Boone: A Biography (46 page)

By June of 1781 Lord Cornwallis’s campaign was beginning to fall apart. Morale was low in the British corps and he was running out of men and supplies. The British were in no condition to take more prisoners. The oath was probably understood as a mere formality on both sides. As soon as he was released, Boone rejoined the legislature where it had reconvened at Staunton. There is no evidence that Boone was a very active or effective legislator at this time. He was out of his element in committees and long meetings conducted according to parliamentary procedure. He was awkward at the deal making and exchanges of favors, which are the very essence of political success. He would never become an effective politician as some contemporaries such as Isaac
Shelby and James Robertson would, and he was anything but a backroom man or lobbyist. He returned to Kentucky for the summer and continued with his farming and surveying.

Whatever his contribution to the legislative process, Boone must have been aware of the impression he made on the other legislators. While others wore fine coats and silks, in the company of Thomas Jefferson, Boone wore his hunting clothes, appearing to some more Indian than white. “
I recollect very well when I saw Col. Boone
,” John Redd told Draper. “He was dressed in real backwoods stile, he had a common jeans [rough twill] suit, with buckskin leggings neatily beaded. His leggings were manufactured by the Indians.”

Returning to the assembly in the fall, Boone came by way of Pennsylvania and stopped in Oley to visit relatives he had not seen in decades. He was probably in no hurry to join the lawmakers, and when he did arrive in Richmond he stayed away from meetings so often, J. P. Hale tells us, the speaker gave an order “that the Sergeant-at-Arms attending the House take in his custody Daniel Boone.” It seems likely he was out hunting instead of sitting in the chamber.

D
ANIEL AND REBECCA’S
last child, Nathan, had been born March 2, 1781. It was Nathan who would live far into the next century and spend three weeks talking with Lyman Draper about his father. Nathan’s wife, Olive Van Bibber, would also add valuable information to the interviews. The story is that Nathan was born when Boone was away, and several other babies were also born in the Boone family. Asked if he could identify his own baby, he picked out Nathan.

By the time the Virginia legislature began its session that fall, Cornwallis was trapped on the peninsula at Yorktown as Washington and Lafayette and Rochambeau closed in and began a siege, and the French navy blockaded the Chesapeake, preventing the British navy from coming to his rescue. Cornwallis surrendered his forces on October 17, 1781. The main campaign of the Revolution was over, but there would be continued action in the South and New England, and
bloody fighting in the West, especially in Kentucky, before the treaty was signed in 1783.

Apparently defeated in the former colonies on the Atlantic, the British had no intention of giving up their claims to the interior, the Ohio Valley and forts such as Detroit. They still controlled Canada and could send their forces south across the Great Lakes any time they chose. And they still had powerful Indian allies in the Shawnees and Mingoes and Delawares and Wyandottes in the region. The war in the West was far from over. In fact, 1782 proved to be Kentucky’s “Year of Blood,” one of the deadliest in frontier history. The violence in the Ohio Valley escalated early in the year and never let up. In March a party of Pennsylvania militia crossed the Ohio in retaliation for Indian raids and attacked the Moravian Indian settlements of Gnaddenhutten, Salem, and Shoenbrunn, killing ninety to a hundred unarmed men, women, and children. Those Indians had been converted by the Moravians and were pacifists. Col. David Williamson led the raid, and one explanation for the brutality was that he and his men saw an Indian woman wearing a dress that had belonged to a white woman killed in an earlier Indian attack. As Neal O. Hammon describes the event: “
On March 5, 1782 Williamson and volunteers
[from Pennsylvania] rounded up most of the missionary Indians in the area and confined them in some outbuildings . . . The next day the mission Indians were taken out, three-at-a-time and executed with mallets or clubs. Twenty-nine men, twenty-seven women, and thirty-four children were killed.” After those at Gnaddenhutten, which means huts of mercy, were killed, more Indians were brought from the village of Salem and executed. The massacre at Gnaddenhutten was one of the worst atrocities of the Revolutionary era and set off a new round of retaliatory raids from the Ohio tribes. Within days an army of Wyandottes attacked Estill’s Station in Kentucky and captured a girl and the slave named Monk Estill. They killed the girl in front of the stockade and took Monk prisoner.

Monk Estill is a well-known figure in early Kentucky history. When the Estill family first came to Kentucky they lived at Boonesborough,
and Boone knew James Estill and his family and Monk there. James Estill, Monk’s owner, was away when the kidnapping occurred, but as soon as he returned he organized a party of eighteen men to pursue the Wyandottes. The posse caught up with the Indians at Little Mountain on March 22, 1782, and fought an intense battle that lasted for two hours.

Monk shouted to his owner that twenty-five Indians opposed the whites. Estill split his force into three groups to complicate the attack. He and six others were killed and seven wounded. Approximately seventeen Wyandottes were killed. Monk escaped during the battle and carried a wounded man all the way back to Estill’s Station, twenty-five miles away. For his valor he was freed by the Estill family and lived a long life, noted for his orchards, and later his son became a well-known Baptist preacher. Monk Estill was very likely the first free black man in Kentucky,
one of four thousand African Americans
estimated by Filson to reside in the region in 1784.

In June of 1782 another American militia returned to Ohio to avenge the many Indian attacks across the Ohio River. Led by Col. William Crawford, who had worked as a scout and surveyor for George Washington, the force of five hundred was lured deeper into the interior and defeated by the Indians on the upper Sandusky River. Crawford was taken prisoner and tortured, along with a surgeon named Dr. Knight. Crawford, Dr. Knight, and eight other prisoners were taken to Half King’s Town on the upper Sandusky on June 10, 1782. Simon Girty was among the party of Indians and promised to help the prisoners. As it turned out, Girty was unable or unwilling to aid them. On June 11 all the captives were painted black, sign of a death sentence, and four were tomahawked and scalped. The rest were then taken to a Delaware town nearby, where all but Dr. Knight and Colonel Crawford were killed by women and boys.

At four o’clock in the afternoon a fire was made and Dr. Knight and Colonel Crawford were beaten by all present and bound to separate
posts. Speeches were made, reminding those present of the Gnaddenhutten massacre, and Crawford’s ears were cut off. Then the Indians took turns prodding Crawford over his naked body with burning poles. Women threw live coals on the ground and made Crawford walk on them. Crawford begged Girty to shoot him, but the “white” Indian laughed at him.

After two hours Crawford was pushed face down into embers and scalped. An old woman threw coals on his mutilated head, and he was made to walk around the post as the Indians jabbed him with burning sticks. Dr. Knight was taken away, but later reports said that after Crawford was unconscious and could not be revived for more torture, he was roasted over the fire.

The British Loyalist officer Capt. William Caldwell, who was present at the torture, wrote to his commanding officer at Detroit two days later, “
Crawford died like a hero
; never changed his countenance, tho’ they scalped him alive, then laid hot ashes upon his head; after which they roasted him by a slow fire.” Accounts of the torture of Crawford inspired even greater rage and fear among the residents of Kentucky.

T
HE FURY OF
the Indian attacks increased, and with experience the raids were conducted with added cunning. In August 1782 a small party of Indians attacked Hoy’s Station and captured two boys. It was a diversionary raid, to draw the militia away while the main force of Indians made their attack elsewhere. Captain Holder and a company followed the party with the kidnapped boys and were defeated on August 14, losing four men. Meanwhile Boone was organizing a force from Fayette County. Holder’s group returned and reported their losses, and
Boone realized things had taken a very serious turn
.

Map of the Battle of the Blue Licks. On the morning of August 19, 1782, the Kentucky militia pursued the Indians and British forces, which had attacked Bryan’s Station, to the Licking River. Boone warned that an ambush was likely in the woods across the river. (Courtesy Neal O. Hammon, 2005.)

1782

At least three hundred warriors were gathering in Ohio in August 1782 to attack the Kentucky settlements. Led by British officers and Wyandottes, the army included Delawares, Mingoes, Miamis, as well as some Shawnees and Cherokees. Perhaps there were more than five hundred or six hundred. Before they left Ohio, Simon Girty, the white man raised by Indians, who had joined the British and Indian forces in 1778, roused them with a passionate speech. He concluded his oratory with this paragraph:

Brothers, the intruders on your lands
exult in the success that has crowned their flagitious acts. . .. They are planting fruit trees and ploughing the lands where not long since were the cane break and the clover field. Was there a voice in the trees of the forest, or articulate sounds in the gurgling waters, every part of this country would call on you to chase away these ruthless invaders, who are laying it waste. Unless you rise in the majesty of your might, and exterminate their whole race, you may bid adieu to the hunting ground of your fathers, to the delicious flesh of the animals with which they once abounded, and to the skins with which you were once enabled to purchase your clothing and your rum.

It is impossible to read Girty’s words without hearing the truth in them. By 1782 the Shawnees and the Mingoes and Delawares and
Wyandottes knew it was now or never. Either they drove the white settlers out of the Great Meadow or they would lose forever their finest hunting ground and therefore their relatively luxurious lifestyle on the rivers in Ohio.
What had once been Indian backyards
had become Indian graveyards instead. The Iroquois had been driven from their lands in New York and forced to surrender to General Sullivan in 1779. George Rogers Clark had already taken forts farther west along the Mississippi. The buffalo were rapidly vanishing from the Middle Ground. As the British war back east wound down after Yorktown in October 1781, the Ohio Indians felt more desperate about their future than ever. As Colin C. Calloway says, “
Burned villages and crops, murdered chiefs
, divided councils, and civil wars, migrations, towns and forts choked with refugees, economic disruptions, breaking of ancient traditions, losses in battle and to disease and hunger, betrayal to their enemies, all made the American Revolution one of the darkest periods in American Indian history.” The war had promoted unity among the Indian nations and then destroyed that unity. The desperation in Girty’s speech was real and justified. They had to act immediately, and they had to win.

Simon Girty was one of the most controversial figures on the American frontier. Captured by Indians as a teenager in 1756 along with his three brothers, raised by Senecas in the western region of New York, he served as a scout and interpreter for the Americans at the beginning of the Revolution but switched to the British side in 1778 when he was not paid the two dollars a day he had been promised. Living primarily with Wyandottes, he was fluent in all the Indian tongues. He befriended both Boone and Simon Kenton when they were captives of the Shawnees, but because of his leadership in raids on Kentucky and his presence at the torture of Colonel Crawford, he became a hated man on the frontier, viewed as a devil, a fiend of demonic cruelty. Following his exhortations, he and his brother George helped lead the raid on Bryan’s Station a few miles northeast of Lexington on August 16, 1782, along with three British officers, William Caldwell, Alexander McKee, and Matthew Elliott.

The attack on Bryan’s Station began with eerie silence. The Indians osmosed through the woods in the night and early morning and took positions under cover around the fort. The Indians were not certain how many men were in the fort or how many had been drawn away by the diversionary raid on Hoy’s Station a few days earlier. With the Indians were prisoners taken two years before at Ruddle’s and Martin’s stations.
No one is sure why the prisoners
were brought along to observe the attack.

Bryan’s Station is always referred to as a station and not a fort because it was founded as a private settlement by the Bryan family. It had, however, grown quickly, attracting many residents. With a palisade wall, and fortified with blockhouses at the corners, the enclosure would fit most definitions of a fort. According to Neal O. Hammon, “
The fort [Bryan’s Station] in 1782 was said to be
one of the largest in the West, at 150 feet wide by 600 feet long.”