USA > Kentucky > Madison County > Boonesborough > Boonesborough; its founding, pioneer struggles, Indian experiences, Transylvania days, and revolutionary annals; > Part 9
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It was at this time that Hoy's Station,3 only a few miles south of Boonesborough, was threatened, and the Indians, both in coming and going, left bloody tracks. Two at least of their victims were identified with Boones- borough. One was Captain William Buchanan,4 killed while with Holder's men in pursuit of one of the decoy bands, and the other was Colonel Nathaniel Hart, way-
" The Treaty of Paris. England would have welcomed any pretext during the consideration of this much-delayed instrument to prevent the absolute cession to the United States of the territory conquered by Clark. Influences were at work in Paris at this very time to that end.
2 The writer has given an account of this invasion in his "Story of Bryan's Station."
3 Located close to the present village of Foxtown, Madison County, Kentucky.
4 Judge William Chenault.
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laid in the vicinity of White Oak Station while out hunting for his horse, unconscious of the presence of an enemy. The savages in an attempt to take him prisoner broke his thigh, and finding that it would be impossible on that account to take him along with them they shot the helpless sufferer through the heart with a rifle that was placed so close to his breast that the powder burned his skin. In addition to this he was tomahawked and scalped, and in the turmoil of the incursion it was two days before his poor mutilated body was found.'
Holder was defeated, and another and an apparently serious demonstration was made against Hoy's Station. Boone hurried across the river to Boonesborough to assume command of the riflemen ordered to the relief of the threatened post ; William Ellis? was just about to join him with mounted men that had assembled at Boone's Station ; the Lexington garrison was well on its way to the Ken- tucky River, and the ruse of the Indian leaders was almost a success when their real object was discovered, and soon the entire fighting force of all the settlements was on the march to the relief of Bryan's Station. Boone led off a company that had gathered at Boonesborough. It was
1 Jesse Benton's letter of December 4, 1782, to Thomas Hart.
2 Ellis' Station was convenient to Boone's, being located near the present Pine Grove. A few hours after this, Captain Ellis led the cavalry charge at Bryan's Station.
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the last time that "the knight errant of the wood" sal- lied forth with men at arms from the pioneer castle he had done so much to render famous. During the next few days the only defenders of Boonesborough were one or two of its oldest men, the women and the children, and, with the exception of a little cooking, domestic employ- ments ceased. Details of women, rifle in hand, did guard duty day and night, and during that memorable period none of the inmates of the stockade ever slept except as they had watched, fully clothed and ready for any emergency. The anxious days only ended in dark- ness, for then came the crowning disaster of that year of pioneer defeats, the Battle of the Blue Licks, the last battle of the American Revolution,1 when Boonesborough, with all Kentucky, was overwhelmed with grief. And the consternation was as great as the grief, for it was feared that the savages "would bring another campaign into the country," and that, said Boone in an appealing letter to the Governor of Virginia, written at Boone's Sta-
1 Collins, by a singular error, places Loughry's defeat after the Battle of the Blue Licks; but it has been plainly shown to have occurred on the 24th of August, 1781 (see Anderson's Diary in Indiana H. S., Pamphlet No. 4), and the fight at Combahee Ferry, South Carolina, which took place August 27, 1782, General Greene himself called "a paltry little skirmish." Whatever may be said as to " the last blood shed in the field," the fact is evident that the engagement at the Blue Licks on the 19th of August, 1782, was the last battle of the Revolution.
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tion a few days after the defeat, "would break up these settlements." Never since the spring of 1775 had the pioneers come so near to abandoning Kentucky. They were in the depths of despair until electrified by a bugle- call from the indomitable Clark to invade the enemy's country. Two months were devoted to careful prepara- tions and to the march, and when at last, on the 10th of November, they descended upon the haunts of the Miamis, the astonished savages fled without a fight ; their towns were burned to ashes, all their corn and winter stores were utterly destroyed, and the pioneers became their confident and defiant selves again.
This blow and the progress of negotiations at Paris brought a quiet winter to the harassed frontier. But early in the spring of 1783, in spite of the assurances of peace, minor Indian outrages began again and contin- ued, and among them, and of especial interest to Boones- borough, were the killing of its former resident, John Floyd,' and the attempted capture of Boone, but no
" Colonel Floyd had acted as Surveyor for the Transylvania Company. He was killed on the 12th of April, 1783, a short distance from his station on Beargrass. The settlements were not without their own superstitions at that time, for, according to Shane's pioneer notes, Floyd's wife did not want him to leave home, because the day before he started "a bird flew round his head seven times and flew off in the very direction he had to go, and that night a chunk of fire popped out and went by Samuel Aikin's gate." She said that if a personal enemy did not kill him the Indians would.
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serious expedition of the savages into Kentucky was ever again attempted. Boone's adventure was long recounted at his old stamping-ground. It seems the Shawanese still sighed for the companionship of their adopted brother, and four of them undertook to bring him back to his former Indian home. They haunted Boone's Station and caught him at last outside of it at work, says Peck, in his log tobacco barn. Boone submitted so good-naturedly that his delighted red kinfolks allowed him to go up into the loft of the barn, as he requested, "to get some fine tobacco to carry along." In a twinkling he sprang down upon them with an armful of dry tobacco that he scat- tered as he fell, and before the blinded and sputtering savages could recover themselves he was safe within his stockade. 1
The preliminary articles of the Treaty of Paris had been signed at the beginning of the year, but it took two months for the news to creep to America, and then nearly another month for it to penetrate the Western wilderness. In the meanwhile Virginia's three terribly tried frontier counties had been erected into a separate district, per-
1 Boone's Station, near what is now Athens, was still the home of Boone in 1784, when he related the story of his life to Filson, and con- tinued to be his home until he left the State, ten or twelve years thereafter.
" The preliminary treaty was signed January 20, 1783; a cessation of hostilities was formally declared by Congress the 19th of the following April, and the final, definitive treaty was signed the 3d of the succeeding September.
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petuating the ancient Indian name Kentucky, and an unprecedented flood of hopeful settlers was pouring into the country. In April the long-looked-for tidings of the signing of the treaty reached Kentucky, and when at Boonesborough a mounted messenger rode into the stockade with the word " Peace" displayed upon his coonskin cap the welkin rang with the sounds of rejoicing, with hurrahs for "Washington and the Continental Congress," and with the songs of the Sons of Liberty, and far into the night a great bonfire blazed and volley after volley rang out from horse-pistols and flint-lock rifles. But the peace so ardently celebrated was far from coming at once in its fulness to the District of Kentucky as it came to the seaboard States, for the British posts located in the great Northwest, and whose surrender had been guaranteed, were long withheld and as long exerted a baleful influence upon the former savage allies of the Crown. But in spite of every obstacle the "wilderness blossomed as the rose," and henceforth from that day of rejoicing in April, 1783, the ponderous gates of the battle - scarred fort of Boones- borough were closed no more. Soon the great pickets between the cabins gave way to progress ; streets were opened, log houses increased, and the one-time stockaded little capital of the Colony of Transylvania became an open town.
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The War of the Revolution was over, and with it ended the tragic and romantic part of the story of Boones- borough that will be forever identified with the history of that struggle, and is of itself almost a history of the permanent settlement of Kentucky.
In 1792, when Kentucky was admitted into the Union, Boonesborough was one of the largest towns in the State, ' was conspicuous for its shipments of the great tobacco crops2 that were produced in the region surrounding it, and contested for the location there of the capital of the new Commonwealth. But it was soon left behind in the march of population and events. By 1810 it had declined to an obscure hamlet ; a little later on even its decreasing cabins had disappeared, the town site had become only a lonely part of a river farm, and Boonesborough was
" Even in 1789, according to a report on "The Colony of Kentucky," made to Lord Dorchester at Quebec, a report slightly mixed in its topog- raphy, the statement was made that " Boonsburg, upon Red River, com- prehends upwards of a hundred and twenty houses." (See volume Canadian Archives published in 1890.)
2 The cultivation of tobacco, which began almost with the permanent settlement of Kentucky, was wonderfully increased when the Revolution ended, and had much to do with the close and wholesale clearing away of the timber in certain sections of the State. One flood in the Kentucky, that of 1817, carried off more than three hundred thousand dollars' worth of the tobacco of the counties of Madison, Clark, and Jessamine that was warehoused on the river banks.
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reckoned among the towns of Kentucky that once had been. I
One and only one institution survives that was estab- lished by the settlers of the place, and that figured familiarly in their lives. It is the picturesque old ferry, the oldest in Kentucky, and consecrated by the blood of its founders. The ferryboat is fashioned still exactly like its quaint and simple predecessors of the Revolution, and is polled across the river yet in the same primitive style as in the fighting days of Boone. No remnant of the battle-scared old fort remains. For nearly a century the plow has been busy where it stood, and year after year the tall corn has rustled and ripened above its site. Elevated as the fort ground is, it has not always, it is said, escaped the obliterating effects of great overflows of the Kentucky River,2 and now the graves of such of the founders and defenders of the old stronghold as were buried within or near its wooden walls have long been leveled and lost to sight. The famous "Hollow," owing
" Among the extinct or projected towns of Kentucky may be mentioned Leestown, a mile below Frankfort ; Saltsburg, at Bullitt's Lick ; Transyl- vania, at the mouth of Harrod's Creek ; Port William, merged into Carrollton; Granville, named for the North Carolina county, and Lystra. Another was " Ohiopiomingo," whose title was to honor a beautiful river and a noble Indian ; but the name, though musical, ingenious, and magnificent, was about all there ever was of the town.
2 There was a great overflow of the river in the spring of 1894, and the water then is said to have risen twenty-five feet in Sycamore Hollow.
THE FAMOUS OLD SYCAMORE.
The only Surviving Witness of the Rise and Fall of Booneshore nah (As it appeared in the Autumn of 1900.)
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to successive deposits from river floods,' is not nearly so deep as it was in the days of the pioneers, and, long undisturbed, it is thick with sycamores that have sprung up since the settlement died out, and once again the ancient haunt of the buffalo and the elk is a romantic and luxuriant wild. The mighty elm, whose majestic dome sheltered the first legislature and the first worship- ing assembly of a wilderness empire, and which witnessed one of the strangest episodes of the American Revolution, fell under the axe in 1828, and fell in all its stateliness and splendor. It was the most unique and precious his- torical monument in the whole domain of Kentucky, and was invested with a charm that the loftiest sculptured column could not possess. But hedged about and obscured as it has been by deposits from river floods, the sulphur water? is there around which the wild animals of the wilderness gathered for unnumbered generations ; the Lick
" The descriptions here given were written in November, 1900, when the writer made his last visit to Boonesborough, at which time also most of the views of its scenery and historic sites included in this volume were secured.
2 Owing to the partial filling of the hollow, as already mentioned, the sulphur spring had to be surrounded by a wall, and, in time, it virtually became a well, in which shape it still exists. Many years ago an old musket barrel, unearthed on the place and a relic of the days of Indian investments, was fitted into this spring as a drinking tube, says Mr. H. S. Halley, whose boyhood was spent at Boonesborough, and to whom the writer is indebted for facts and courtesies.
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Spring still exists which refreshed alike the Indian and the pioneer, and near it stands the last of the great sycamores' that were there when the white men first invaded the vast solitude in which they grew. Its hoary old trunk, hollowed by time, decay, and the leaden storm of a Revolutionary conflict, is now a mere shell, within which four or five men could stand. It is the one soli- tary living thing still at Boonesborough that has felt the familiar touch of Boone and Henderson and Kenton ; that stood while the vanished fort was standing ; that partici- pated in the remarkable siege of 1778, and that has sur- vived the throngs of sturdy pioneers and painted savages that have gone the way of all the earth. An age has passed since Boonesborough echoed with the appalling war-cry of the Indian and the crack of the settlers' flintlock, and few sounds disturb it now but the dying clatter of railway trains that pass it by in the distance, the sighing of the wind as it bends the tall tops of a thousand sycamores, and the noises of a crossing at the ferry which come up indistinctly from the deep-down beautiful river, which once knew no other traveler but the red man and no other craft but his bark canoe. The whole place, upland
' Of the three great sycamores that graced this spot a century and a quarter ago, one fell in 1873 and another in 1885. Both might have been preserved by timely efforts of the Commonwealth.
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and hollow, has all the sadness of a deserted village, 1 the melancholy charm of lonely nature, and the elo- quence of an historic past. It thrills the soul with a sug- gestion of that untouched wilderness that was as sublime as the ocean, of a hunting-ground that has never been surpassed, of that quickly shattered dream of Colonial wealth and feudal power, and of the heroic men and the heroic women who, unaided and forgotten, laid the foun- dation of a free and independent State. Boonesborough clusters thick with memories of that solitary log fort that was pelted with lead, blackened by fire, and stained with blood. It is rich with the romance of the Revolution and the romance of Indian warfare. It is hallowed by the sufferings of her settlers. It is consecrated by the ashes of her dead. It is ground immortalized that
" Boonesborough, or, strictly speaking, the site of it, would now be described as being in Madison County, Kentucky, and located immediately on the south bank of the Kentucky River and between it and the close- by Richmond and Winchester turnpike. It is about two miles from the town of Ford, which is on the opposite side of the river in Clark County and on the Louisville & Nashville Railroad, and the site of the fort is reached from that place by a picturesque country road which leads to the historic river, which is crossed at a ferry so close to the old settlement that it may itself be called a part of it. Ford is only a short ride by rail from Richmond, Winchester, and Lexington, Ky. Boonesborough is by turnpike twelve miles from Richmond, nine miles from Winchester, and about twenty miles from Lexington. It is about sixty miles by land from the mouth of the Kentucky River, and about one hundred and thirty miles from it by water.
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should be owned, honored, and eternally cherished by the Commonwealth ' it cradled.
" The writer would respectfully suggest that Boonesborough could be strikingly and most appropriately marked if the work were done in accord- ance with the eternal fitness of things. A log fort, stockade and all, could be built almost exactly similar to that of Boone and Henderson, as the plan of their station still exists. Such a realistic reminder of the life, the times, and the heroism of the Kentucky pioneers would, if suit- ably cared for, last for generations. In the center of this enclosure, suitably inscribed, could be a giant boulder from the bed of the Ken- tucky or from the Rockcastle River, an object which the settlers them- selves no doubt often saw, which was personally associated with them, and which would be virtually indestructible. A like great rock could mark the site of the famous elm in the famous hollow, and it would be about the only thing that could withstand the river floods. It strikes the writer that memorials of this kind would require but little attention, could be but little injured by relic hunters, and would be in harmony with the rugged virtues of the settlers and defenders of Boonesborough and with the solitude, the natural features, and the historic associations of the spot they immortalized. Of course these suggestions are based on the assump- tion that the ground would be the property either of the State or of some patriotic or memorial association.
AUTHOR'S
APPENDIX
NOTES, DATA,
AND
HISTORICAL DOCUMENTS
RELATING TO THE
SUBJECT OF THIS VOLUME
CONTENTS OF APPENDIX.
PAGE
A-The Name " Kentucky "
143
B-Boone Before 1775 145
C-Boone's First Attempt to Colonize Kentucky
146
D-Proclamation of Governor Martin of North Carolina
147
E-The Cherokee Deed to Henderson and Company
151
F-Deposition of Charles Robertson 158
G-Felix Walker's Narrative. 161
H-Boone's Letter of April 1, 1775
168
I-Henderson's Journal.
169
J-Proclamation of Lord Dunmore.
181
K-Extract from Henderson's Letter written en route to Kentucky. . 183
L-Henderson's Letter from Boonesborough, June 12, 1775 184
M-Letter to Patrick Henry from Henderson and Company 194 N-Journal of House of Delegates of Transylvania Colony 196
O-Proceedings of the Transylvania Proprietors
212
P-Silas Deane's Letter to James Hogg . 219
Q-Hogg's Report of His Embassy to the Continental Congress 224 R-Reply of John Williams, Agent, to the Harrodsburg Remonstrance 230 S-Williams' Report of January, 1776, on Transylvania Affairs 232
T-Survey Warrant of Henderson and Company 240
U-Petition of Transylvanians to Virginia Convention 241
V-Petition of Committee of West Fincastle.
244
W-Proclamation of Transylvania Company, June, 1776
248
X-Capture of the Girls in July, 1776 - Extract from Floyd's Letter 249 Y-The Bowman Letter on the Last Siege of Boonesborough 251
Z-The Transylvania Purchase Declared Void
253
I-Virginia's Land Grant to Henderson and Company 254
II-Roll of Holder's Company for June, 1779 255 III-Act Establishing Town of Boonesborough 256
IV-Memorial of the Transylvania Company to Congress in 1795
257
AUTHOR'S APPENDIX.
A
THE NAME "KENTUCKY."
Both the country and the river that now bear the beautiful name "Kentucky " were called so by the Indians ages before the coming of their white destroyers. The Indians also called the river "Chenoca," a word which still distinguishes a mountain spur in Bell County, Kentucky, but the name they used by far the most was Kentucky. In coming into use among the whites early in the eighteenth century the word varied as to form and pronunciation according to the user's knowledge of the Indian tongue. John Salling, who was a prisoner among the Cherokees for some years before 1736, and who must have been somewhat familiar with their language, gives the name as we now have it, when he says they took him "to the salt licks of Kentucky."1 Alexander Maginty, who had also been held by the Indians, deposed in 1753 that they captured him "on the south bank of the Cantucky,"2 and Colonel George Croghan (not the Major Croghan of Fort Stephenson ), who was for so many years British Agent among the Six Nations and an authority in savage matters, speaks in his journal3 of 1765 of "the River Kentucky." Doctor Thomas Walker ( 1749) ignores the Indian name, if he knew it.
I Withers' Border Warfare.
2 Made in Philadelphia. Howe.
3 Published in The American Journal of Geology and N. S. for Decem- ber, 1831.
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Christopher Gist ( 1751 ) gives it in a corrupted form as " Cutta- way," and Lewis Evans ( 1755), who only caught the name from traders, put it down on his map as "Cuttawa." Later on, after many vicissitudes among the whites as to spelling and pronuncia- tion, the name came into permanent use as the Indians themselves pronounced it, "Kentucky."
Authors differ as to the meaning of the name. According to Darlington, in Archives Americana, it is a Mohawk word signify- ing "among the meadows." Johnson, in "Indian Tribes of Ohio," claims it is Shawanese, meaning "at the head of a river," and others give it still different definitions. Probably the earliest writer to give its meaning as "The Dark and Bloody Ground " was Filson ( 1784), who says the country was so denominated by the Indians when Findlay traveled through it about 1767. This state- ment was adopted by succeeding historians and came into use, though Filson gave no authority for it, and there is nothing extant that this writer knows of to sustain it -certainly nothing from the Indians themselves. There is a popular impression that this phrase, "The Dark and Bloody Ground," was used as the mean- ing of the word Kentucky by the Cherokees at the treaty of Watauga in 1775, but that is a mistake. On that occasion Drag- ging Canoe, who was strongly opposed to the treaty, said in that metaphorical style which distinguished his race, that there was a "dark cloud " over Kentucky,' meaning by that expression, as he himself explained, the hostility of the northern tribes to its occu- pancy by the whites. On the same occasion an Indian opposer of the treaty, hoping to arouse the superstitious fears of the whites, said that the land desired by Henderson and Company was a "bloody country,"2 but in neither case was a reference made to
I Deposition of Charles Robertson. See Appendix F.
2 Deposition of James Robertson, Volume I, Virginia State Papers.
Appendix 145
the meaning of the word " Kentucky." What this last expression did mean is not clear. Certain writers assume that it referred to the supposed bloody extermination of the Mound Builders, but on that theory the phrase would apply with even more force to Ohio and other States of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. One has as much authority, apparently, for calling it "The Meadow Land " as "The Dark and Bloody Ground."
B
DANIEL BOONE BEFORE 1775.
Some of the Watauga settlers had known Boone before this spring of 1775, for they had come themselves from the Yadkin Valley, to which his father had emigrated from Pennsylvania in 1753, when Daniel was nineteen and already an adventurous hunter. As early as 1760 he had crossed the Alleghanies and begun to explore the Watauga region, and in 1769 he had passed the Cumberland barrier and was hunting up and down the Kentucky River. He had long been familiar with the lonely country west of the Blue Ridge when the Regulators of North Carolina were defeated, and had guided some of those victims of royal oppression over the mountains when they fled to the obscurity and freedom of the Watauga wilderness. In 1773 he had been frustrated in his attempt to plant in Kentucky a colony of which his family was a part (see Appendix C), and the next year, while waiting for another chance to settle there, had been called into service in Dunmore's War, from which he had returned but a few months before this spring of 1775 more determined than ever to carry out his Kentucky project.
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C
BOONE'S FIRST ATTEMPT TO COLONIZE KENTUCKY (1773) BARRED AT WALLEN'S GAP.
(Statement of M. B. Wood.' See Footnote on page 38.)
About the first of March, 1773, Daniel Boone started from North Carolina with his first colony for Kentucky. He crossed Clinch River at the old Neil ford, and went up the Devil's Race Path and crossed Powell Mountain near the head of Wallen Creek. On this trip there were with Boone eighteen men, besides women and children. They went down Wallen Creek to "the gap," where it breaks through Wallen Ridge. Just as the immigrants were entering the gap they were attacked by twenty-seven Indians, and at their first fire Boone's oldest son was killed, and there they buried him. Boone fired and killed an Indian, and before the savages could carry their comrade away Boone had reloaded his gun and wounded another. The Indians then fell back. Boone had intended to go through the gap and camp in the level country beyond, but it was late in the evening and he selected his camping-ground in the gap. There was a dry hollow which led up into a gorge of the ridge, and in the wet season the water running down this hollow had washed the dirt from under the roots of a beech tree, forming a fair shelter from the winds. Here Boone put the women and children, and posted sentinels all around his camp. These dispo- sitions being made, with a few of his men he followed the Indians some distance in their retreat down the creek, but night coming on they returned to their camp.
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