XLA. D. 1776DANIEL BOONE
Asa matter of unnatural history the British lion is really and truly a lioness with a large and respectable family. When only a cub she sharpened her teeth on Spain, in her youth crushed Holland, and in her prime fought France, wresting from each in turn the command of the sea.
She was nearing her full strength when France with a chain of forts along the Saint Lawrence and the Mississippi attempted to strangle the thirteen British cubs in America. By the storming of Quebec the lion smashed that chain; but the long and world-wide wars with France had bled her dry, and unless she could keep the sea her cubs were doomed, so bluntly she told them they must help.
The cubs had troubles of their own and could not help. Theirs was the legal, hers the moral right, but both sides fell in the wrong when they lost their tempers. Since then the mother of nations has reared her second litter with some of that gentleness which comes of sorrow.
So far the French in Canada were not settlers so much as gay adventurers for the Christ, or for beaver skins, living among the Indians, or in a holiday mood leading the tribes against the surly British.
So far the British overseas were not adventurers so much as dour fugitives from injustice at home, or from justice, or merely deported as a general nuisance, to join in one common claim to liberty, the fanatics of freedom.
Unlike the French and Spaniards, the northern folk—British or Dutch, German or Scandinavian—had no mission, except by smallpox to convert the heathen. Nothing cared they for glory or adventure, but only for homes and farms. Like a hive of bees they filled the Atlantic coast lands with tireless industry until they began to feel crowded; then like a hive they swarmed, over the Appalachian ranges, across the Mississippi, over the Rocky Mountains, and now in our own time to lands beyond the sea.
Among the hard fierce colonists a very few loved nature and in childhood took to the wilds. Such was the son of a tame Devon Quaker, young Daniel Boone, a natural marksman, axman, bushman, tracker and scout of the backwoods who grew to be a freckled ruddy man, gaunt as a wolf, and subtle as a snake from his hard training in the Indian wars.
When first he crossed the mountains on the old warrior trail into Kentucky, hunting and trapping paid well in that paradise of noble timber and white clover meadows. The country swarmed with game, a merry hunting ground and battle-field of rival Indian tribes.
There Boone and his wife’s brother Stuart were captured by Shawnees, who forced the prisoners to lead the way to their camp where the other four hunters were taken. The Indians took their horses, rifles, powder, traps and furs, all lawful plunder, but gave them food to carry them to the settlements with awarning for the whites that trespassers would be prosecuted. That was enough for four of the white hunters, but Boone and Stuart tracked the Indians and stole back some of their plunder, only to be trailed in their turn and recaptured. The Shawnees were annoyed, and would have taken these trespassers home to be burned alive, but for Boone’s queer charm of manner which won their liking, and his ghostlike vanishing with Stuart into the cane brakes. The white men got away with rifles, bullets and powder, and they were wise enough not to be caught again. Still it needed some courage to stay in Kentucky, and after Stuart got scalped Boone said he felt unutterably lonely. Yet he remained, dodging so many and such varied perils that his loneliness must really have been a comfort, for it is better to be dull in solitude than scalped in company. He owed money for his outfit, and would not return to the settlements until he had earned the skins that paid his debt.
At the moment when the big colonial hive began to swarm Boone led a party of thirty frontiersmen to cut a pack-trail over the mountains into the plains of Kentucky. This wilderness trail—some two hundred miles of mud-holes, rocks and stumps—opened the way for settlement in Kentucky, a dark and bloody ground, for white invaders. At a cost of two or three scalps Boone’s outfit reached this land, to build a stockaded village named for the leader, Boonesborough, and afterward he was very proud that his wife and daughters were the first women to brave the perils of that new settlement.
Under a giant elm the settlers, being British, had church and parliament, but only on one Sunday didthe parson pray for King George before the news came that congress needed prayers for the new republic at war with the motherland.
Far to the northwest of Kentucky the forts of Illinois were held by a British officer named Hamilton. He had with him a handful of American Tories loyal to the king, some newly conquered French Canadians not much in love with British government, and savage Indian tribes. All these he sent to strike the revolting colonies in their rear, but the whole brunt of the horror fell upon poor Kentucky. The settlements were wrecked, the log cabins burned, and the Indians got out of hand, committing crimes; but the settlers held four forts and cursed King George through seven years of war.
It was in a lull of this long storm that Boone led a force of thirty men to get salt from the salt-licks frequented by the buffalo and deer, on the banks of Licking River. One day while he was scouting ten miles from camp, and had just loaded his horse with meat to feed his men, he was caught, in a snow-storm, by four Shawnees. They led him to their camp where some of the hundred warriors had helped to capture Boone eight years before. These, with much ceremony and mock politeness, introduced him to two American Tories, a brace of French Canadians, and their Shawnee chiefs. Then Boone found out that this war party was marching on Fort Boonesborough where lived his own wife and children and many women, but scarcely any men. But knowing the ways of the redskins Boone saw that if he let them capture his own men in camp at the salt-licks they would go home without attacking Boonesborough.He must risk the fighting men to save the fort; he must guide the enemy to his own camp and order his men to surrender; and if they laid down all their lives for the sake of their women and children—well, they must take their chance. Boone’s men laid down their arms.
A council followed at which fifty-nine Indians voted to burn these Americans at the stake against sixty-one who preferred to sell them to Hamilton as prisoners of war. Saved by two votes, they marched on a winter journey dreadful to the Indians as well as to the prisoners; but all shared alike when dogs and horses had to be killed for food. Moreover the savages became so fond of Boone that they resolved to make an Indian of him. Not wanting to be an Indian he pleaded with Hamilton the Hair Buyer, promising to turn loyalist and fight the rebels, but when the British officer offered a hundred pounds for this one captive it was not enough for these loving savages. They took Boone home, pulled out his hair, leaving only a fine scalp-lock adorned with feathers, bathed him in the river to wash all his white blood out, painted him, and named him Big Turtle. As the adopted son of the chief, Black Fish, Boone pretended to be happy, and in four months had become a popular chief, rather closely watched, but allowed to go out hunting. Then a large Indian force assembled to march against Fort Boonesborough.
Daniel Boone
Daniel Boone
Boone easily got leave to go out hunting, and a whole day passed before his flight was known. Doubling on his course, setting blind trails, wading along the streams to hide his tracks, sleeping inthickets or in hollow logs, starving because he dared not fire a gun to get food, his clothes in rags, his feet bloody, he made his way across country, and on the fifth day staggered into Fort Boonesborough.
The enemy were long on the way. There was time to send riders for succor and scouts to watch, to repair the fort, even to raid the Shawnee country before the invaders arrived—one hundred Canadians and four hundred Indians, while Boone’s garrison numbered fifty men and boys, with twenty-five brave women.
By Hamilton’s orders there must be no bloodshed, and he sent forty horses for the old folks, the women and children to ride on their way northward as prisoners of war.
Very solemn was Boone, full of negotiations for surrender, gaining day after day with talk, waiting in a fever for expected succor from the colonies. Nine commissioners on either side were to sign the treaty, but the Indians—for good measure—sent eighteen envoys to clasp the hands of their nine white brothers, and drag them into the bush for execution. The white commissioners broke loose, gained the fort, slammed the gates and fired from the ramparts.
Long, bitter and vindictive was the siege. A pretended retreat failed to lure Boone’s men into ambush. The Indians dug a mine under the walls, but threw the dirt from the tunnel into the river where a streak of muddy water gave their game away. Torches were thrown on the roofs, but women put out the flames. When at last the siege was raised and the Indians retreated, twenty-four hours lapsed beforethe famished garrison dared to throw open their gates.
In these days a Kentucky force, led by the hero George Rogers Clark, captured the French forts on the Illinois, won over their garrisons, and marched on the fortress of Vincennes through flooded lands, up to their necks in water, starving, half drowned. They captured the wicked Hamilton and led him away in chains.
Toward the end of the war once more a British force of Frenchmen and Indians raided Kentucky, besieging Logan’s fort, and but for the valor of the women, that sorely stricken garrison would have perished. For when the tanks were empty the women took their buckets and marched out of the gates, laughing and singing, right among the ambushed Indians, got their supply of water from the spring, and returned unhurt because they showed no fear.
With the reliefs to the rescue rode Daniel Boone and his son Israel, then aged twenty-three. At sight of reinforcements the enemy bolted, hotly pursued to the banks of Licking River. Boone implored his people not to cross into the certainty of an ambush, but the Kentuckians took no notice, charging through the river and up a ridge between two bushed ravines.
From both flanks the Wyandots charged with tomahawks, while the Shawnees raked the horsemen with a galling fire, and there was pitiless hewing down of the broken flying settlers. Last in that flight came Boone, bearing in his arms his mortally wounded son, overtaken, cut off, almost surrounded before he struck off from the path, leaping from rock to rock.As he swam the river Israel died, but the father carried his body on into the shelter of the forest.
With the ending of the war of the Revolution, the United States spread gradually westward, and to the close of his long life old Daniel Boone was ever at the front of their advance, taking his rest at last beyond the Mississippi. To-day his patient and heroic spirit inspires all boys, leads every frontiersman, commands the pioneers upon the warrior trails, the ax-hewn paths, the wilderness roads of marching empire.