USA > Kentucky > Madison County > Boonesborough > Boonesborough; its founding, pioneer struggles, Indian experiences, Transylvania days, and revolutionary annals; > Part 8
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KENTUCKY, H.
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reminded of the great increase of immigration to the new country by the statement in the bill that the town is established "for the reception of traders." In addition to the land included in the town site, six hundred and forty acres adjoining it were allowed for "a cominon." The trustees appointed were "Richard Callaway, Charles Mims Thruston, Levin Powell, Edmund Taylor, James Estre, Edward Bradley, John Kennedy, David Gist, Pemberton Rollins, and Daniel Boon.": The keeping of the ferry, from the newly incorporated town across "Ken- tucky" River to the land opposite, now in Clark County, was granted with its emoluments to Richard Callaway, and the toll was set at "three shillings each for man or horse." Quite a number of log cabins were erected out- side the stockade at Boonesborough this year, but the fort itself was unchanged and kept up as usual.
Thanks partly to the inactivity of the Indians, by far the largest crop of corn yet raised in the region about the station was made this season, fortunately for the immigrants who continued to push into the country until winter weather blockaded the routes. One of the
I Boone's name is incorrectly given in this charter, just as it was after- ward by a strange oversight by Filson. The signature to Boone's letter of April 1, 1775, to Henderson, which was long in the possession of James Hall, the historical author, gives his name plainly as " Boone," and all the original autographs of the famous woodsman or fac-similes of them that the writer has ever seen show the name with the final "e."
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late trains was headed by Colonel Callaway, who had been serving as a representative of Kentucky County in the General Assembly of Virginia. He brought in a good supply of lead and plenty of gun-flints for the garrison, but only a small quantity of powder, as that material was badly needed just then by the Continental troops of the seaboard. His company consisted of forty mounted men, with as many pack-horses. Since the passage the preceding May of the famous land law there had been no trouble in getting an escort through the wilderness for immigrants or stores, as the fever was raging in the old communities, in spite of the war, to secure some of the fertile acres of Kentucky, and every opportunity, including escort duty, was seized to get to them. After a short rest at Boonesborough the home- hunters scattered out on the lonely trails and were swal- lowed up in the vast expanse of leafless woods. But some of them were back at the station by the 18th of Decem- ber, increasing the crowd of settlers and speculators who had eagerly gathered to attend the land court which opened there on that day.' The crowd that "cabined " or camped by the river while the court was in session included many a veteran of the French and Indian War, and claims on military bounties were frequent among the
' Marshall.
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numerous ones for settlement and pre-emption rights. Boone, who seems to have hurried back to attend this court, probably reached the settlement the last of Decem- ber, after the court had adjourned, for he is quoted as entering land on the Commissioners' books a few days after, while the court was being held at Bryan's Station.1 He left for Richmond 2 to buy land warrants just as soon as he could raise some money on his little property.
The gunpowder that Colonel Callaway had brought in was spun out as long and as carefully as possible, but it was nearly exhausted before the spring of 1780 opened, and there was no Daniel Boone present to make more. The garrison was getting nervous when "Uncle " Monk, an intelligent negro slave who belonged at Estill's Station, a few miles away, came over to Boonesborough to visit his wife, whose owner lived there. Monk not only volun- teered to make a supply of powder, but to the relief of everybody he did it,3 and was highly regarded and favored for it. Monk had learned the art at an exposed settlement in the valley of Virginia. He exercised it several times after this at the stations south of the Kentucky.
The unusual amount of corn that had been raised about Boonesborough not only prevented much suffering and
* Depositions.
" The capital of Virginia had been removed from Williamsburg to Rich- mond the preceding October.
3 N. Hart, junior.
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anxiety during the winter, but was a source of no little profit to the inhabitants in the spring of 1780, for the demand for grain was then urgent. It was partly to secure a supply of this indispensable staple that, about the first of March,' brought back to the station once more its former official head and de facto Governor of Transylvania, Judge Richard Henderson. The affairs of the Company had energetically engaged him ever since he had left Boonesborough, and it was mainly through his efforts that the Virginia Assembly had granted to the Company the great tract of Kentucky land below the mouth of Green River. He was now by recent appointment a commissioner on the part of North Carolina to run the boundary line between that State and Virginia, and was promoting the settlement of the Company's lands on the Lower Cum- berland, which were within the supposed boundary of North Carolina. Just now breadstuff was badly needed at half-starving French Lick,2 the future Nashville - the stockaded nucleus of Henderson's second colony. His stay at Boonesborough lasted but five days, and his trip through Kentucky was necessarily a hurried one ; but he saw enough of settlements and population to convince him that he had not overestimated the future value of
1 Haywood.
2 James Robertson seems to have made this settlement in the interest of the Transylvania Company.
OLD REVOLUTIONARY RESIDENCE OF RICHARD HENDERSON
At Williamsboro, North Carolina. (See foot note, page 115.)
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the great prize that had slipped from the Company's grasp. The corn he bought cost two hundred dollars per bushel 1 in Continental currency, and was shipped the entire dis- tance by water in log perogues," which made their long and crooked way down the Indian-haunted Kentucky and the Ohio and up the Cumberland to French Lick Station. The unique little fleet was in charge of Major W. B. Smith, whose connection with Boonesborough now ceased.2 This visit of Henderson's was the last he ever made to his famous log "capital." His years thereafter were few, 3
' Nat. Hart, junior.
2 After his arrival at French Lick, Smith assisted Henderson in the interstate survey. He finally settled about sixteen miles from the site of the present city of Henderson, Kentucky, on a tract of land which he received from John Luttrell, of the Transylvania Company, in payment for services. His residence was near what was afterward known as " Smith's Ferry," mouth of Green River, and there he died in October, 1818, at the age of eighty. He never married. (Draper.)
3 Soon after this visit to Boonesborough Henderson opened an office at French Lick for the sale of the Company's lands. In 1781 he was a member of the North Carolina House of Commons, and in 1783 his Company received from that State two hundred thousand acres of land in Powell's Valley in compensation for settlement and expenses of 1775. About that time (1783) he retired to his farm, located in the fork of Anderson Swamp and Big Nut Bush Creeks, about seven miles north- east of Williamsboro, in Granville (now Vance) County, North Carolina. Much of the farm is now owned by a connection, W. G. B. Snead, Esquire. Here Judge Henderson died January 30, 1785, in his fiftieth year, and here he was buried in the family lot about a quarter of a mile southeast of his residence, and only a few steps from the burial-place of the adjoining (Stamper) farm. No stone or memorial of any kind marks the grave of one of the most enlightened and enterprising characters of colonial North Carolina and pioneer Kentucky, and no portrait of him exists. Fortunately
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and they were saddened by the failure of his great plans. Even as late as ten years after his death the Transylvania Company made an ineffectual appeal to Congress for redress of alleged wrongs.1
In this spring of 1780 the Indians made up for lost time. Their scouts and man-hunters were in Kentucky before the snow was fairly gone, and tragedies commenced again. Early in March Colonel Callaway began prepara- tions to establish his ferry, and on the 8th of the month while he, Pemberton Rawlings (or Rollins), and three negro men were building a ferryboat on Canoe Ridge, about a mile above Boonesborough, a volley of rifle shots was heard, and shortly after one of the negroes rushed, panting and terrified, into the settlement with the news that the boat-builders had been attacked by Indians. A party of riflemen, headed by Captain Holder, and including young Bland Ballard, then just commencing his career as a scout and spy,2 galloped to the rescue, but were too late. Colonel Callaway had been instantly killed,3 scalped, and robbed of most of his clothing. Rawlings had been
his residence is preserved. Some years after his death it was removed to Williamsboro, and now, though modernized, stands as a historic personal reminder of the head of the most unique of the Colonial Governments of America.
1 See Appendix IV for the Company's Memorial to Congress in 1795.
2 Ballard was then about nineteen, and had been in Kentucky but a few months.
3 N. Hart, junior, and Draper.
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shot down, tomahawked in the back of the neck, and scalped, but, though mortally wounded, was still alive, and the two negroes were prisoners, destined for savage slavery. They were heard of no more. The Indians who, almost as a matter of course, were Shawanese, and who successfully eluded pursuit, had evidently watched the movements of the boat-builders, and fired with impunity from a nearby place of concealment. There was sudden, crushing grief in two homes, and sorrow throughout the settlement as the stricken forms were tenderly brought in, and there was even deeper gloom soon after, for the terribly wounded Rawlings died before the setting of the sun. The gallant old leader and his brave lieutenant were buried in one grave back of the fort they had helped to defend, and where the soil they loved overlooks the beautiful river that is consecrated to the memory of the pioneers. Colonel Callaway's hair was noticeable both for its length and for its peculiar shade of gray, and when the scalp was carried by the exulting savages to their town across the Ohio it was recognized with horror and sadness by Joseph Jackson, one of Boone's unfortunate party of salt-boilers of the Blue Licks, who was still a captive.
Anxieties were added to griefs as the days went by at Boonesborough, but the greatest of them all was occa-
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sioned by the news brought by Abraham Chaplain and one Hendricks, who had escaped from Wyandot captivity about the middle of May, and tattered and famished had been welcomed by the pitying settlers. They reported that the Indians and Canadians were assembling in unusual force to attack Boonesborough ; that they would certainly move in about four weeks, and that this time they would come with cannon, against which the wooden forts would be utterly helpless. The information, reliable as it was startling, was dispatched at once to Colonel John Bowman in a letter signed by E. Worthington, Ben Roberts, James Patton, and Edward Bulger,' who, in earnestly request- ing more militia to repel the invasion, declared, with patriotic fervor, that such was "the humble prayer of this garrison and of every other son of liberty." Heavy as this news was, there is no data now extant to show that any steps were taken to meet this the greatest danger that had yet threatened the Kentucky settlements. In the absence of such data it looks like there was the same remarkable failure on the part of the authorities as to scout service and ordinary military precautions that in another invasion, two years after this, brought such scath- ing rebukes and stinging sarcasms from George Rogers
1 The original letter was in the possession of the late John B. Bowman, of Kentucky University. The fact that this warning was given is strangely omitted in all accounts of this invasion by Kentucky historians.
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Clark.' One little colony - that under Grant and Ellis at Grant's Station -did make a wise and timely with- drawal,? but it was the only one to do so. In spite of the warning a month in advance, the invading force under Captain Bird 3 was allowed to reach the heart of Ken- tucky not only unresisted but undiscovered, and, on the 22d of June, Ruddle's and Martin's Stations succumbed to the enemy's artillery. The swift tidings of the actual pres- ence of cannon, even more than the report of the disaster itself, was almost a forecast of doom to Boonesborough. The once redoubtable fort looked suddenly weak to the settlers, but in spite of that there was a quick and instinct- ive rush for it by all outsiders near it. Only once- when the blazing arrows of Black Fish struck the station - had the pioneers felt so hopeless, and the panic reached its height when marauders from the Indian army sur- rounded Strode's Station, 4 across the river and only a few
"The Girty and Caldwell expedition of August, 1782. (See Virginia State Papers, Volume III, page 385.)
2 Grant and Ellis both returned home by way of Boonesborough and re-entered the Continental Army, but both located permanently in Ken- tucky in the winter of 1781. (See The Traveling Church. )
3 McBride says (page 190) that Bird was from Virginia originally ; that his father returned to England when the Revolution broke out and obtained a commission for his son in the British army. Captain Bird's retreat seems to have been due to his humanity. Kentuckians of that day could thank their stars that his American training had given him a horror of savage barbarity.
4 Strode's Station was about two miles from what is now Winchester, Clark County, Kentucky.
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miles away. But they came without field pieces, mainly to steal horses, and soon disappeared, and the relief at Boonesborough was inexpressible when it was discovered that the entire invading force had strangely retreated without striking another blow, when the whole interior of the country was at its mercy.
It was about this time that the simple - hearted and uncomplaining Boone returned to Boonesborough' from North Carolina with his wife and family, bereft of his little fortune? and saddened by domestic troubles. The population of the station had greatly changed during his absence, most of his old friends were missing, and the settlement was becoming entirely too crowded for the inveterate hunter and lover of the free and lonely woods. But he made his home at Boonesborough until shortly after another misfortune overtook him, the killing of his brother Edward by the Indians in October at fateful Blue Licks, when he moved out with his family, a few loaded pack-horses, and his dogs, crossed the river and located in what is now Fayette County, at a spot about five miles
' He had been in Kentucky probably less than two weeks when he was summoned to serve on the Jury of Escheat at Lexington Station ( July I, 1780 ), when lands of certain British subjects were confiscated.
2 He had been robbed of his own money and of funds entrusted to him the preceding February while en route to Richmond to purchase land war- rants. See Morehead's Address for Thomas Hart's letter exonerating him, and page 136 of Marshall, Volume I.
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northwest of Boonesborough, near where several buffalo traces conveniently crossed each other, and on a stream that has ever since been known as Boone's Creek. Boone inherited the tract on which he now settled from his eldest brother, Israel Boone,' then recently deceased, and who seems to have briefly "adventured" to that neigh- borhood about 1776, shortly after the establishment of Boonesborough. Boone's Station,2 as the new log and stockaded home of Daniel Boone was immediately known, stood, it is claimed, on the land at the junction of Boone's Creek and Boffman's Creek, still called on that account "the station pasture," and from this little wooden fort he sallied forth on many a hunting and surveying trip, to many an adventure with the Indians, and to the disas- trous conflict in which he lost another son.
Thanks to the confidence restored by Clark's Piqua expedition, the number of settlers so increased that in
1 Deed Book "D," page 143, Fayette Circuit Court and History of Fayette County, Kentucky.
2 The site of Boone's Station is now included in the Garrett Watts farm. Boffman's Creek was named after Captain John Boffman, who raised corn in that locality in 1776. The company of immigrants he came out with was defeated by the Indians on Skaggs' trace. We use the name as given by one of his descendants (see 1810 edition of Hardin's Reports, page 348), but it is also spelt " Baughman " in Fayette County records. Boone's Station was succeeded, so to speak, by a little settlement that sprang up near it at the crossing of the buffalo traces, which fact gave it the name of "Cross Plains," but it lost its identity shortly after 1826, when the present town of Athens was started about half a mile away.
17
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November of this year (1780) Kentucky County was divided by the Virginia Legislature into three counties, which were given the names of shining lights of the heroic struggle then in progress-Jefferson, Fayette, and Lincoln. Boonesborough now found itself in the most populous of the new counties, Lincoln, and Daniel Boone became the lieutenant- colonel of the county in which he then resided, Fayette.1
The Indians now gave the people a rest, but the winter that followed was as terrible as the savages. It commenced unusually soon with a succession of snow- storms, followed by the coldest weather the settlers had ever experienced. The snow that banked the ground was locked in ice, the trees seemed made of marble and glass. The streams were solid. The Kentucky River was lost in snow, and the transformed hills opposite the fort were as white, as desolate, and as beautiful as the towering ice-packs of the Polar Sea. The very firewood had to be chopped out of encircling ice, and every thing that wild animals could eat was hidden in snow and shut in by ice. And this desperate and apparently intermin- able weather continued without a thaw until the spring of 1781, and with all the suffering that such an experi- ence comprehends. Not only did forest animals freeze
I Calendar Virginia State Papers.
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to death, but cattle and hogs about the station, and many that did not die in that way perished of starvation. The settlers did manage with great exertions and misery to keep from freezing, but food was so scarce that they barely succeeded in keeping life in their bodies, for the corn gave out, and for weeks they had to exist on wild game, as in 1776, except that now it was so wretchedly poor as to be almost useless. The name given this unprecedented season, "The Hard Winter,": but mildly expresses the terrors of it.
Miserable, however, as were the cooped-up settlers during this memorable time, they did not forget to sympa- thize with the distant Continentals, and they especially exulted in the signal success at King's Mountain of their old friends and neighbors of Watauga and the Holston. Time and again at night, as they huddled close to their cabin fires, did the subject come up, and it was only supplanted at last by the news of the Battle of the Cowpens, which did not reach them until nearly a month after that British defeat.
I Authors differ as to the date of "The Hard Winter," some, with apparent correctness, placing it the season before this. We follow Boone mainly because he seems to have been the only authority actually in Ken- tucky at the time who gave any thing like contemporary testimony about it. If The Hard Winter occurred the preceding season, one is puzzled to account for the evident abundance of corn, at Boonesborough at least, in March, 1780.
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The patriots of the backwoods were now more hope- ful of their country, and they were encouraged both by the auspicious opening of the spring of 1781 and the influx of immigrants that distinguished it; but the gloom of Indian prospect brightened not at all, for savage war bands, generally small, but occasionally important, were striking somewhere in Kentucky in 1781 from the time they attacked McAfee's Station in May until winter came again. Boonesborough barely escaped a visit about the middle of September from probably the strongest and certainly the most successful of these parties, comprising Hurons and Miamis, who, under the noted Brant, had just defeated Floyd at Long Run.' The Indians were urged by Alexander McKee, who accompanied them, to march against the hated fort "on the Kentuck," but the fickle and elated savages were so anxious to celebrate their victories that they scattered at once to their vil- lages. Boonesborough was unassailed this time in force, but few indeed were the weeks that followed when minor tragedies did not bring sorrow to some dweller within her gates or to some family within sound of her rifles. All through this fall, and especially at the gathering in of the crops, the avenging or marauding Indian was at
' Haldimand manuscripts. Letters of McKee and Thompson of Sep- tember, 1781.
BOONESBOROUGH FERRY, ESTABLISHED IN 1779.
(As it now appears.)
Fort Site, hidden by fehuge, on the left; Roadway leading toward it; and Ridge in the background that faced the Fort.
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his deadly work, and the very Christmas-tide was ush- ered in with mortal combats and savage murders, for it was in December that some of the Pennsylvanians, who had located so close to Boonesborough,' were ambus- caded, and that the heroic Mrs. Duree took the place of her fallen husband and defended both the living and the dead of her desolated cabin. Absorbed utterly in the desperate struggle for the possession of a home and for life itself, the Kentucky pioneer had but little time to give to the preservation of the deeds of daring and of blood that were almost commonplace in their perpetual occurrence, and this is especially true of the year 1781. There is no record extant that conveys any adequate idea of the trials and the tragedies of that eventful sea- son. Even the surrender of Cornwallis, which made the whole Atlantic seaboard exult in the certainty of peace, seemed only to incite the British and the savages of the Northwest to still greater exertions to sweep the "rebels" of the frontier from the face of the earth, and the spring of 1782 found the Kentucky settlers penned up as closely as ever in their cramped, crowded, and monotonous forts.
On the 19th of March of this year all Boonesborough was stirred up at the sight of two or three logs, united 1 At White Oak Station, about a mile away.
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in the crudest way, drifting down the Kentucky and past the station. To the inexperienced the incident was too trifling for a second thought, but to the veteran woods- man the little raft betrayed the presence of Indians, from whom it had accidentally slipped away as they were cross- ing the river. It was, in fact, the first announcement of that incursion of Wyandots which resulted in Estill's defeat, which was probably the most equal, the most stubbornly contested, and the most desperate of the minor engagements of pioneer Kentucky.' And there was more grief at Boonesborough and at every station in the region about it.
The season of 1782 had opened, as it was to close, in blood. All during the planting-time the fields were haunted by straggling Indians, and such crops as were raised were made while contending both with them and with a drouth that extended from the last of April until late in July. But none of these things kept back the land-hungry immigrants, who came on in rapidly increas- ing numbers. The savages were now not only more seriously alarmed than ever, but they were incited with redoubled energy by the despairing British, who sought at once to regain their lost advantages and thus, if not already too late, to prevent the vast and magnificent
" Marshall's Reports, page 304, and Cists' Miscellany for 1845.
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domain of the West from passing, by a pending treaty, ' forever from the British Crown. Once more a formida- ble force of Indians and Canadians was called together, and in August, under the leadership of Girty and Cald- well, they swarmed across the Ohio in a last, supreme effort to destroy the Kentucky forts.2 Aiming first at the capture of the two principal ones on the "frontier," Bryan's Station and Lexington, by strategy they sought to draw away their garrisons to the south side of the Kentucky River through demonstrations of decoy parties sent in advance of the main body to the neighborhood of Boonesborough.
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