The Dark And Bloody Ground
With the coming of spring Daniel Boone's desire, so long cherished and
deferred, to make a way for his neighbors through the wilderness was to
be fulfilled at last. But ere his ax could slash the thickets from the
homeseekers' path, more than two hundred settlers had entered Kentucky
by the northern waterways. Eighty or more of these settled at
Harrodsburg, where Harrod was laying out his town on a generous plan,
with "in-lots" of half an acre and "out-lots" of larger size. Among
those associated with Harrod was George Rogers Clark, who had surveyed
claims for himself during the year before the war.
While over two hundred colonists were picking out home sites wherever
their pleasure or prudence dictated, a gigantic land promotion
scheme--involving the very tracts where they were sowing their first
corn--was being set afoot in North Carolina by a body of men who figure
in the early history of Kentucky as the Transylvania Company. The leader
of this organization was Judge Richard Henderson. ¹ Judge Henderson
dreamed a big dream. His castle in the air had imperial proportions. He
resolved, in short, to purchase from the Cherokee Indians the larger
part of Kentucky and to establish there a colony after the manner and
the economic form of the English Lords Proprietors, whose day in America
was so nearly done. Though in the light of history the plan loses none
of its dramatic features, it shows the practical defects that must
surely have prevented its realization. Like many another Cæsar hungering
for empire and staking all to win it, the prospective lord of Kentucky,
as we shall see, had left the human equation out of his calculations.
¹ Richard Henderson (1734-1785) was the son of the High Sheriff of
Granville County. At first an assistant to his father, he studied law
and soon achieved a reputation by the brilliance of his mind and the
magnetism of his personality. As presiding Judge at Hillsborough he had
come into conflict with the violent element among the Regulators, who
had driven him from the court and burned his house and barns. For some
time prior to his elevation to the bench, he had been engaged in land
speculations. One of Boone's biographers suggests that Boone may have
been secretly acting as Henderson's agent during his first lonely
explorations of Kentucky. However this may be, it does not appear that
Boone and his Yadkin neighbors were acting with Henderson when in
September, 1773, they made their first attempt to enter Kentucky as
settlers.
Richard Henderson had known Daniel Boone on the Yadkin; and it was
Boone's detailed reports of the marvelous richness and beauty of
Kentucky which had inspired him to formulate his gigantic scheme and had
enabled him also to win to his support several men of prominence in the
Back Country. To sound the Cherokees regarding the purchase and to
arrange, if possible, for a conference, Henderson dispatched Boone to
the Indian towns in the early days of 1775.
Since we have just learned that Dunmore's War compelled the Shawanoes
and their allies to relinquish their right to Kentucky, that, both
before and after that event, government surveyors were in the territory
surveying for the soldiers' claims, and that private individuals had
already laid out town sites and staked holdings, it may be asked what
right of ownership the Cherokees possessed in Kentucky, that Henderson
desired to purchase it of them. The Indian title to Kentucky seems to
have been hardly less vague to the red men than it was to the whites.
Several of the nations had laid claim to the territory. As late as 1753,
it will be remembered, the Shawanoes had occupied a town at Blue Licks,
for John Findlay had been taken there by some of them. But, before
Findlay guided Boone through the Gap in 1769, the Shawanoes had been
driven out by the Iroquois, who claimed suzerainty over them as well as
over the Cherokees. In 1768, the Iroquois had ceded Kentucky to the
British Crown by the treaty of Fort Stanwix; whereupon the Cherokees had
protested so vociferously that the Crown's Indian agent, to quiet them,
had signed a collateral agreement with them. Though claimed by many,
Kentucky was by common consent not inhabited by any of the tribes. It
was the great Middle Ground where the Indians hunted. It was the
Warriors' Path over which they rode from north and south to slaughter
and where many of their fiercest encounters took place. However shadowy
the title which Henderson purposed to buy, there was one all-sufficing
reason why he must come to terms with the Cherokees: their northernmost
towns in Tennessee lay only fifty or sixty miles below Cumberland Gap
and hence commanded the route over which he must lead colonists into his
empire beyond the hills.
The conference took place early in March, 1775, at the Sycamore Shoals
of the Watauga River. Twelve hundred Indians, led by their "town
chiefs"--among whom were the old warrior and the old statesman of their
nation, Oconostota and Attakullakulla--came to the treaty grounds and
were received by Henderson and his associates and several hundred white
men who were eager for a chance to settle on new lands. Though Boone was
now on his way into Kentucky for the Transylvania Company, other border
leaders of renown or with their fame still to win were present, and
among them James Robertson, of serious mien, and that blond gay knight
in buckskin, John Sevier.
It is a dramatic picture we evolve for ourselves from the meager
narratives of this event--a mass of painted Indians moving through the
sycamores by the bright water, to come presently into a tense, immobile
semicircle before the large group of armed frontiersmen seated or
standing about Richard Henderson, the man with the imperial dream, the
ready speaker whose flashing eyes and glowing oratory won the hearts of
all who came under their sway. What though the Cherokee title be a
flimsy one at best and the price offered for it a bagatelle! The spirit
of Forward March! is there in that great canvas framed by forest and
sky. The somber note that tones its lustrous color, as by a sweep of the
brush, is the figure of the Chickamaugan chief, Dragging Canoe, warrior
and seer and hater of white men, who urges his tribesmen against the
sale and, when they will not hearken, springs from their midst into the
clear space before Henderson and his band of pioneers and, pointing with
uplifted arm, warns them that a dark cloud hangs over the land the white
man covets which to the red man has long been a bloody ground. ¹
¹ This utterance of Dragging Canoe's is generally supposed to be the
origin of the descriptive phrase applied to Kentucky--"the Dark and
Bloody Ground." See Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, vol. I, p.229.
The purchase, finally consummated, included the country lying between
the Kentucky and Cumberland Rivers--almost all the present State of
Kentucky, with the adjacent land watered by the Cumberland River and its
tributaries, except certain lands previously leased by the Indians to
the Watauga Colony. The tract comprised about twenty million acres and
extended into Tennessee.
Daniel Boone's work was to cut out a road for the wagons of the
Transylvania Company's colonists to pass over. This was to be done by
slashing away the briers and underbrush hedging the narrow Warriors'
Path that made a direct northward line from Cumberland Gap to the Ohio
bank, opposite the mouth of the Scioto River. Just prior to the
conference Boone and "thirty guns" had set forth from the Holston to
prepare the road and to build a fort on whatever site he should select.
By April, Henderson and his first group of tenants were on the trail. In
Powell's Valley they came up with a party of Virginians Kentucky bound,
led by Benjamin Logan; and the two bands joined together for the march.
They had not gone far when they heard disquieting news. After leaving
Martin's Station, at the gates of his new domain, Henderson received a
letter from Boone telling of an attack by Indians, in which two of his
men had been killed, but "we stood on the ground and guarded our baggage
till the day and lost nothing." ¹ These tidings, indicating that despite
treaties and sales, the savages were again on the warpath, might well
alarm Henderson's colonists. While they halted, some indecisive, others
frankly for retreat, there appeared a company of men making all haste
out of Kentucky because of Indian unrest. Six of these Henderson
persuaded to turn again and go in with him; but this addition hardly
offset the loss of those members of his party who thought it too
perilous to proceed. Henderson's own courage did not falter. He had
staked his all on this stupendous venture and for him it was forward to
wealth and glory or retreat into poverty and eclipse. Boone, in the
heart of the danger, was making the same stand. "If we give way to them
[the Indians] now," he wrote, "it will ever be the case."
¹ Bogart, Daniel Boone and the Hunters of Kentucky, p. 121.
Signs of discord other than Indian opposition met Henderson as he
resolutely pushed on. His conversations with some of the fugitives from
Kentucky disclosed the first indications of the storm that was to blow
away the empire he was going in to found. He told them that the claims
they had staked in Kentucky would not hold good with the Transylvania
Company. Whereupon James McAfee, who was leading a group of returning
men, stated his opinion that the Transylvania Company's claim would not
hold good with Virginia. After the parley, three of McAfee's brothers
turned back and went with Henderson's party, but whether with intent to
join his colony or to make good their own claims is not apparent.
Benjamin Logan continued amicably with Henderson on the march but did
not recognize him as Lord Proprietor of Kentucky. He left the
Transylvania caravan shortly after entering the territory, branched off
in the direction of Harrodsburg, and founded St. Asaph's Station, in the
present Lincoln County, independently of Henderson though the site lay
within Henderson's purchase.
Notwithstanding delays and apprehensions, Henderson and his colonists
finally reached Boone's Fort, which Daniel and his "thirty
guns"--lacking two since the Indian encounter--had erected at the mouth
of Otter Creek.
An attractive buoyancy of temperament is revealed in Henderson's
description in his journal of a giant elm with tall straight trunk and
even foliage that shaded a space of one hundred feet. Instantly he chose
this "divine elm" as the council chamber of Transylvania. Under its
leafage he read the constitution of the new colony. It would be too
great a stretch of fancy to call it a democratic document, for it was
not that, except in deft phrases. Power was certainly declared to be
vested in the people; but the substance of power remained in the hands
of the Proprietors.
Terms for land grants were generous enough in the beginning, although
Henderson made the fatal mistake of demanding quitrents--one of the
causes of dissatisfaction which had led to the Regulators' rising in
North Carolina. In September he augmented this error by more than
doubling the price of land, adding a fee of eight shillings for
surveying, and reserving to the Proprietors one-half of all gold,
silver, lead, and sulphur found on the land. No land near sulphur
springs or showing evidences of metals was to be granted to settlers.
Moreover, at the Company's store the prices charged for lead were said
to be too high--lead being necessary for hunting, and hunting being the
only means of procuring food--while the wages of labor, as fixed by the
Company, were too low. These terms bore too heavily on poor men who were
risking their lives in the colony.
Hence newcomers passed by Boonesborough, as the Transylvania settlement
was presently called, and went elsewhere. They settled on Henderson's
land but refused his terms. They joined in their sympathies with James
Harrod, who, having established Harrodsburg in the previous year at the
invitation of Virginia, was not in the humor to acknowledge Henderson's
claim or to pay him tribute. All were willing to combine with the
Transylvania Company for defense, and to enforce law they would unite in
bonds of brotherhood in Kentucky, even as they had been one with each
other on the earlier frontier now left behind them. But they would call
no man master; they had done with feudalism. That Henderson should not
have foreseen this, especially after the upheaval in North Carolina,
proves him, in spite of all his brilliant gifts, to have been a man out
of touch with the spirit of the time.
The war of the Revolution broke forth and the Indians descended upon the
Kentucky stations. Defense was the one problem in all minds, and defense
required powder and lead in plenty. The Transylvania Company was not
able to provide the means of defense against the hordes of savages whom
Henry Hamilton, the British Governor at Detroit, was sending to make war
on the frontiers. Practical men like Harrod and George Rogers
Clark--who, if not a practical man in his own interests, was a most
practical soldier--saw that unification of interests within the
territory with the backing of either Virginia or Congress was necessary.
Clark personally would have preferred to see the settlers combine as a
freemen's state. It was plain that they would not combine and stake
their lives as a unit to hold Kentucky for the benefit of the
Transylvania Company, whose authority some of the most prominent men in
the territory had refused to recognize. The Proprietary of Transylvania
could continue to exist only to the danger of every life in Kentucky.
While the Proprietors sent a delegate to the Continental Congress to win
official recognition for Transylvania, eighty-four men at Harrodsburg
drew up a petition addressed to Virginia stating their doubts of the
legality of Henderson's title and requesting Virginia to assert her
authority according to the stipulations of her charter. That defense was
the primary and essential motive of the Harrodsburg Remonstrance seems
plain, for when George Rogers Clark set off on foot with one companion
to lay the document before the Virginian authorities, he also went to
plead for a load of powder. In his account of that hazardous journey, as
a matter of fact, he makes scant reference to Transylvania, except to
say that the greed of the Proprietors would soon bring the colony to its
end, but shows that his mind was seldom off the powder. It is a detail
of history that the Continental Congress refused to seat the delegate
from Transylvania. Henderson himself went to Virginia to make the fight
for his land before the Assembly. ¹
¹ In 1778 Virginia disallowed Henderson's title but granted him two
hundred thousand acres between the Green and Kentucky rivers for his
trouble and expense in opening up the country.
The magnetic center of Boonesborough's life was the lovable and
unassuming Daniel Boone. Soon after the building of the fort Daniel had
brought in his wife and family. He used often to state with a mild pride
that his wife and daughters were the first white women to stand on the
banks of the Kentucky River. That pride had not been unmixed with
anxiety; his daughter Jemima and two daughters of his friend, Richard
Galloway, while boating on the river had been captured by Shawanoes and
carried off. Boone, accompanied by the girls' lovers and by John Floyd
(eager to repay his debt of life-saving to Boone) had pursued them,
tracing the way the captors had taken by broken twigs and scraps of
dress goods which one of the girls had contrived to leave in their path,
had come on the Indians unawares, killed them, and recovered the three
girls unhurt.
In the summer of 1776, Virginia took official note of "Captain Boone of
Boonesborough," for she sent him a small supply of powder. The men of
the little colony, which had begun so pretentiously with its
constitution and assembly, were now obliged to put all other plans aside
and to concentrate on the question of food and defense. There was a
dangerous scarcity of powder and lead. The nearest points at which these
necessaries could be procured were the Watauga and Holston River
settlements, which were themselves none too well stocked. Harrod and
Logan, some time in 1777, reached the Watauga fort with three or four
pack-horses and filled their packs from Sevier's store; but, as they
neared home, they were detected by red scouts and Logan was badly
wounded before he and Harrod were able to drive their precious load
safely through the gates at Harrodsburg. In the autumn of 1777, Clark,
with a boatload of ammunition, reached Maysville on the Ohio, having
successfully run the gauntlet between banks in possession of the foe. He
had wrested the powder and lead from the Virginia Council by threats to
the effect that if Virginia was so willing to lose Kentucky--for of
course "a country not worth defending is not worth claiming"--he and his
fellows were quite ready to take Kentucky for themselves and to hold it
with their swords against all comers, Virginia included. By even such
cogent reasoning had he convinced the Council--which had tried to hedge
by expressing doubts that Virginia would receive the Kentucky settlers
as "citizens of the State"--that it would be cheaper to give him the
powder.
Because so many settlers had fled and the others had come closer
together for their common good, Harrodsburg and Boonesborough were now
the only occupied posts in Kentucky. Other settlements, once thriving,
were abandoned; and, under the terror, the Wild reclaimed them. In
April, 1777, Boonesborough underwent its first siege. Boone, leading a
sortie, was shot and he fell with a shattered ankle. An Indian rushed
upon him and was swinging the tomahawk over him when Simon Kenton, giant
frontiersman and hero of many daring deeds, rushed forward, shot the
Indian, threw Boone across his back, and fought his way desperately to
safety. It was some months ere Boone was his nimble self again. But
though he could not "stand up to the guns," he directed all operations
from his cabin.
The next year Boone was ready for new ventures growing from the
settlers' needs. Salt was necessary to preserve meat through the summer.
Accordingly Boone and twenty-seven men went up to the Blue Licks in
February, 1778, to replenish their supply by the simple process of
boiling the salt water of the Licks till the saline particles adhered to
the kettles. Boone was returning alone, with a pack-horse load of salt
and game, when a blinding snowstorm overtook him and hid from view four
stealthy Shawanoes on his trail. He was seized and carried to a camp of
120 warriors led by the French Canadian, Dequindre, and James and George
Girty, two white renegades. Among the Indians were some of those who had
captured him on his first exploring trip through Kentucky and whom he
had twice given the slip. Their hilarity was unbounded. Boone quickly
learned that this band was on its way to surprise Boonesborough. It was
a season when Indian attacks were not expected; nearly threescore of the
men were at the salt spring and, to make matters worse, the walls of the
new fort where the settlers and their families had gathered were as yet
completed on only three sides. Boonesborough was, in short, well-nigh
defenseless. To turn the Indians from their purpose, Boone conceived the
desperate scheme of offering to lead them to the salt makers' camp with
the assurance that he and his companions were willing to join the tribe.
He understood Indians well enough to feel sure that once possessed of
nearly thirty prisoners, the Shawanoes would not trouble further about
Boonesborough but would hasten to make a triumphal entry into their own
towns. That some, perhaps all, of the white men would assuredly die, he
knew well; but it was the only way to save the women and children in
Boonesborough. In spite of Dequindre and the Girtys, who were leading a
military expedition for the reduction of a fort, the Shawanoes fell in
with the suggestion. When they had taken their prisoners, the more
bloodthirsty warriors in the band wanted to tomahawk them all on the
spot. By his diplomatic discourse, however, Boone dissuaded them, for
the time being at least, and the whole company set off for the towns on
the Little Miami.
The weather became severe, very little game crossed their route, and for
days they subsisted on slippery elm bark. The lovers of blood did not
hold back their scalping knives and several of the prisoners perished;
but Black Fish, the chief then of most power in Shawanoe councils,
adopted Boone as his son, and gave him the name of Sheltowee, or Big
Turtle. Though watched zealously to prevent escape, Big Turtle was
treated with every consideration and honor; and, as we would say today,
he played the game. He entered into the Indian life with apparent zest,
took part in hunts and sports and the races and shooting matches in
which the Indians delighted, but he was always careful not to outrun or
outshoot his opponents. Black Fish took him to Detroit when some of the
tribe escorted the remainder of the prisoners to the British post. There
he met Governor Hamilton and, in the hope of obtaining his liberty, he
led that dignitary to believe that he and the other people of
Boonesborough were eager to move to Detroit and take refuge under the
British flag. ¹ It is said that Boone always carried in a wallet round
his neck the King's commission given him in Dunmore's War; and that he
exhibited it to Hamilton to bear out his story. Hamilton sought to
ransom him from the Indians, but Black Fish would not surrender his new
son. The Governor gave Boone a pony, with saddle and trappings, and
other presents, including trinkets to be used in procuring his needs and
possibly his liberty from the Shawanoes.
¹ So well did Boone play his part that he aroused suspicion even in
those who knew him best. After his return to Boonesborough his old
friend, Calloway, formally accused him of treachery on two counts: that
Boone had betrayed the salt makers to the Indians and had planned to
betray Boonesborough to the British. Boone was tried and acquitted. His
simple explanation of his acts satisfied the court-martial and made him
a greater hero than ever among the frontier folk.
Black Fish then took his son home to Chillicothe. Here Boone found
Delawares and Mingos assembling with the main body of the Shawanoe
warriors. The war belt was being carried through the Ohio country. Again
Boonesborough and Harrodsburg were to be the first settlements attacked.
To escape and give warning was now the one purpose that obsessed Boone.
He redoubled his efforts to throw the Indians off their guard. He sang
and whistled blithely about the camp at the mouth of the Scioto River,
whither he had accompanied his Indian father to help in the salt
boiling. In short, he seemed so very happy that one day Black Fish took
his eye off him for a few moments to watch the passing of a flock of
turkeys. Big Turtle passed with the flock, leaving no trace. To his
lamenting parent it must have seemed as though he had vanished into the
air. Daniel crossed the Ohio and ran the 160 miles to Boonesborough in
four days, during which time he had only one meal, from a buffalo he
shot at the Blue Licks. When he reached the fort after an absence of
nearly five months, he found that his wife had given him up for dead and
had returned to the Yadkin.
Boone now began with all speed to direct preparations to withstand a
siege. Owing to the Indian's leisurely system of councils and ceremonies
before taking the warpath, it was not until the first week in September
that Black Fish's painted warriors, with some Frenchmen under Dequindre,
appeared before Boonesborough. Nine days the siege lasted and was the
longest in border history. Dequindre, seeing that the fort might not be
taken, resorted to trickery. He requested Boone and a few of his men to
come out for a parley, saying that his orders from Hamilton were to
protect the lives of the Americans as far as possible. Boone's friend,
Calloway, urged against acceptance of the apparently benign proposal
which was made, so Dequindre averred, for "bienfaisance et humanité."
But the words were the words of a white man, and Boone hearkened to
them. With eight of the garrison he went out to the parley. After a long
talk in which good will was expressed on both sides, it was suggested by
Black Fish that they all shake hands and, as there were so many more
Indians than white men, two Indians should, of course, shake hands with
one white man, each grasping one of his hands. The moment that their
hands gripped, the trick was clear, for the Indians exerted their
strength to drag off the white men. Desperate scuffling ensued in which
the whites with difficulty freed themselves and ran for the fort.
Calloway had prepared for emergencies. The pursuing Indians were met
with a deadly fire. After a defeated attempt to mine the fort the enemy
withdrew.
The successful defense of Boonesborough was an achievement of national
importance, for had Boonesborough fallen, Harrodsburg alone could not
have stood. The Indians under the British would have overrun Kentucky;
and George Rogers Clark--whose base for his Illinois operations was the
Kentucky forts--could not have made the campaigns which wrested the
Northwest from the control of Great Britain.
Again Virginia took official note of Captain Boone when in 1779 the
Legislature established Boonesborough "a town for the reception of
traders" and appointed Boone himself one of the trustees to attend to
the sale and registration of lots. An odd office that was for Daniel,
who never learned to attend to the registration of his own; he declined
it. His name appears again, however, a little later when Virginia made
the whole of Kentucky one of her counties with the following officers:
Colonel David Robinson, County Lieutenant; George Rogers Clark, Anthony
Bledsoe, and John Bowman, Majors; Daniel Boone, James Harrod, Benjamin
Logan, and John Todd, Captains.
Boonesborough's successful resistance caused land speculators as well as
prospective settlers to take heart of grace. Parties made their way to
Boonesborough, Harrodsburg, and even to the Falls of the Ohio, where
Clark's fort and blockhouses now stood. In the summer of 1779 Clark had
erected on the Kentucky side of the river a large fort which became the
nucleus of the town of Louisville. Here, while he was eating his heart
out with impatience for money and men to enable him to march to the
attack of Detroit, as he had planned, he amused himself by drawing up
plans for a city. He laid out private sections and public parks and
contemplated the bringing in of families only to inhabit his city, for,
oddly enough, he who never married was going to make short shift of mere
bachelors in his City Beautiful. Between pen scratches, no doubt, he
looked out frequently upon the river to descry if possible a boatload of
ammunition or the banners of the troops he had been promised.
When neither appeared, he gave up the idea of Detroit and set about
erecting defenses on the southern border, for the Choctaws and
Cherokees, united under a white leader named Colbert, were threatening
Kentucky by way of the Mississippi. He built in 1780 Fort Jefferson in
what is now Ballard County, and had barely completed the new post and
garrisoned it with about thirty men when it was besieged by Colbert and
his savages. The Indians, assaulting by night, were lured into a
position directly before a cannon which poured lead into a mass of them.
The remainder fled in terror from the vicinity of the fort; but Colbert
succeeded in rallying them and was returning to the attack when he
suddenly encountered Clark with a company of men and was forced to
abandon his enterprise.
Clark knew that the Ohio Indians would come down on the settlements
again during the summer and that to meet their onslaughts every man in
Kentucky would be required. He learned that there was a new influx of
land seekers over the Wilderness Road and that speculators were doing a
thriving business in Harrodsburg; so, leaving his company to protect
Fort Jefferson, he took two men with him and started across the wilds on
foot for Harrodsburg. To evade the notice of the Indian bands which were
moving about the country the three stripped and painted themselves as
warriors and donned the feathered headdress. So successful was their
disguise that they were fired on by a party of surveyors near the
outskirts of Harrodsburg.
The records do not state what were the sensations of certain speculators
in a land office in Harrodsburg when a blue-eyed savage in a war bonnet
sprang through the doorway and, with uplifted weapon, declared the
office closed; but we get a hint of the power of Clark's personality and
of his genius for dominating men from the terse report that he
"enrolled" the speculators. He was informed that another party of men,
more nervous than these, was now on its way out of Kentucky. In haste he
dispatched a dozen frontiersmen to cut the party off at Crab Orchard and
take away the gun of every man who refused to turn back and do his bit
for Kentucky. To Clark a man was a gun, and he meant that every gun
should do its duty.
The leaders and pioneers of the Dark and Bloody Ground were now
warriors, all under Clark's command, while for two years longer the Red
Terror ranged Kentucky, falling with savage force now here, now there.
In the first battle of 1780, at the Blue Licks, Daniel's brother, Edward
Boone, was killed and scalped. Later on in the war his second son,
Israel, suffered a like fate. The toll of life among the settlers was
heavy. Many of the best-known border leaders were slain. Food and powder
often ran short. Corn might be planted, but whether it would be
harvested or not the planters never knew; and the hunter's rifle shot,
necessary though it was, proved only too often an invitation to the
lurking foe. But sometimes, through all the dangers of forest and trail,
Daniel Boone slipped away silently to Harrodsburg to confer with Clark;
or Clark himself, in the Indian guise that suited the wild man in him
not ill, made his way to and from the garrisons which looked to him for
everything.
Twice Clark gathered together the "guns" of Kentucky and, marching north
into the enemy's country, swept down upon the Indian towns of Piqua and
Chillicothe and razed them. In 1782, in the second of these enterprises,
his cousin, Joseph Rogers, who had been taken prisoner and adopted by
the Indians and then wore Indian garb, was shot down by one of Clark's
men. On this expedition Boone and Harrod are said to have accompanied
Clark.
The ever present terror and horror of those days, especially of the two
years preceding this expedition, are vividly suggested by the quaint
remark of an old woman who had lived through them, as recorded for us by
a traveler. The most beautiful sight she had seen in Kentucky, she said,
was a young man dying a natural death in his bed. Dead but unmarred by
hatchet or scalping knife, he was so rare and comely a picture that the
women of the post sat up all night looking at him.
But, we ask, what golden emoluments were showered by a grateful country
on the men who thus held the land through those years of want and war,
and saved an empire for the Union? What practical recognition was there
of these brave and unselfish men who daily risked their lives and faced
the stealth and cruelty lurking in the wilderness ways? There is meager
eloquence in the records. Here, for instance, is a letter from George
Rogers Clark to the Governor of Virginia, dated May 27, 1783:
Sir. Nothing but necessity could induce me to make the following request
to Your Excellency, which is to grant me a small sum of money on
account; as I can assure you, Sir, that I am exceedingly distressed for
the want of necessary clothing etc and don't know any channel through
which I could procure any except of the Executive. The State I believe
will fall considerably in my debt. Any supplies which Your Excellency
favors me with might be deducted out of my accounts. ¹
¹ Calendar of Virginia State Papers, vol. III, p. 487.
Clark had spent all his own substance and all else he could beg,
borrow--or appropriate--in the conquest of Illinois and the defense of
Kentucky. His only reward from Virginia was a grant of land from which
he realized nothing, and dismissal from her service when she needed him
no longer.
All that Clark had asked for himself was a commission in the Continental
Army. This was denied him, as it appears now, not through his own
errors, which had not at that time taken hold on him, but through the
influence of powerful enemies. It is said that both Spain and England,
seeing a great soldier without service for his sword, made him offers,
which he refused. As long as any acreage remained to him on which to
raise money, he continued to pay the debts he had contracted to finance
his expeditions, and in this course he had the assistance of his
youngest brother, William, to whom he assigned his Indiana grant.
His health impaired by hardship and exposure and his heart broken by his
country's indifference, Clark sank into alcoholic excesses. In his
sixtieth year, just six years before his death, and when he was a
helpless paralytic, he was granted a pension of four hundred dollars.
There is a ring of bitter irony in the words with which he accepted the
sword sent him by Virginia in his crippled old age: "When Virginia
needed a sword I gave her one." He died near Louisville on February 13,
1818.
Kentucky was admitted to the Union in 1792. But even before Kentucky
became a State her affairs, particularly as to land, were arranged, let
us say, on a practical business basis. Then it was discovered that
Daniel Boone had no legal claim to any foot of ground in Kentucky.
Daniel owned nothing but the clothes he wore; and for those--as well as
for much powder, lead, food, and such trifles--he was heavily in debt.
So, in 1788, Daniel Boone put the list of his debts in his wallet,
gathered his wife and his younger sons about him, and, shouldering his
hunter's rifle, once more turned towards the wilds. The country of the
Great Kanawha in West Virginia was still a wilderness, and a hunter and
trapper might, in some years, earn enough to pay his debts. For others,
now, the paths he had hewn and made safe; for Boone once more the
wilderness road.