SUFFERINGS OF THE PIONEERS

Emigration to Boonesborough. ­New Perils. ­Transylvania Company. ­Beneficence of its Laws. ­Interesting Incident. ­Infamous conduct of Great Britain. ­Attack on the Fort. ­Reinforcements. ­Simon Kenton and his Sufferings. ­Mrs. Harvey.

The fortress at Boonesborough consisted of ten strong log huts arranged in a quadrangular form, enclosing an area of about one-third of an acre.  The intervals, as before stated, between the huts, were filled with strong palisades of timber, which, like the huts themselves, were bullet-proof.  The outer sides of the cabins, together with the palisades, formed the sides of the fort exposed to the foe.  Each of these cabins was about twenty feet in length and twelve or fifteen in breadth.  There were two entrance gates opposite each other, made of thick slabs of timber, and hung on wooden hinges.  The forest, which was quite dense, had been cut away to such a distance as to expose an assailing party to the bullets of the garrison.  As at that time the Indians were armed mainly with bows and arrows, a few men fully supplied with ammunition within the fort could bid defiance to almost any number of savages.  And subsequently, as the Indians obtained fire-arms, they could not hope to capture the fort without a long siege, or by assailing it with a vastly overwhelming superiority of numbers.  The accompanying illustration will give the reader a very correct idea of this renowned fortress of logs, which was regarded as the Gibraltar of Indian warfare.

Having finished this fort Daniel Boone, leaving a sufficient garrison for its security, set out for his home on the Clinch river to bring his wife and family to the beautiful land he so long had coveted for their residence.  It seems that his wife and daughters were eager to follow their father to the banks of the Kentucky, whose charms he had so glowingly described to them.  Several other families were also induced to join the party of emigration.  They could dwell together in a very social community and in perfect safety in the spacious cabins within the fortress.  The river would furnish them with an unfailing supply of water.  The hunters, with their rifles, could supply them with game, and with those rifles could protect themselves while laboring in the fields, which with the axe they had laid open to the sun around the fort.  The hunters and the farmers at night returning within the enclosure, felt perfectly safe from all assaults.

Daniel Boone commenced his journey with his wife and children, and others who joined them, back to Boonesborough in high spirits.  It was a long journey of several hundred miles, and to many persons it would seem a journey fraught with great peril, for they were in danger almost every mile of the way, of encountering hostile Indians.  But Boone, accustomed to traversing the wilderness, and accompanied by well armed men, felt no more apprehensions of danger than the father of a family would at the present day in traveling by cars from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania.

It was beautiful autumnal weather when the party of pioneers commenced its adventurous tour through the wilderness, to find a new home five hundred miles beyond even the remotest frontiers of civilization.  There were three families besides that of Boone, and numbered in all twenty-six men, four women, and four or five boys and girls of various ages.  Daniel Boone was the happy leader of this heroic little band.

In due time they all arrived safely at Boonesborough “without having encountered,” as Boone writes, “any other difficulties than such as are common to this passage.”  As they approached the fort, Boone and his family, for some unexplained reason, pressed forward, and entered the fortress a few days in advance of the rest of the party.  Perhaps Boone himself had a little pride to have it said, that Mrs. Boone and her daughter were the first of her color and sex that ever stood upon the banks of the wild and beautiful Kentucky.

A few days after their arrival, the emigrants had a very solemn admonition of the peril which surrounded them, and of the necessity of constant vigilance to guard against a treacherous and sleepless foe.  One of their number who had sauntered but a short distance from the fort, lured by the combined beauty of the field, the forest and the river, was shot by a prowling Indian, who, raising the war-whoop of exultation and defiance, immediately disappeared in the depths of the wilderness.

Colonel Henderson and his partners, anxious to promote the settlement of the country, by organising parties of emigration, were busy in making known through the settlements the absolute security of the fort at Boonesborough, and the wonderful attractions of the region, in soil, climate, and abounding game.  Henderson himself soon started with a large party, forty of whom were well armed.  A number of pack-horses conveyed the luggage of the emigrants.  Following the very imperfect road that Boone with much skill had engineered, which was quite tolerable for pack-horses in single file, they reached Boonesborough early in the following spring.

The Transylvania Company was in the full flush of successful experiment.  Small parties of emigrants were constantly arriving.  Boonesborough was the capital of the colony.  Various small settlements were settled in its vicinity.  Colonel Henderson opened a land office there, and in the course of a few months, over half a million of acres were entered, by settlers or speculators.  These men did not purchase the lands outright, but bound themselves to pay a small but perpetual rent.  The titles, which they supposed to be perfectly good, were given in the name of the “proprietors of the Colony of Transylvania, in America.”

Soon four settlements were organised called Boonesborough, Harrodsburg, Boiling Spring, and St. Asaph.  Colonel Henderson, on the twenty-third of May, 1775, as president or rather sovereign of this extraordinary realm, summoned a legislature consisting of delegates from this handful of pioneers, to meet at his capital, Boonesborough.  Henderson presided.  Daniel and his brother Squire were delegates from Boonesborough.  A clergyman, the Reverend John Leythe, opened the session with prayer.  Colonel Henderson made a remarkable and admirable speech.  This extraordinary legislature represented only a constituency of one hundred and fifty souls.  But the Colonel presented to them very clearly the true republican principle of government.  He declared that the only legitimate source of political power is to be found in the will of the people, and added: 

“If any doubts remain among you with respect to the force and efficiency of whatever laws you now or hereafter make, be pleased to consider that all power is originally in the people.  Make it their interest, therefore, by impartial and beneficent laws, and you may be sure of their inclination to see them enforced.”

Rumors of these extraordinary proceedings reached the ears of Lord Dunmore.  He considered the whole region of Kentucky as included in the original grant of Virginia, and that the Government of Virginia alone had the right to extinguish the Indian title to any of those lands.  He therefore issued a proclamation, denouncing in the severest terms the “unlawful proceedings of one Richard Henderson and other disorderly persons, his associates.”  The legislature continued in session but three days, and honored itself greatly by its energetic action, and by the character of the laws which it inaugurated.  One bill was introduced for preserving game; another for improving the breed of their horses; and it is worthy of especial record that a law was passed prohibiting profane swearing and Sabbath breaking.

The moral sense of these bold pioneers was shocked at the desecration of the Creator’s name among their sublime solitudes.

The controversy between the Transylvania Company and the Government of Virginia was short but very sharp.  Virginia could then very easily send an army of several thousand men to exterminate the Kentucky colony.  A compromise was the result.  The title of Henderson was declared “null and void.”  But he received in compensation a grant of land on the Ohio, about twelve miles square, below the mouth of Green River.  Virginia assumed that the Indian title was entirely extinguished, and the region called Transylvania now belonged without encumbrance to the Old Dominion.

Still the tide of emigration continued to flow into this beautiful region.  Among others came the family of Colonel Calloway, consisting of his wife and two daughters.  For a long time no Indians had been seen in the vicinity of Boonesborough.  No one seemed to apprehend the least danger from them, and the people in the fort wandered about as freely as if no foe had ever excited their fears.  An accident occurred which sent a tremor of dismay through the whole colony, and which we will describe as related to the intelligent historian, Peck, from the lips of one of the parties, who experienced all the terrors of the scene: 

“On the fourteenth of July, 1776, Betsey Calloway, her sister Frances, and Jemima Boone, a daughter of Daniel Boone, the two last about fourteen years of age, carelessly crossed the river opposite Boonesborough in a canoe, at a late hour in the afternoon.  The trees and shrubs on the opposite bank were thick, and came down to the water’s edge.  The girls, unconscious of danger, were playing and splashing the water with their paddles, until the canoe floating with the current, drifted near the shore.  Five stout Indians lay there concealed, one of whom, noiseless and stealthy as the serpent, crawled down the bank until he reached the rope that hung from the bow, turned its course up the stream, and in a direction to be hidden from the view of the fort.  The loud shrieks of the captured girls were heard, but too late for their rescue.

“The canoe, their only means of crossing, was on the opposite shore, and none dared to risk the chance of swimming the river, under the impression that a large body of savages was concealed in the woods.  Boone and Calloway were both absent, and night came on before arrangements could be made for their pursuit.  Next morning by daylight we were on the track, and found they had prevented our following them by walking some distance apart through the thickest canes they could find.  We observed their course, and on which side they had left their sign and traveled upwards of thirty miles.  We then imagined they would be less cautious in traveling, and made a turn in order to cross their trace, and had gone but a few miles when we found their tracks in a buffalo path.  We pursued and overtook them on going about ten miles, as they were kindling a fire to cook.

“Our study had been more to get the prisoners without giving the Indians time to murder them, after they discovered us, than to kill them.  We discovered each other nearly at the same time.  Four of us fired, and all of us rushed on them, which prevented them from carrying away anything, except one shot-gun without ammunition.  Mr. Boone and myself had a pretty fair shoot, just as they began to move off.  I am well convinced I shot one through, and the one he shot dropped his gun.  Mine had none.  The place was very thick with canes, and being so much elated on recovering the three broken-hearted girls, prevented our making further search.  We sent them off without their mocassins, and not one of them with so much as a knife or a tomahawk.”

The Indians seemed to awake increasingly to the consciousness that the empire of the white man in their country could only exist upon the ruins of their own.  They divided themselves into several parties, making incessant attacks upon the forts, and prowling around to shoot every white man who could be found within reach of their bullets.  They avoided all open warfare, and fought only when they could spring from an ambush, or when protected by a stump, a rock, or a tree.  An Indian would conceal himself in the night behind a stump, shoot the first one who emerged from the fort in the morning, and then with a yell disappear in the recesses of the forest.  The cattle could scarcely appear for an hour to graze beyond the protection of the fort, without danger of being struck down by the bullet of an unseen foe.

The war of the American Revolution was just commencing.  Dreadfully it added to the perils of these distant emigrants.  The British Government, with infamy which can never be effaced from her records, called in to her aid the tomahawk and the scalping knife of the savage.  The Indian alone in his wild and merciless barbarity, was terrible enough.  But when he appeared as the ally of a powerful nation, guided in his operations by the wisdom of her officers, and well provided with guns, powder, and bullets from inexhaustible resources, the settler had indeed reason to tremble.  The winter of 1776 and 1777 was gloomy beyond expression.  The Indians were hourly becoming more bold.  Their predatory bands were wandering in all directions, and almost every day came fraught with tidings of outrage or massacre.

The whole military force of the colony was but about one hundred men.  Three hundred of the pioneers, dismayed by the cloud of menace, every hour growing blacker, had returned across the moutains.  There were but twenty-two armed men left in the fort at Boonesborough.  The dismal winter passed slowly away, and the spring opened replete with nature’s bloom and beauty, but darkened by the depravity of man.  On the fifteenth of April, a band of a hundred howling Indians appeared in the forest before Boonesborough.  With far more than their ordinary audacity, they rushed from their covert upon the fort.  Had they been acquainted with the use of scaling ladders, by attacking at different points, they might easily, by their superior numbers, have carried the place by storm.

But fortunately the savages had but little military science, and when once repulsed, would usually retreat in dismay.  The garrison, behind their impenetrable logs, took deliberate aim, and every bullet killed or wounded some Indian warrior.  The savages fought with great bravery, and succeeded in killing one man in the garrison.  Dismayed by the slaughter which they were encountering, they fled, taking their dead and wounded with them.  But so fully were they conscious, that would they retain their own supremacy in the wilderness, they must exterminate the white man, that their retreat was only in preparation for a return with accumulated numbers.

An intelligent historian writes: 

“Daniel Boone appears before us in these exciting times the central figure towering like a colossus amid that hardy band of pioneers who opposed their breasts to the shock of the struggle which gave a terrible significance and a crimson hue to the history of the old dark and bloody ground.”

The Indians were scattered everywhere in desperate bands.  Forty men were sent from North Carolina and a hundred from Virginia, under Colonel Bowman, to strengthen the feeble settlements.  The latter party arrived on the twentieth of August, 1776.  There were at that time skirmishes with the Indians almost every day at some point.  The pioneers within their log-houses, or behind their palisades, generally repelled these assaults with but little loss to themselves and not often inflicting severe injury to the wary savages.  In the midst of these constant conflicts and dangers, the winter months passed drearily away.  Boonesborough was constantly menaced and frequently attacked.  In a diary kept within the fort we find the following entries: 

“May 23. ­A large party of Indians attacked Boonesborough fort.  Kept a warm fire till eleven o’clock at night.  Began it next morning, and kept a warm fire till midnight.  Attempting several times to burn the fort.  Three of our men were wounded, but not mortally.

     “May 26th. ­A party went out to hunt Indians.  One wounded Squire      Boone, and escaped.”

Very cruel warfare was now being waged by the majestic power of Great Britain to bring the revolted colonies back to subjection to their laws.  As we have mentioned they called into requisition on their side the merciless energies of the savage, openly declaring to the world that they were justified in making use of whatever weapons God and nature might place in their hands.  From the strong British garrisons at Detroit, Vincennes and Kaskaskia, the Indians were abundantly supplied with rifles, powder and bullets, and were offered liberal rewards for such prisoners, and even scalps, as they might bring in.

The danger which threatened these settlements in Kentucky was now such as might cause the stoutest heart to quail.  The savage had been adopted as an ally by the most wealthy and powerful nation upon the globe.  His marauding bands were often guided by the intelligence of British officers.  Boone organized what might be called a corps of explorers to go out two and two, penetrating the wilderness with extreme caution, in all directions, to detect any indication of the approach of the Indians.  One of these explorers, Simon Kenton, acting under the sagacious counsel of Colonel Boone, had obtained great and deserved celebrity as among the most heroic of the remarkable men who laid the foundation of the State of Kentucky.  It would be difficult to find in any pages of romance incidents of more wonderful adventure, or of more dreadful suffering, or stories of more miraculous escape, than were experienced by this man.  Several times he was taken captive by the Indians, and though treated with great inhumanity, succeeded in making his escape.  The following incident in his life, occurring about this time, gives one a very vivid picture of the nature of this warfare with the Indians: 

“Colonel Bowman sent Simon Kenton with two other men, Montgomery and Clark, on an exploring tour.  Approaching an Indian town very cautiously in the night, on the north side of the Ohio river, they found a number of Indian horses in an enclosure.  A horse in the wilderness was one of the most valuable of prizes.  They accordingly each mounted an animal, and not daring to leave any behind, which would aid the Indians to pursue them, by hastily constructed halters they led the rest.  The noise which the horses made awoke the Indians, and the whole village was at once in a state of uproar.  The mounted adventurers dashed through the woods and were soon beyond the reach of the shouts and the yells which they left behind them.  They knew, however, full well that the swift-footed Indian warriors would be immediately on their trail.  Without a moment’s rest they rode all night, the next day and the next night, and on the morning of the second day reached the banks of the Ohio river.  The flood of that majestic stream flowed broad and deep before them, and its surface was lashed into waves by a very boisterous wind.  The horses could not swim across in such a gale, but their desire to retain the invaluable animals was so great that they resolved to wait upon the banks until sunset, when they expected the wind to abate.  Having been so well mounted and having such a start of the Indians, they did not suppose it possible that their pursuers could overtake them before that time.

“Night came, but with it an increase of the fury of the gale, and the stream became utterly impassable.  Early in the morning Kenton, who was separated from his companions, observed three Indians and a white man, well mounted, rapidly approaching.  Raising his rifle, he took steady aim at the breast of the foremost Indian, and pulled the trigger.  The powder flashed in the pan.  Kenton took to his heels, but was soon overtaken and captured.  The Indians seemed greatly exasperated at the loss of their horses.  One seized him by the hair and shook his head ’till his teeth rattled.’  The others scourged him severely with their ramrods over the head and face, exclaiming at every blow, ‘Steal Indian hoss, hey!’

“Just then Kenton saw Montgomery coming boldly to his assistance.  Instantly two Indian rifles were discharged, and Montgomery fell dead.  His bloody scalp was waved in the face of Kenton, with menaces of a similar fate.  Clark had sought safety in flight.  Kenton was thrown upon the ground upon his back.  His neck was fastened by a halter to a sapling; his arms, extended to their full length, were pinioned to the earth by stakes; his feet were fastened in a similar manner.  A stout stick was passed across his breast, and so attached to the earth that he could not move his body.  All this was done in the most violent and cruel manner, accompanied by frequent cuffs, and blows, as the maddened Indians called him in the broken English which they had acquired, ’a tief, a hoss steal, a rascal,’ which expressions the Indians had learned to intersperse with English oaths.

“In this condition of suffering Kenton remained through the day and through the night.  The next morning the savages having collected their scattered horses, put Kenton upon a young colt, tied his hands behind him and his feet beneath the horse’s belly, and set out on their return.  The country was rough and Kenton could not at all protect himself from the brambles through which they passed.  Thus they rode all day.  When night came, their prisoner was bound to the earth as before.  The next day they reached the Indian village, which was called Chilicothe, on the Miami river, forty or fifty miles west of the present city of Chilicothe, Ohio.  A courier was sent forward, to inform the village of their arrival.  Every man, woman and child came running out, to view the prisoner.  One of their chiefs, Blackfish, approached Kenton with a strong hickory switch in his hand, and addressing him said,

“‘You have been stealing our horses, have you?’

“‘Yes,’ was the defiant reply.

“‘Did Colonel Boone,’ inquired the chief, ’tell you to steal our horses?’

“‘No,’ said Kenton, ‘I did it of my own accord.’

“Blackfish then with brawny arms so mercilessly applied the scourge to the bare head and shoulders of his prisoner, as to cause the blood to flow freely, and to occasion the acutest pain.

“In the mean time the whole crowd of men, women and children danced and hooted and clapped their hands, assailing him with the choicest epithets of Indian vituperation.  With loud cries they demanded that he should be tied to the stake, that they might all enjoy the pleasure of tormenting him.  A stake was immediately planted in the ground, and he was firmly fastened to it.  His entire clothing was torn from him, mainly by the Indian women.  The whole party then danced around him until midnight, yelling in the most frantic manner, smiting him with their hands and lacerating his flesh with their switches.

“At midnight they released him from the stake, and allowed him some little repose, in preparation for their principal amusement in the morning, of having their prisoner run the gauntlet.  Three hundred Indians of all ages and both sexes were assembled for the savage festival.  The Indians were ranged in two parallel lines, about six feet apart, all armed with sticks, hickory rods, whips, and other means of inflicting torture.  Between these lines, for more than half a mile to the village, the wretched prisoner was doomed to run for his life, exposed to such injury as his tormentors could inflict as he passed.  If he succeeded in reaching the council-house alive, it would prove an asylum to him for the present.

“At a given signal, Kenton started in the perilous race; exerting his utmost strength and activity, he passed swiftly along the line, receiving numerous blows, stripes, buffets, and wounds, until he approached the town, near which he saw an Indian leisurely awaiting his advance, with a drawn knife in his hand, intent upon his death.

“To avoid him, he instantly broke through the line, and made his rapid way towards the council-house, pursued by the promiscuous crowd, whooping and yelling like infernal furies at his heels.  Entering the town in advance of his pursuers, just as he supposed the council-house within his reach, an Indian was perceived leisurely approaching him with his blanket wrapped around him; but suddenly he threw off the blanket and sprung upon Kenton as he advanced.  Exhausted with fatigue and wounds, he was thrown to the ground, and in a moment he was beset with crowds, eager to inflict upon him the kick or blow which had been avoided by breaking through the line.  Here beaten, kicked and scourged, until he was nearly lifeless, he was left to die."

A few hours afterwards he was supplied with food and water, and was suffered to recuperate for a few days, until he was enabled to attend at the council-house, and receive the announcement of his final doom.  It was here decided that he should be made a public sacrifice to the vengeance of the nation.  The Indian town of Wappatomica, upon the present site of Zanesville, Ohio, was the appointed place of his execution.  Being in a state of utter exhaustion his escape was deemed impossible, and he was carelessly guarded.  In despair he attempted it.  He was promptly recaptured and punished by being taken to a neighboring creek where he was dragged through mud and water, till life was nearly extinct.  Still his constitutional vigor triumphed, and he revived.

Wappatomica was a British trading post.  Here Kenton met an old comrade, Simon Girty, who had become a renegade, had joined the Indians, and had so adopted their dress and manners as hardly to be distinguished from his savage associates.  Girty cautiously endeavored to save the condemned prisoner.  He represented to the band that it would be of great advantage to them to have possession of one so intimately acquainted with all the white settlements and their resources.

A respite was granted.  Another council was held.  The spirit of Indian revenge prevailed.  Kenton was again doomed to death, to be preceded by the terrible ordeal of running the gauntlet.

But a British officer, influenced by the persuasions of the Indian chief Logan, the friend of the white man, urged upon the Indian chiefs that the British officers at Detroit would regard the possession of Kenton, with the information he had at his command, as a great acquisition, and that they would pay for him a ransom of at least one hundred dollars.  They took him to Detroit; the ransom was paid, and Kenton became the prisoner of the British officers, instead of the savage chieftains.  Still he was a prisoner, though treated with ordinary humanity, and was allowed the liberty of the town.

There were two other American captives there, Captain Nathan Bullit and Jesse Coffer.  Escape seemed impossible, as it could only be effected through a wilderness four hundred miles in extent, crowded with wandering Indian bands, where they would be imminently exposed to recapture, or to death by starvation.

Simon Kenton was a very handsome man.  He won the sympathies of a very kind English woman, Mrs. Harvey, the wife of one of the traders at the post.  She secretly obtained for him and his two companions, and concealed in a hollow tree, powder, lead, moccasins, and a quantity of dried beef.  One dark night, when the Indians were engaged in a drunken bout, she met Kenton in the garden and handed him three of the best rifles, which she had selected from those stacked near the house.  The biographer of these events writes: 

“When a woman engages to do an action, she will risk limb, life or character, to serve him whom she respects or wishes to befriend.  How differently the same action would be viewed by different persons!  By Kenton and his friends her conduct was viewed as the benevolent conduct of a good angel; while if the part she played in behalf of Kenton and his companions had been known to the commander at Detroit, she would have been looked upon as a traitress, who merited the scorn and contempt of all honest citizens.  This night was the last that Kenton ever saw or heard of her.”

Our fugitives traveled mostly by night, guided by the stars.  After passing through a series of wonderful adventures, which we have not space here to record, on the thirty-third day of their escape, they reached the settlement at the Falls of the Ohio, now Louisville.  During the rest of the war, Kenton was a very active partisan.  He died in the year 1836, over eighty years of age, having been for more than a quarter of a century an honored member of the Methodist Church.