Six hundred Indians attack Boonesborough--Boone and Captain Smith go out
to treat with the enemy under a flag of truce, and are extricated from a
treacherous attempt to detain them as prisoners--Defence of the
fort--The Indians defeated--Boone goes to North Carolina to bring bark
his family.
It will naturally be supposed that foes less wary and intelligent, than
those from whom Boone had escaped, after they had abandoned the hope of
recapturing him, would calculate to find Boonesborough in readiness for
their reception.
Boonesborough, though the most populous and important station in
Kentucky, had been left by the abstraction of so many of the select
inhabitants in the captivity of the Blue Licks, by the absence of
Colonel Clarke in Illinois, and by the actual decay of the pickets,
almost defenceless. Not long before the return of Boone, this important
post had been put under the care of Major Smith, an active and
intelligent officer. He repaired thither, and put the station, with
great labor and fatigue, in a competent state of defence. Learning from
the return of some of the prisoners, captured at the Blue Licks, the
great blow which the Shawnese meditated against this station, he deemed
it advisable to anticipate their movements, and to fit out an expedition
to meet them on their own ground.--Leaving twenty young men to defend
the place, he marched with thirty chosen men towards the Shawnese
towns.
At the Blue Licks, a place of evil omen to Kentucky, eleven of the men,
anxious for the safety of the families they had left behind and deeming
their force too small for the object contemplated, abandoned the
enterprise and retreated to the fort. The remaining nineteen, not
discouraged by the desertion of their companions, heroically persevered.
They crossed the Ohio to the present site of Cincinnati, on rafts. They
then painted their faces, and in other respects assumed the guise and
garb of savages, and marched upon the Indian towns.
When arrived within twenty miles of these towns they met the force with
which Boone had set out. Discouraged by his escape, the original party
had returned, had been rejoined by a considerable reinforcement, the
whole amounting to two hundred and fifty men on horse-back, and were
again on their march against Boonesborough. Fortunately, Major Smith and
his small party discovered this formidable body before they were
themselves observed. But instead of endeavoring to make good their
retreat from an enemy so superior in numbers, and mounted upon horses,
they fired upon them and killed two of their number. An assault so
unexpected alarmed the Indians; and without any effort to ascertain the
number of their assailants, they commenced a precipitate retreat. If
these rash adventurers had stopped here, they might have escaped
unmolested. But, flushed with this partial success, they rushed upon the
retreating foe, and repeated their fire. The savages, restored to
self-possession, halted in their turn, deliberated a moment, and turned
upon the assailants. Major Smith, perceiving the imprudence of having
thus put the enemy at bay, and the certainty of the destruction of his
little force, if the Indians should perceive its weakness, ordered a
retreat in time; and being considerably in advance of the foe, succeeded
in effecting it without loss. By a rapid march during the night, in the
course of the next morning they reached Boonesborough in safety.
Scarcely an hour after the last of their number had entered the fort, a
body of six hundred Indians, in three divisions of two hundred each,
appeared with standards and much show of warlike array, and took their
station opposite the fort. The whole was commanded by a Frenchman named
Duquesne. They immediately sent a flag requesting the surrender of the
place, in the name of the king of Great Britain. A council was held, and
contrary to the opinion of Major Smith, it was decided to pay no
attention to the proposal. They repeated their flag of truce, stating
that they had letters from the commander at Detroit to Colonel Boone. On
this, it was resolved that Colonel Boone and Major Smith should venture
out, and hear what they had to propose.
Fifty yards from the fort three chiefs met them with great parade, and
conducted them to the spot designated for their reception, and spread a
panther's skin for their seat, while two other Indians held branches
over their heads to protect them from the fervor of the sun. The chiefs
then commenced an address five minutes in length, abounding in friendly
assurances, and the avowal of kind sentiments. A part of the advanced
warriors grounded their arms, and came forward to shake hands with them.
The letter from Governor Hamilton of Detroit was then produced, and
read. It proposed the most favorable terms of surrender, provided the
garrison would repair to Detroit. Major Smith assured them that the
proposition seemed a kind one; but that it was impossible, in their
circumstances, to remove their women and children to Detroit. The reply
was that this difficulty should be removed, for that they had brought
forty horses with them, expressly prepared for such a contingency.
In a long and apparently amicable interview, during which the Indians
smoked with them, and vaunted their abstinence in not having killed the
swine and cattle of the settlement, Boone and Smith arose to return to
the fort, and make known these proposals, and to deliberate upon their
decision. Twenty Indians accompanied their return as far as the limits
stipulated between the parties allowed. The negotiators having returned,
and satisfied the garrison that the Indians had no cannon, advised to
listen to no terms, but to defend the fort to the last extremity. The
inmates of the station resolved to follow this counsel.
In a short time the Indians sent in another flag, with a view, as they
stated, to ascertain the result of the deliberations of the fort. Word
was sent them, that if they wished to settle a treaty, a place of
conference must be assigned intermediate between their camp and the
fort. The Indians consented to this stipulation, and deputed thirty
chiefs to arrange the articles, though such appeared to be their
distrust, that they could not be induced to come nearer than eighty
yards from the fort. Smith and Boone with four others were deputed to
confer with them. After a close conference of two days, an arrangement
was agreed upon, which contained a stipulation, that neither party
should cross the Ohio, until after the terms had been decided upon by
the respective authorities on either side. The wary heads of this
negotiation considered these terms of the Indians as mere lures to
beguile confidence.
When the treaty was at last ready for signature, an aged chief, who had
seemed to regulate all the proceedings, remarked that he must first go
to his people, and that he would immediately return, and sign the
instrument. He was observed to step aside in conference with some young
warriors. On his return the negotiators from the garrison asked the
chief why he had brought young men in place of those who had just been
assisting at the council? His answer was prompt and ingenious. It was,
that he wished to gratify his young warriors, who desired to become
acquainted with the ways of the whites. It was then proposed, according
to the custom of both races, that the parties should shake hands. As the
two chief negotiators, Smith and Boone, arose to depart, they were both
seized from behind.
Suspicious of treachery, they had posted twenty-five men in a bastion,
with orders to fire upon the council, as soon as they should see any
marks of treachery or violence. The instant the negotiators were seized,
the whole besieging force fired upon them, and the fire was as promptly
returned by the men in the bastion. The powerful savages who had grasped
Boone and Smith, attempted to drag them off as prisoners. The one who
held Smith was compelled to release his grasp by being shot dead.
Colonel Boone was slightly wounded. A second tomahawk, by which his
skull would have been cleft asunder, he evaded, and it partially fell on
Major Smith; but being in a measure spent, it did not inflict a
dangerous wound. The negotiators escaped to the fort without receiving
any other injury. The almost providential escape of Boone and Smith can
only be accounted for by the confusion into which the Indians were
thrown, as soon as these men were seized, and by the prompt fire of the
men concealed in the bastion. Added to this, the two Indians who seized
them were both shot dead, by marksmen who knew how to kill the Indians,
and at the same time spare the whites, in whose grasp they were held.
The firing on both sides now commenced in earnest, and was kept up
without intermission from morning dawn until dark. The garrison, at once
exasperated and cheered by the meditated treachery of the negotiation
and its result, derided the furious Indians, and thanked them for the
stratagem of the negotiation, which had given them time to prepare the
fort for their reception. Goaded to desperation by these taunts, and by
Duquesne, who harangued them to the onset, they often rushed up to the
fort, as if they purposed to storm it. Dropping dead under the cool and
deliberate aim of the besieged, the remainder of the forlorn hope,
raising a yell of fury and despair, fell back. Other infuriated bands
took their place; and these scenes were often repeated, invariably with
the same success, until both parties were incapable of taking aim on
account of the darkness.
They then procured a quantity of combustible matter, set fire to it, and
approached under covert of the darkness, so near the palisades as to
throw the burning materials into the fort. But the inmates had availed
themselves of the two days' consultation, granted them by the
treacherous foe, to procure an ample supply of water; and they had the
means of extinguishing the burning faggots as they fell.
Finding their efforts to fire the fort ineffectual, they returned again
to their arms, and continued to fire upon the station for some days.
Taught a lesson of prudence, however, by what had already befallen them,
they kept at such a cautious distance, as that their fire took little
effect. A project to gain the place, more wisely conceived, and
promising better success, was happily discovered by Colonel Boone. The
walls of the fort were distant sixty yards from the Kentucky river. The
bosom of the current was easily discernible by the people within. Boone
discovered in the morning that the stream near the shore was extremely
turbid. He immediately divined the cause.
The Indians had commenced a trench at the water level of the river
bank, mining upwards towards the station, and intending to reach the
interior by a passage under the wall. He took measures to render their
project ineffectual, by ordering a trench to be cut inside the fort,
across the line of their subterraneous passage. They were probably
apprised of the countermine that was digging within, by the quantity of
earth thrown over the wall. But, stimulated by the encouragement of
their French engineer, they continued to advance their mine towards the
wall, until, from the friability of the soil through which it passed, it
fell in, and all their labor was lost. With a perseverance that in a
good cause would have done them honor, in no wise discouraged by this
failure to intermit their exertions, they returned again to their fire
arms, and kept up a furious and incessant firing for some days, but
producing no more impression upon the station than before.
During the siege, which lasted eight days, they proposed frequent
parleys, requesting the surrender of the place, and professing to treat
the garrison with the utmost kindness. They were answered, that they
must deem the garrison to be still more brutally fools than themselves,
to expect that they would place any confidence in the proposals of
wretches who had already manifested such base and stupid treachery. They
were bidden to fire on, for that their waste of powder and lead gave the
garrison little uneasiness, and were assured that they could not hope
the surrender of the place, while there was a man left within it. On the
morning of the ninth day from the commencement of the siege, after
having, as usual, wreaked their disappointed fury upon the cattle and
swine, they decamped, and commenced a retreat.
No Indian expedition against the whites had been known to have had such
a disastrous issue for them. During the siege, their loss was estimated
by the garrison at two hundred killed, beside a great number wounded.
The garrison, on the contrary, protected by the palisades, behind which
they could fire in safety, and deliberately prostrate every foe that
exposed himself near enough to become a mark, lost but two killed, and
had six wounded.
After the siege, the people of the fort, to whom lead was a great
object, began to collect the balls that the Indians had fired upon them.
They gathered in the logs of the fort, beside those that had fallen to
the ground, a hundred and twenty-five pounds. The failure of this
desperate attempt, with such a powerful force, seems to have discouraged
the Indians and their Canadian allies from making any further effort
against Boonesborough. In the autumn of this season, Colonel Boone
returned to North Carolina to visit his wife and family.
When he was taken at the Blue Licks, with his associates, who had
returned, while he was left behind in a long captivity, during which no
more news of him transpired than as if he were actually among the dead,
the people of the garrison naturally concluded that he had been killed.
His wife and family numbered him as among the dead; and often had they
shuddered on the bare recurrence of some one to the probability of the
tortures he had undergone. Deeply attached to him, and inconsolable,
they could no longer endure a residence which so painfully reminded them
of their loss. As soon as they had settled their minds to the conviction
that their head would return to them no more, they resolved to leave
these forests that had been so fatal to them, and return to the banks of
the Yadkin, where were all their surviving connections. A family so
respectable and dear to the settlement would not be likely to leave
without having to overcome many tender and pressing solicitations to
remain, and many promises that if they would, their temporal wants
should be provided for.
To all this Mrs. Boone could only object, that Kentucky had indeed been
to her, as its name imported, a dark and _Bloody Ground_. She had lost
her eldest son by the savage fire before they had reached the country.
Her daughter had been made a captive, and had experienced a forbearance
from the Indians to her inexplicable. She would have been carried away
to the savage towns, and there would have been forcibly married to some
warrior, but for the perilous attempt, and improbable success of her
father in recapturing her. Now the father himself, her affectionate
husband, and the heroic defender of the family, had fallen a sacrifice,
probably in the endurance of tortures on which the imagination dared not
to dwell. Under the influence of griefs like these, next to the
unfailing resource of religion, the heart naturally turns to the
sympathy and society of those bound to it by the ties of nature and
affinity. They returned to their friends in North Carolina.
It was nearly five years since this now desolate family had started in
company with the first emigrating party of families, in high hopes and
spirits, for Kentucky. We have narrated their disastrous rencounter with
the Indians in Powell's valley, and their desponding return to Clinch
river. We have seen their subsequent return to Boonesborough, on
Kentucky river. Tidings of the party thus far had reached the relatives
of Mrs. Boone's family in North Carolina; but no news from the country
west of the Alleghanies had subsequently reached them. All was uncertain
conjecture, whether they still lived, or had perished by famine, wild
beasts, or the Indians.
At the close of the summer of 1778, the settlement on the Yadkin saw a
company on pack horses approaching in the direction from the western
wilderness. They had often seen parties of emigrants departing in that
direction, but it was a novel spectacle to see one return from that
quarter. At the head of that company was a blooming youth, scarcely yet
arrived at the age of manhood. It was the eldest surviving son of Daniel
Boone. Next behind him was a matronly woman, in weeds, and with a
countenance of deep dejection. It was Mrs. Boone. Still behind was the
daughter who had been a captive with the Indians. The remaining children
were too young to feel deeply. The whole group was respectable in
appearance, though clad in skins, and the primitive habiliments of the
wilderness. It might almost have been mistaken for a funeral
procession. It stopped at the house of Mr. Bryan, the father of Mrs.
Boone.
The people of the settlement were not long in collecting to hear news
from the west, and learn the fate of their former favorite, Boone, and
his family. As Mrs. Boone, in simple and backwood's phrase, related the
thrilling story of their adventures, which needed no trick of venal
eloquence to convey it to the heart, an abundant tribute of tears from
the hearers convinced the bereaved narrator that true sympathy is
natural to the human heart. As they shuddered at the dark character of
many of the incidents related, it was an hour of triumph,
notwithstanding their pity, for those wiser ones, who took care, in an
under tone, to whisper that it might be remembered that they had
predicted all that had happened.