The Fight For Kentucky
When Boone returned home he found the Back Country of North Carolina in
the throes of the Regulation Movement. This movement, which had arisen
first from the colonists' need to police their settlements, had more
recently assumed a political character. The Regulators were now in
conflict with the authorities, because the frontier folk were suffering
through excessive taxes, extortionate fees, dishonest land titles, and
the corruption of the courts. In May, 1771, the conflict lost its
quasi-civil nature. The Regulators resorted to arms and were defeated by
the forces under Governor Tryon in the Battle of the Alamance.
The Regulation Movement, which we shall follow in more detail further
on, was a culmination of those causes of unrest which turned men
westward. To escape from oppression and to acquire land beyond the
bounds of tyranny became the earnest desire of independent spirits
throughout the Back Country. But there was another and more potent
reason why the country east of the mountains no longer contented Boone.
Hunting and trapping were Boone's chief means of livelihood. In those
days, deerskins sold for a dollar a skin to the traders at the Forks or
in Hillsborough; beaver at about two dollars and a half, and otter at
from three to five dollars. A pack-horse could carry a load of one
hundred dressed deerskins, and, as currency was scarce, a hundred
dollars was wealth. Game was fast disappearing from the Yadkin. To Boone
above all men, then, Kentucky beckoned. When he returned in the spring
of 1771 from his explorations, it was with the resolve to take his
family at once into the great game country and to persuade some of his
friends to join in this hazard of new fortunes.
The perils of such a venture, only conjectural to us at this distance,
he knew well; but in him there was nothing that shrank from danger,
though he did not court it after the rash manner of many of his
compeers. Neither reckless nor riotous, Boone was never found among
those who opposed violence to authority, even unjust authority; nor was
he ever guilty of the savagery which characterized much of the
retaliatory warfare of that period when frenzied white men bettered the
red man's instruction. In him, courage was illumined with tenderness and
made equable by self-control. Yet, though he was no fiery zealot like
the Ulstermen who were to follow him along the path he had made and who
loved and revered him perhaps because he was so different from
themselves, Boone nevertheless had his own religion. It was a simple
faith best summed up perhaps by himself in his old age when he said that
he had been only an instrument in the hand of God to open the wilderness
to settlement.
Two years passed before Boone could muster a company of colonists for
the dangerous and delectable land. The dishonesty practiced by Lord
Granville's agents in the matter of deeds had made it difficult for
Daniel and his friends to dispose of their acreage. When at last in the
spring of 1773 the Wanderer was prepared to depart, he was again
delayed; this time by the arrival of a little son to whom was given the
name of John. By September, however, even this latest addition to the
party was ready for travel; and that month saw the Boones with a small
caravan of families journeying towards Powell's Valley, whence the
Warrior's Path took its way through Cumberland Gap. At this point on the
march they were to be joined by William Russell, a famous pioneer, from
the Clinch River, with his family and a few neighbors, and by some of
Rebecca Boone's kinsmen, the Bryans, from the lower Yadkin, with a
company of forty men.
Of Rebecca Boone history tells us too little--only that she was born a
Bryan, was of low stature and dark eyed, that she bore her husband ten
children, and lived beside him to old age. Except on his hunts and
explorations, she went with him from one cabined home to another, always
deeper into the wilds. There are no portraits of her. We can see her
only as a shadowy figure moving along the wilderness trails beside the
man who accepted his destiny of God to be a way-shower for those of
lesser faith.
He tires not forever on his leagues of march
Because her feet are set to his footprints,
And the gleam of her bare hand slants across his shoulder.
Boone halted his company on Walden Mountain over Powell's Valley to
await the Bryan contingent and dispatched two young men under the
leadership of his son James, then in his seventeenth year, to notify
Russell of the party's arrival. As the boys were returning with
Russell's son, also a stripling, two of his slaves, and some white
laborers, they missed the path and went into camp for the night. When
dawn broke, disclosing the sleepers, a small war band of Shawanoes, who
had been spying on Boone and his party, fell upon them and slaughtered
them. Only one of Russell's slaves and a laborer escaped. The tragedy
seems augmented by the fact that the point where the boys lost the trail
and made their night quarters was hardly three miles from the main
camp--to which an hour later came the two survivors with their gloomy
tidings. Terror now took hold of the little band of emigrants, and there
were loud outcries for turning back. The Bryans, who had arrived
meanwhile, also advised retreat, saying that the "signs" about the scene
of blood indicated an Indian uprising. Daniel carried the scalped body
of his son, the boy-comrade of his happy hunts, to the camp and buried
it there at the beginning of the trail. His voice alone urged that they
go on.
Fortunately indeed, as events turned out, Boone was overruled, and the
expedition was abandoned. The Bryan party and the others from North
Carolina went back to the Yadkin. Boone himself with his family
accompanied Russell to the Clinch settlement, where he erected a
temporary cabin on the farm of one of the settlers, and then set out
alone on the chase to earn provision for his wife and children through
the winter.
Those who prophesied an Indian war were not mistaken. When the snowy
hunting season had passed and the "Powwowing Days" were come, the Indian
war drum rattled in the medicine house from the borders of Pennsylvania
to those of Carolina. The causes of the strife for which the red men
were making ready must be briefly noted to help us form a just opinion
of the deeds that followed. Early writers have usually represented the
frontiersmen as saints in buckskin and the Indians as fiends without the
shadow of a claim on either the land or humanity. Many later writers
have merely reversed the shield. The truth is that the Indians and the
borderers reacted upon each other to the hurt of both. Paradoxically,
they grew like enough to hate one another with a savage hatred--and both
wanted the land.
Land! Land! was the slogan of all sorts and conditions of men. Tidewater
officials held solemn powwows with the chiefs, gave wampum strings, and
forthwith incorporated. ¹ Chiefs blessed their white brothers who had
"forever brightened the chain of friendship," departed home, and
proceeded to brighten the blades of their tomahawks and to await, not
long, the opportunity to use them on casual hunters who carried in their
kits the compass, the "land-stealer." Usually the surveying hunter was a
borderer; and on him the tomahawk descended with an accelerated gusto.
Private citizens also formed land companies and sent out surveyors,
regardless of treaties. Bold frontiersmen went into No Man's Land and
staked out their claims. In the very year when disaster turned the Boone
party back, James Harrod had entered Kentucky from Pennsylvania and had
marked the site of a settlement.
¹ The activities of the great land companies are described in Alvord's
exhaustive work, The Mississippi Valley in British Politics.
Ten years earlier (1763), the King had issued the famous and much
misunderstood Proclamation restricting his "loving subjects" from the
lands west of the mountains. The colonists interpreted this document as
a tyrannous curtailment of their liberties for the benefit of the fur
trade. We know now that the portion of this Proclamation relating to
western settlement was a wise provision designed to protect the settlers
on the frontier by allaying the suspicions of the Indians, who viewed
with apprehension the triumphal occupation of that vast territory from
Canada to the Gulf of Mexico by the colonizing English. By seeking to
compel all land purchase to be made through the Crown, it was designed
likewise to protect the Indians from "whisky purchase," and to make
impossible the transfer of their lands except with consent of the Indian
Council, or full quota of headmen, whose joint action alone conveyed
what the tribes considered to be legal title. Sales made according to
this form, Sir William Johnson declared to the Lords of Trade, he had
never known to be repudiated by the Indians. This paragraph of the
Proclamation was in substance an embodiment of Johnson's suggestions to
the Lords of Trade. Its purpose was square dealing and pacification; and
shrewd men such as Washington recognized that it was not intended as a
final check to expansion. "A temporary expedient to quiet the minds of
the Indians," Washington called it, and then himself went out along the
Great Kanawha and into Kentucky, surveying land.
It will be asked what had become of the Ohio Company of Virginia and
that fort at the Forks of the Ohio, once a bone of contention between
France and England. Fort Pitt, as it was now called, had fallen foul of
another dispute, this time between Virginia and Pennsylvania. Virginia
claimed that the far western corner of her boundary ascended just far
enough north to take in Fort Pitt. Pennsylvania asserted that it did
nothing of the sort. The Ohio Company had meanwhile been merged into the
Walpole Company. George Croghan, at Fort Pitt, was the Company's agent
and as such was accused by Pennsylvania of favoring from ulterior
motives the claims of Virginia. Hotheads in both colonies asseverated
that the Indians were secretly being stirred up in connection with the
boundary disputes. If it does not very clearly appear how an Indian
rising would have settled the ownership of Fort Pitt, it is evident
enough where the interests of Virginia and Pennsylvania clashed.
Virginia wanted land for settlement and speculation; Pennsylvania wanted
the Indians left in possession for the benefit of the fur trade. So far
from stirring up the Indians, as his enemies declared, Croghan was as
usual giving away all his substance to keep them quiet. ¹ Indeed, during
this summer of 1774, eleven hundred Indians were encamped about Fort
Pitt visiting him.
¹ The suspicion that Croghan and Lord Dunmore, the Governor of Virginia,
were instigating the war appears to have arisen out of the conduct of
Dr. John Connolly, Dunmore's agent and Croghan's nephew. Croghan had
induced the Shawanoes to bring under escort to Fort Pitt certain English
traders resident in the Indian towns. The escort was fired on by
militiamen under command of Connolly, who also issued a proclamation
declaring a state of war to exist. Connolly, however, probably acted on
his own initiative. He was interested in land on his own behalf and was
by no means the only man at that time who was ready to commit outrages
on Indians in order to obtain it. As Croghan lamented, there was "too
great a spirit in the frontier people for killing Indians."
Two hundred thousand acres in the West--Kentucky and West Virginia--had
been promised to the colonial officers and soldiers who fought in the
Seven Years' War. But after making the Proclamation the British
Government had delayed issuing the patents. Washington interested
himself in trying to secure them; and Lord Dunmore, who also had caught
the "land-fever," ² prodded the British authorities but won only rebuke
for his inconvenient activities. Insistent, however, Dunmore sent out
parties of surveyors to fix the bounds of the soldiers' claims. James
Harrod, Captain Thomas Bullitt, Hancock Taylor, and three McAfee
brothers entered Kentucky, by the Ohio, under Dunmore's orders. John
Floyd went in by the Kanawha as Washington's agent. A bird's-eye view of
that period would disclose to us very few indeed of His Majesty's loving
subjects who were paying any attention to his proclamation. Early in
1774, Harrod began the building of cabins and a fort, and planted corn
on the site of Harrodsburg. Thus to him and not to Boone fell the honor
of founding the first permanent white settlement in Kentucky.
² See Alvord, The Mississippi Valley in British Politics, vol. II, pp.
191-94.
When summer came, its thick verdure proffering ambuscade, the air hung
tense along the border. Traders had sent in word that Shawanoes,
Delawares, Mingos, Wyandots, and Cherokees were refusing all other
exchange than rifles, ammunition, knives, and hatchets. White men were
shot down in their fields from ambush. Dead Indians lay among their own
young corn, their scalp locks taken. There were men of both races who
wanted war and meant to have it--and with it the land.
Lord Dunmore, the Governor, resolved that, if war were inevitable, it
should be fought out in the Indian country. With this intent, he wrote
to Colonel Andrew Lewis of Botetourt County, Commander of the Southwest
Militia, instructing him to raise a respectable body of troops and "join
me either at the mouth of the Great Kanawha or Wheeling, or such other
part of the Ohio as may be most convenient for you to meet me." The
Governor himself with a force of twelve hundred proceeded to Fort Pitt,
where Croghan, as we have seen, was extending his hospitality to eleven
hundred warriors from the disaffected tribes.
On receipt of the Governor's letter, Andrew Lewis sent out expresses to
his brother Colonel Charles Lewis, County Lieutenant of Augusta, and to
Colonel William Preston, County Lieutenant of Fincastle, to raise men
and bring them with all speed to the rendezvous at Camp Union
(Lewisburg) on the Big Levels of the Greenbrier (West Virginia). Andrew
Lewis summoned these officers to an expedition for "reducing our
inveterate enemies to reason." Preston called for volunteers to take
advantage of "the opportunity we have so long wished for... this useless
People may now at last be Oblidged to abandon their country." These men
were among not only the bravest but the best of their time; but this was
their view of the Indian and his alleged rights. To eliminate this
"useless people," inveterate enemies of the white race, was, as they saw
it, a political necessity and a religious duty. And we today who profit
by their deeds dare not condemn them.
Fervor less solemn was aroused in other quarters by Dunmore's call to
arms. At Wheeling, some eighty or ninety young adventurers, in charge of
Captain Michael Cresap of Maryland, were waiting for the freshets to
sweep them down the Ohio into Kentucky. When the news reached them, they
greeted it with the wild monotone chant and the ceremonies preliminary
to Indian warfare. They planted the war pole, stripped and painted
themselves, and starting the war dance called on Cresap to be their
"white leader." The captain, however, declined; but in that wild
circling line was one who was a white leader indeed. He was a
sandy-haired boy of twenty--one of the bold race of English Virginians,
rugged and of fiery countenance, with blue eyes intense of glance and
deep set under a high brow that, while modeled for power, seemed
threatened in its promise by the too sensitive chiseling of his lips.
With every nerve straining for the fray, with thudding of feet and
crooning of the blood song, he wheeled with those other mad spirits
round the war pole till the set of sun closed the rites. "That evening
two scalps were brought into camp," so a letter of his reads. Does the
bold savage color of this picture affright us? Would we veil it? Then we
should lose something of the true lineaments of George Rogers Clark,
who, within four short years, was to lead a tiny army of tattered and
starving backwoodsmen, ashamed to quail where he never flinched, through
barrens and icy floods to the conquest of Illinois for the United
States.
Though Cresap had rejected the rôle of "white leader," he did not escape
the touch of infamy. "Cresap's War" was the name the Indians gave to the
bloody encounters between small parties of whites and Indians, which
followed on that war dance and scalping, during the summer months. One
of these encounters must be detailed here because history has assigned
it as the immediate cause of Dunmore's War.
Greathouse, Sapperton, and King, three traders who had a post on Yellow
Creek, a tributary of the Ohio fifty miles below Pittsburgh, invited
several Indians from across the stream to come and drink with them and
their friends. Among the Indians were two or three men of importance in
the Mingo tribe. There were also some women, one of whom was the Indian
wife of Colonel John Gibson, an educated man who had distinguished
himself as a soldier with Forbes in 1758. That the Indians came in amity
and apprehended no treachery was proved by the presence of the women.
Gibson's wife carried her half-caste baby in her shawl. The disreputable
traders plied their guests with drink to the point of intoxication and
then murdered them. King shot the first man and, when he fell, cut his
throat, saying that he had served many a deer in that fashion. Gibson's
Indian wife fled and was shot down in the clearing. A man followed to
dispatch her and her baby. She held the child up to him pleading, with
her last breath, that he would spare it because it was not Indian but
"one of yours." The mother dead, the child was later sent to Gibson.
Twelve Indians in all were killed.
Meanwhile Croghan had persuaded the Iroquois to peace. With the help of
David Zeisberger, the Moravian missionary, and White Eyes, a Delaware
chief, he and Dunmore had won over the Delaware warriors. In the
Cherokee councils, Oconostota demanded that the treaty of peace signed
in 1761 be kept. The Shawanoes, however, led by Cornstalk, were
implacable; and they had as allies the Ottawas and Mingos, who had
entered the council with them.
A famous chief of the day and one of great influence over the Indians,
and also among the white officials who dealt with Indian affairs, was
Tach-nech-dor-us, or Branching Oak of the Forest, a Mingo who had taken
the name of Logan out of compliment to James Logan of Pennsylvania.
Chief Logan had recently met with so much reproach from his red brothers
for his loyalty to the whites that he had departed from the Mingo town
at Yellow Creek. But, learning that his tribe had determined to assist
the Shawanoes and had already taken some white scalps, he repaired to
the place where the Mingos were holding their war council to exert his
powers for peace. There, in presence of the warriors, after swaying them
from their purpose by those oratorical gifts which gave him his
influence and his renown, he took the war hatchet that had already
killed, and buried it in proof that vengeance was appeased. Upon this
scene there entered a Mingo from Yellow Creek with the news of the
murders committed there by the three traders. The Indian whose throat
had been slit as King had served deer was Logan's brother. Another man
slain was his kinsman. The woman with the baby was his sister. Logan
tore up from the earth the bloody tomahawk and, raising it above his
head, swore that he would not rest till he had taken ten white lives to
pay for each one of his kin. Again the Mingo warriors declared for war
and this time were not dissuaded. But Logan did not join this red army.
He went out alone to wreak his vengeance, slaying and scalping.
Meanwhile Dunmore prepared to push the war with the utmost vigor. His
first concern was to recall the surveying parties from Kentucky, and for
so hazardous an errand he needed the services of a man whose endurance,
speed, and woodcraft were equal to those of any Indian scout afoot.
Through Colonel Preston, his orders were conveyed to Daniel Boone, for
Boone's fame had now spread from the border to the tidewater regions. It
was stated that "Boone would lose no time," and "if they are alive, it
is indisputable but Boone must find them."
So Boone set out in company with Michael Stoner, another expert
woodsman. His general instructions were to go down the Kentucky River to
Preston's Salt Lick and across country to the Falls of the Ohio, and
thence home by Gaspar's Lick on the Cumberland River. Indian war parties
were moving under cover across "the Dark and Bloody Ground" to surround
the various groups of surveyors still at large and to exterminate them.
Boone made his journey successfully. He found John Floyd, who was
surveying for Washington; he sped up to where Harrod and his band were
building cabins and sent them out, just in time as it happened; he
reached all the outposts of Thomas Bullitt's party, only one of whom
fell a victim to the foe; ¹ and, undetected by the Indians, he brought
himself and Stoner home in safety, after covering eight hundred miles in
sixty-one days.
¹ Hancock Taylor, who delayed in getting out of the country and was cut
off.
Harrod and his homesteaders immediately enlisted in the army. How eager
Boone was to go with the forces under Lewis is seen in the official
correspondence relative to Dunmore's War. Floyd wanted Boone's help in
raising a company: "Captain Bledsoe says that Boone has more [influence]
than any man now disengaged; and you know what Boone has done for me...
for which reason I love the man." Even the border, it would seem, had
its species of pacifists who were willing to let others take risks for
them, for men hung back from recruiting, and desertions were the order
of the day. Major Arthur Campbell hit upon a solution of the
difficulties in West Fincastle. He was convinced that Boone could raise
a company and hold the men loyal. And Boone did.
For some reason, however, Daniel's desire to march with the army was
denied. Perhaps it was because just such a man as he--and, indeed, there
was no other--was needed to guard the settlement. Presently he was put
in command of Moore's Fort in Clinch Valley, and his "diligence"
received official approbation. A little later the inhabitants of the
valley sent out a petition to have Boone made a "captain" and given
supreme command of the lower forts. The settlers demanded Boone's
promotion for their own security.
The land it is good, it is just to our mind,
Each will have his part if his Lordship be kind,
The Ohio once ours, we'll live at our ease,
With a bottle and glass to drink when we please.
So sang the army poet, thus giving voice, as bards should ever do, to
the theme nearest the hearts of his hearers--in this case, Land!
Presumably his ditty was composed on the eve of the march from
Lewisburg, for it is found in a soldier's diary.
On the evening of October 9, 1774, Andrew Lewis with his force of eleven
hundred frontiersmen was encamped on Point Pleasant at the junction of
the Great Kanawha with the Ohio. Dunmore in the meantime had led his
forces into Ohio and had erected Fort Gower at the mouth of the
Hockhocking River, where he waited for word from Andrew Lewis. ¹
¹ It has been customary to ascribe to Lord Dunmore motives of treachery
in failing to make connections with Lewis; but no real evidence has been
advanced to support any of the charges made against him by local
historians. The charges were, as Theodore Roosevelt says, "an
afterthought." Dunmore was a King's man in the Revolution; and yet in
March, 1775, the Convention of the Colony of Virginia, assembled in
opposition to the royal party, resolved: "The most cordial thanks of the
people of this colony are a tribute justly due to our worthy Governor,
Lord Dunmore, for his truly noble, wise, and spirited conduct which at
once evinces his Excellency's attention to the true interests of this
colony, and a zeal in the executive department which no dangers can
divert, or difficulties hinder, from achieving the most important
services to the people who have the happiness to live under his
administration." (See American Archives, Fourth Series, vol. II, p.
170.) Similar resolutions were passed by his officers on the march home
from Ohio; at the same time, the officers passed resolutions in sympathy
with the American cause. Yet it was Andrew Lewis who later drove Dunmore
from Virginia. Well might Dunmore exclaim, "That it should ever come to
this!"
The movements of the two armies were being observed by scouts from the
force of red warriors gathered in Ohio under the great leader of the
Shawanoes. Cornstalk purposed to isolate the two armies of his enemy and
to crush them in turn before they could come together. His first move
was to launch an attack on Lewis at Point Pleasant. In the dark of
night, Cornstalk's Indians crossed the Ohio on rafts, intending to
surprise the white man's camp at dawn. They would have succeeded but for
the chance that three or four of the frontiersmen, who had risen before
daybreak to hunt, came upon the Indians creeping towards the camp. Shots
were exchanged. An Indian and a white man dropped. The firing roused the
camp. Three hundred men in two lines under Charles Lewis and William
Fleming sallied forth expecting to engage the vanguard of the enemy but
encountered almost the whole force of from eight hundred to a thousand
Indians before the rest of the army could come into action. Both
officers were wounded, Charles Lewis fatally. The battle, which
continued from dawn until an hour before sunset, was the bloodiest in
Virginia's long series of Indian wars. The frontiersmen fought as such
men ever fought--with the daring, bravery, swiftness of attack, and
skill in taking cover which were the tactics of their day, even as at a
later time many of these same men fought at King's Mountain and in
Illinois the battles that did so much to turn the tide in the
Revolution. ²
² With Andrew Lewis on this day were Isaac Shelby and William Campbell,
the victorious leaders at King's Mountain, James Robertson, the "father
of Tennessee," Valentine Sevier, Daniel Morgan, hero of the Cowpens,
Major Arthur Campbell, Benjamin Logan, Anthony Bledsoe, and Simon
Kenton. With Dunmore's force were Adam Stephen, who distinguished
himself at the Brandywine, George Rogers Clark, John Stuart, already
noted through the Cherokee wars, and John Montgomery, later one of
Clark's four captains in Illinois. The two last mentioned were
Highlanders. Clark's Illinois force was largely recruited from the
troops who fought at Point Pleasant.
Colonel Preston wrote to Patrick Henry that the enemy behaved with
"inconceivable bravery," the head men walking about in the time of
action exhorting their men to "lie close, shoot well, be strong, and
fight." The Shawanoes ran up to the muzzles of the English guns,
disputing every foot of ground. Both sides knew well what they were
fighting for--the rich land held in a semicircle by the Beautiful River.
Shortly before sundown the Indians, mistaking a flank movement by
Shelby's contingent for the arrival of reinforcements, retreated across
the Ohio. Many of their most noted warriors had fallen and among them
the Shawano chief, Puck-e-shin-wa, father of a famous son, Tecumseh. ¹
Yet they were unwilling to accept defeat. When they heard that Dunmore
was now marching overland to cut them off from their towns, their fury
blazed anew. "Shall we first kill all our women and children and then
fight till we ourselves are slain?" Cornstalk, in irony, demanded of
them; "No? Then I will go and make peace."
¹ Thwaites, Documentary History of Dunmore's War.
By the treaty compacted between the chiefs and Lord Dunmore, the Indians
gave up all claim to the lands south of the Ohio, even for hunting, and
agreed to allow boats to pass unmolested. In this treaty the Mingos
refused to join, and a detachment of Dunmore's troops made a punitive
expedition to their towns. Some discord arose between Dunmore and
Lewis's frontier forces because, since the Shawanoes had made peace, the
Governor would not allow the frontiersmen to destroy the Shawano towns.
Of all the chiefs, Logan alone still held aloof. Major Gibson undertook
to fetch him, but Logan refused to come to the treaty grounds. He sent
by Gibson the short speech which has lived as an example of the best
Indian oratory:
I appeal to any white man to say if ever he entered Logan's cabin hungry
and he gave him not meat: if ever he came cold and naked and he clothed
him not. During the course of the last long and bloody war, Logan
remained idle in his cabin, an advocate for peace. Such was my love for
the whites that my countrymen pointed as they passed and said, "Logan is
the friend of the white men." I had even thought to have lived with you
but for the injuries of one man. Colonel Cresap, the last spring, in
cold blood and unprovoked, murdered all the relations of Logan, not even
sparing my women and children. There remains not a drop of my blood in
the veins of any living creature. This called on me for revenge. I have
sought it; I have killed many; I have fully glutted my vengeance: for my
country I rejoice at the beams of peace. But do not harbor a thought
that mine is the joy of fear. Logan never felt fear. He will not turn on
his heel to save his life. Who is there to mourn for Logan? Not one. ¹
¹ Some writers have questioned the authenticity of Logan's speech,
inclining to think that Gibson himself composed it, partly because of
the biblical suggestion in the first few lines. That Gibson gave
biblical phraseology to these lines is apparent, though, as Adair points
out there are many examples of similitude in Indian and biblical
expression. But the thought is Indian and relates to the first article
of the Indian's creed, namely, to share his food with the needy. "There
remains not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living creature" is a
truly Indian lament. Evidently the final four lines of the speech are
the most literally translated, for they have the form and the primitive
rhythmic beat which a student of Indian poetry quickly recognizes. The
authenticity of the speech, as well as the innocence of Cresap, whom
Logan mistakenly accused, was vouched for by George Rogers Clark in a
letter to Dr. Samuel Brown dated June 17, 1798. See Jefferson papers,
Series 5, quoted by English, Conquest of the Country Northwest of the
River Ohio, vol. II. p. 1029.
By rivers and trails, in large and small companies, started home the
army that had won the land. The West Fincastle troops, from the lower
settlements of the Clinch and Holston valleys, were to return by the
Kentucky River, while those from the upper valley would take the shorter
way up Sandy Creek. To keep them in provisions during the journey it was
ordered that hunters be sent out along these routes to kill and barbecue
meat and place it on scaffolds at appropriate spots.
The way home by the Kentucky was a long road for weary and wounded men
with hunger gnawing under their belts. We know who swung out along the
trail to provide for that little band, "dressed in deerskins colored
black, and his hair plaited and bobbed up." It was Daniel Boone--now, by
popular demand, Captain Boone--just "discharged from Service," since the
valley forts needed him no longer. Once more only a hunter, he went his
way over Walden Mountain--past his son's grave marking the place where
he had been turned back--to serve the men who had opened the gates.