p104  Chapter VI
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  p105 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  p106 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 dishonest 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  p107 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 of the 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.

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,  p108 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 "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  p109 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,  p110 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.

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  p111 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  p112 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. 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.2 Indeed,  p113 during this summer of 1774, eleven hundred Indians were encamped about Fort Pitt visiting him.

•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,"3 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  p114 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.

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  p115 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  p116 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.  p117 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.a

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  p118 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.

 p119  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,  p120 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  p121 and Bloody Ground" to surround the various groups of surveyors still at large and 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 victim to the foe;4 and, undetected by the Indians, he brought himself and Stoner home in safety, after covering •eight hundred miles in sixty-one days.

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 had 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  p122 of the difficulties in West Fincastle. He was convinced that Boone could raise a company and hold 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.

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  p123 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.5

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  p124 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.6

 p125  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 the most noted warriors had fallen and among them the Shawano chief, Puck-e‑shin‑wa, father of a famous son, Tecumseh.7 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  p126 fight till we ourselves are slain?" Cornstalk, in irony, demanded of them; "No? Then I will go and make peace."

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:

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  p128 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.

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The Author's Notes:

1 The activities of the great land companies are described in Alvord's extensive work, The Mississippi Valley in British Politics.

2 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."

3 See Alvord, The Mississippi Valley in British Politics, vol. II, pp191‑94.

4 Hancock Taylor, who delayed in getting out of the country and was cut off.

5 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, p170). 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!"

6 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.

7 Thwaites, Documentary History of Dunmore's War.

8 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, p1029.

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Thayer's Note:

a Clark's own account of his Vincennes expedition is onsite in full: The Conquest of the Illinois. The book itself is no less remarkable than the military operation.

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