Boone: A Biography (47 page)

The forty-four men inside the fort kept watch at the loopholes and shot one Indian who ventured into the open. The settlers had not had time to bring the cattle inside the stockade or to fill their water buckets at the spring.
One of the springs outside the walls
had been covered and could be reached by a trench, but apparently the trench was unfinished, or
the covered spring had gone dry
in the hot August weather. Most accounts describe the necessity of going outside the gate to get a supply of water. A hundred acres of corn and other vegetables spread out in front of the fort.

Two men—Thomas Ball and Nicholas Thompson—were sent out before dawn as messengers to Lexington. They gambled that the Indians would stay hidden and let them through rather than reveal their presence, and they won that gamble. It is possible that the whole Indian force had not arrived that early in the morning and that Indians kept arriving and taking their positions throughout the morning. It is also possible that the full force of Indians that had crossed the Ohio never arrived at Bryan’s Station, some staying near the Licking River in hopes of staging an ambush later.

The settlers inside the fort were desperately in need of water, and it was decided to let the women and children and some slaves go out to the spring, as if no Indians were suspected. Again, they gambled that the Indians would not want to give away their positions and numbers. Later accounts claimed that only white women went out to the spring, but it is likely children and slaves joined them. The survivor Grandmother Tomlinson would say, “
It was decided to act for a while
as if we did not suspect the ambushcade by the spring . . . We were not all to go in a crowd, but stringing along two or three together.” Before the women and children and slaves ventured outside, a prayer service was held inside the fort. Grandmother Tomlinson later told the
Madison Democrat
that “
from that awful hour
I date my hope of heaven.” The water carriers took off their moccasins and filed out through the gate, carrying every noggin and piggin available.

Led by Jemima Suggett Johnson, the procession strolled to the spring. They saw moccasins in the brush and a hand holding a tomahawk but pretended not to notice. “
They were not twenty steps
from me, and I trembled so I could hardly stand.” The white women and children and servants chatted as if unconcerned. They were covered by rifles from the fort but were still exposed to rifle fire from the surrounding woods.
Because the spring was shallow in the August
drought, they had to tediously dip water with gourds to fill their vessels.

The Indians and British watched, perhaps astonished by the boldness of the women and children and slaves. And then they were thrilled to think their presence was unsuspected. They imagined they still controlled the element of surprise and those inside the fort must think the Indian who had been shot earlier was a lone scout. As the sun rose and birds sang in the trees, the Indians let the party return to the gate with splashing buckets and kettles. The men welcomed them at the gate and closed the big doors. There were tears of relief and hugs all around.

This episode in the siege of Bryan’s Station, often retold over the years, has a resounding significance in the story of the frontier. Though overshadowed by the men in most histories of heroic action in the settlements,
it can’t be repeated enough that the women made it possible to claim and hold land in Kentucky and elsewhere.

I
N THE AUGUST
heat it is unlikely Bryan’s Station could have held out for long without the supply of fresh water brought in so boldly by white women, children, and slaves at dawn. As the sun got higher and the day hotter, the Indians in the woods, assuming they had not been spotted, waited for the men to open the gates and go out to tend the stock and work in the fields. But the gates remained shut and all was quiet except for a crow here, a squirrel chattering there. It has been assumed by most historians that a large force of Indians and British militia surrounded Bryan’s Station that day but remained hidden in the woods.
The British officer Caldwell later said three hundred
Indians took part in the raid. But most accounts mention the eerie silence and the spooky sense of a vast number lurking out of sight. Apparently the large force was never actually observed by those inside the fort.

Both sides knew it was almost impossible to take a twelve-foot-high stockade without artillery. Girty and Caldwell had no artillery, but those inside the fort had no way of knowing that.

Girty sent a band out into the open on the far side of the fort beyond the spring, as a bait to draw men out of the fort. Deciding to play along with the game, thirteen men went out the cabins’ back doors and fired at the Indians, making as much noise as possible, hoping to give the impression of a larger force leaving the fort, then ran back inside the stockade. Trusting the garrison had been emptied, Girty ordered his forces to begin the attack. The clearing beside the cornfield was narrow and Indians had to run out into the open to fire within range of the walls. Riflemen inside picked them off as they dashed into the open. A few Indians reached the fort and set the outside cabins on fire. As the Indians withdrew from the first attack, the cabins blazed in the wind, sending showers of sparks onto buildings in the enclosure. The dry shingles and poles caught easily, but luckily the wind shifted and turned the showers of sparks away from the fort.

After the first assault, those in the stockade were relieved that no sign of artillery had been revealed. If the Indians and British had artillery, they would have already used it. The firing began again and continued for hours. As Indians came out into the open to fire, a few at a time, the riflemen from the fort continued to pick them off. The settlers in Kentucky had learned a great deal about defending themselves since the siege of Boonesborough four years before and there were no trees close to the fort for the Indians to hide behind. After hours of fire on the fort, only two inside the stockade had been killed.

Because they could not get close enough to use torches, the Indians shot fire arrows into the stockade. If an arrow stuck in a roof and caught the shingles, a child was sent to knock the burning shingles loose. One fire arrow was reputed to have landed near a cradle. “
A lighted arrow from an Indian bow
fell upon the sugar-trough cradle in which the infant, Richard M. Johnson, was lying. His little sister Betsy promptly extinguished the flame.” Johnson would later become a hero of the Battle of the Thames and vice president of the United States.

Meanwhile the two messengers who had ridden out before daybreak had reached Lexington and found that the main force of the militia had gone after the band of Indians who had attacked Hoy’s Station. The messengers rode on to Boone’s Station, where Capt. William Ellis and a company of men had gathered. Boone was apparently away recruiting more men. At two o’clock that afternoon the relief force reached Bryan’s Station. The Indians had faded back into the cover of the woods. All looked peaceful when the militia arrived. It was decided that the horsemen would ride as fast as they could to the fort’s gate, and Levi Todd’s thirty men on foot would ease through the cornfield under cover until they were near the stockade’s walls. Captain Ellis was a pious man, a frontier preacher, and whether it was prayer or sheer bravado that saved them, he and his men charged through a hail of Indian fire to the gate of the fort, which swung open for them. The considerable dust cloud kicked up by the horses’ feet is also credited
with protecting them, and the force of Indians firing at them may have been smaller than was assumed at the time.

Levi Todd and his men on foot had come through the wide cornfield almost to the fort, but when they heard the cries of Ellis’s galloping troops and the firing, they turned back into the corn, only to confront a line of angry Indians. Had they continued as planned to the stockade they might have run through the gate with the horsemen. But having turned back, they had to fight their way through the Indians. Luckily the Indians had already fired their weapons at the dashing horsemen, and as they struggled to reload, the militiamen aimed their rifles at them and retreated into the leafy rows. Those watching from the fort waited for the riflemen to advance again, but Todd and his militia withdrew into the forest and returned to Lexington, having lost two men.

Conceding that the fort could not be taken now that its defense had been increased, Girty came forward and stood on a stump near the wall to offer a proposal. With an air of friendliness and courtesy, reminding those inside that he knew many personally, he offered protection and safety if they surrendered. He told them artillery was on the way and the fort would be blown down.

Among the settlers at Bryan’s Station was a young man named Aaron Reynolds, like John Holder of Boonesborough, notorious for his profanity. With Girty threatening on his stump outside the wall, Reynolds’s talents as a swearer were called upon. He climbed up inside a chimney near the wall, and with only his head exposed above the rim answered Girty. Victorian scholars who passed on the anecdote only give us a laundered paraphrase. Standing on stacked barrels inside the fireplace, Reynolds began by shouting to Girty that he (Reynolds) had two lowdown dogs named Simon and Girty. Girty answered that this was too serious an occasion for malicious joking.

Reynolds claimed that the Kentucky militia was on its way to Bryan’s Station. In one version of his remarks he began by shouting,
“
Know you! Know you! Yes, we know
you well. Know Simon Girty! Yes: he is the renegado, cowardly villain, who loves to murder women and children, especially those of his own people. Know Simon Girty! Yes: his father must have been a panther and his mother a wolf. I have a worthless dog that kills lambs: instead of shooting him I have named him Simon Girty.” But Reynolds was just warming up. “
If you and your gang of murderers
stay here another day, we will have your scalps drying in the sun on the roofs of these cabins,” Reynolds yelled, and swung into higher gear and said they had plenty of ammunition to beat “such a son of a bitch as Girty” and all they needed was hickories to whip the “yellow hides” of his Indian allies. It was said Girty “took great offense at the levity and want of politeness of his adversary.”

Capt. John Craig, commander of the station, then shouted from the wall that the fort would never surrender. Girty threatened that the next day would prove otherwise. Aaron Reynolds turned his dog loose to attack Girty, and Girty retreated. There was sporadic firing from both sides during the night, but the following morning the Indians were found to be gone. The woods and broken cornfields were silent. Hundreds of hogs and cattle had been killed, outbuildings burned, including a tanning shed, and a ropewalk, and cornfields laid waste, but Girty and Caldwell and the other British and Indians were gone.

I
N RESPONSE
to the raid on Bryan’s Station, men from Lexington, Harrodsburg, Boonesborough, and Boone’s Station assembled at Boone’s Station and headed north in pursuit of the retreating Indians. Boone had been appointed lieutenant colonel of the new Fayette County militia and he commanded forty-four men from his district. Col. John Todd of Lexington was the nominal commander of the 182 men who set out on August 17, 1782. Lt. Col. Stephen Trigg of Lincoln County, Maj. Hugh McGary of Harrodsburg, Maj. Silas Harlin, Maj. Edward Bulger, and Maj. Levi Todd were also leading. As was often the case with frontier militias, there seemed almost as many officers as private soldiers, and none of them had much authority over the hastily
mustered and untrained ranks. The actual numbers were twenty-five officers and 157 enlisted men. While John Todd was an experienced soldier,
Trigg had never fought Indians
before. This lack of authority, experience, and recognized chain of command could prove disastrous when decisions had to be made quickly and carried out decisively.

The little army arrived at Bryan’s Station to find the Indians had gone. In conference with the officers there, Major McGary suggested they wait for a larger militia force commanded by Col. Ben Logan to arrive. Logan was gathering upward of five hundred men, and with a force that size a decisive victory could be achieved over Girty and the British and their Indian allies. Colonel Todd accused McGary of timidity and said if they did not follow now the Indians would reach the Ohio River and cross, and it would be too late to attack them. Todd’s argument was persuasive and the officers agreed to leave in the morning.
It is possible that Boone preferred not to wait
for Logan but to serve under Todd, since Logan had been one of the accusers at the court-martial four years before. McGary, known for his bad temper, brooded on Todd’s suggestion that he was timid. On the frontier, no suggestion could hurt a man’s pride more than the hint that he was a coward. In a world where the willingness and ability to defend oneself with gun or knife or fists could be a daily necessity, it was dangerous to be thought timid.
The adage was that cowards did not
even start out and the weak died on the way to the Middle Ground.

After they left Bryan’s Station on August 17, Girty and the Indians followed an old hunter’s trail down Elkhorn Creek, then turned north, arriving at the ruins of Ruddle’s Station near the end of the day. Crossing the Licking River they camped for the night near the ghostly ruins, twenty-two miles from Bryan’s Station.

On August 18 the militia rode north, following the Indian trail to within a few miles of the Lower Blue Licks. As they traveled, Boone noticed a peculiar paradox. From the number of campfires at the Indians’ campsites, where they had feasted on cattle from Bryan’s Station, he estimated there were nearly five hundred in Girty’s party. The Indians
left many signs, broken twigs, as if hoping to be followed. According to John Mason Peck, “
Their camp fires were left burning
; their trail was plainly marked; and every indication showed that they desired a pursuit, for they even marked the trees with their tomahawks along their path.” Boone thought
they might have walked in each other’s tracks
, as though trying to conceal their large number.