USA > Mississippi > The pioneers, preachers and people of the Mississippi Valley > Part 13
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and that season ate the first corn raised by a white man in the " Dark and Bloody Ground."
Kenton now passed two or three years in a series of hunting and fighting adventures, almost mono- tonous for daring, and the extremest and most in- cessant peril from the savages, who haunted every covert of the beloved land into which the whites were crowding with increased rapidity. In the spring of 1777, while he was residing at Harrods- burg, he was sent out with a small party, and driven back by the Indians. Sending his men into the station, he went off alone to warn the garrison of Boonesborough ; delayed entering until dark, to avoid the ambushes which the Indians frequently laid to shoot any persons coming or going; and on his en- trance found the garrison bringing home the corpses of two men who had ignorantly or carelessly violated this prudent rule, and would have entered in day- light on the path he had followed.
The Indians were now becoming more and more enraged at the occupation of the beautiful land of Kentucky, and made incessant and furious incursions ito the settlements, closely besieging every station. Boonesborough was thus assaulted three times.
Gen. George Rogers Clark, then a major, was in chief command of the settlements ; and with his con- currence six spies were appointed as a scouting force to watch the Indian frontier, two for each of the
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three chief stations, Boonesborough, Harrodsburg, and Logansport. Of these Kenton was chosen from Boonesborough, by Boone himself. These fearless and wily woodsmen for a whole year gave timely notice of every attack, going out by twos, each party in its week; except once. Kenton and two more were about going out of Boonesborough to hunt, when two men at work outside the fort were fired at by Indians, and fled unhurt toward the fort. One escaped, but a bold warrior tomahawked the other within seventy yards of the fort, and was scalping him when Kenton shot him, and with his two com- panions sallied out upon the others of the savage party. Boone himself also quickly came out with ten men to support the attack. Kenton, turning round, saw an Indian aiming at Boone's men, and taking a quick aim, shot him. Boone now discovered that his company was cut off from the fort by a large force of Indians who had thrown themselves between. There was but one resource, a prompt attack. "Right about!" he cried, " fire ! charge !" and the little band sprang desperately at their red foes, whose first volley wounded seven of the four- teen, and breaking Boone's leg, brought him down. An Indian leaped on him, hatchet in hand, but the keen-eyed Kenton, cool as ice but quick as light- ning, shot him through the heart, lifted the old leader in his arms, and carried him into the fort.
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The rest all got in too, and after the gate was shut, Boone, a silent man, and much more chary of words and praises than a conqueror of crowns, sent for Kenton to give him his meed of praise for having saved his own life and killed three Indians without getting hurt himself; though the urgency of the case had prevented him from taking the sealp of any of them. This was the eulogy of the veteran Indian- fighter:
" Well, Sam, you have behaved yourself like a man, to-day ; indeed you are a fine fellow !"
Kenton continued in this little force of spies until June of the next year, when he accompanied Gen. Clarke's remarkable expedition against Kaskaskia and Vincennes ; and at his return, joined Boone, who was about marching against an Indian town on Point Creek, with nineteen men. He was in advance of the party when he heard loud laughter in the woods, and had barely time to "tree," when a pony approached, carrying two Indians, one facing the tail and the other the head, and in high spirits. Instantly firing, Kenton's bullet killed one and dangerously wound the other. Springing forth to sealp them, about forty savages attacked him, and he commenced dodging about among the trees, feeling exceedingly hurried and very unsafe until Boone's force came up, charged furiously, and drove the enemy. But having learned that a large war-party had gone out against
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his own station, Boone now turned short round, and hastened homeward. Kenton, and a fellow-woods- man named Montgomery, however, remained, lay within rifle shot of the Indian town two days, stole each a good horse, and rode into Boonesborough the day after the Indians, who had been besieging it, had disappeared.
A few weeks afterward they set off to steal more horses, taking one Clarke with them. They secured seven near Chillicothe, and got away ; the Indians, however, being close behind. Reaching the Ohio, the three men tried in vain to drive their prizes across the river, roughened under a high wind. After delaying, with the most astounding recklessness, for almost a day, waiting for a calm, they decided once to leave four of their beasts and ride home on the other three. While trying to catch them again (hav- ing changed their minds), the Indians came up, shot Montgomery and took Kenton prisoner-even then only in consequence of the very extremest folly on his part, in turning back to get a shot at them. Clarke alone, who fled as fast as possible, escaped.
The Indians, themselves most thoroughgoing of- fenders in the same line, professed the most violent indignation at Kenton's offence, and reproached him for a " hoss steal," beat him until they could not beat him longer, and then secured him for the night, flat on the ground, his legs stretched out and tied tight
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to two saplings, his arms lashed at length to a strong pole tied across his breast, and a stont thong, so tight as barely to permit him to breathe, strained back to a stake. He remained a captive eight months, ran the gauntlet eight times, was once nearly killed by a blow from an axe, and was three times tied to a stake to be burnt, being twice saved by the renegade Si. mon Girty, his early friend-who, in this, showed himself capable of the strongest attachment and the most energetic and disinterested efforts for another- and once by Logan, the Mingo chief, who induced a Canadian trader to buy him. His owner finally took him to Detroit, where he remained, laboring for small wages, until the summer of 1779.
Being in the flower of his youth-he was now twenty-four-an exceedingly handsome man, tall, straight and graceful, dignified and manly in deport- ment and speech, already famous for his bravery and skill in Indian warfare, with a soft and pleasant voice, and always a favorite with females, he was so fortu- nate as to excite a deep interest in the bosom of a Mrs. Harvey, wife of an English trader. Conceiving hopes of escape by her means, he intrusted her, after long doubt, and with great circumspection, with his scheme. After a little hesitation she consented to aid him, and procured and concealed for him and the two fellow-prisoners with whom he proposed to es- cape, provisions and ammunition. During a grand
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drunken frolic of the Indians, she also stole for them three good rifles, and on the 3d June, 1779, they set out, and reached Louisville after thirty-three days of great hardship.
After resting a little while, he went alone through the forest to visit Gen. Clark, at Vincennes ; then returned to Harrodsburg; and the next spring accom- panied Clark on his expedition against the Indian towns, commanding a company ; and, being now the best woodsman and forest spy in the western country, he was the principal guide to the expedition. During two years after the return of these troops, Kenton was occupied, as usual, in spying, hunting, or sur- veying; and in the autumn of 1782, after eleven years of exile and remorse for supposed murder, he learned at the same time that his father was yet alive, and that Veach was not dead, but living and well. Hith- erto, since his flight, he had always been known as Simon Butler; but now he gladly resumed his own name, and with the weight of shame, banishment and guilt removed from his mind, "felt like a new man."
In this same autumn, Kenton again commanded a company and acted as guide for the army on Clark's second expedition against the Indian towns. After his return, he made a clearing on one of the many traets of valuable land of which he had become the owner, and a year afterward, having raised a good crop of corn, returned home, visiting his friends, who
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had supposed him dead, and Mr. and Mrs. Veach, who received him without any remains of rancor for his ancient misdoings. He took his father with him on his return, but the old man died and was buried on the way.
During the subsequent years, Kenton, now at the head of a thriving frontier settlement and a large land- owner, led a company in two more expeditions into the Indian country, and in 1793, with a party, ambus- caded a troop of savages at their crossing-place on the Ohio, and, as they came up on their return, killed six and drove the rest away. This was the last in- cursion they ever made into Kentucky. The whites were now too strong for them, and, discouraged and beaten, they confined themselves within the territories north of the Ohio. All this time-that is, from about 1784 until the end of the century-Kenton was the foremost man on the Kentucky frontier. His landed property was large-he even gave away at one time one thousand acres of land, upon which was founded the town of Washington-and his noble and kindly character, as well as his preëminent skill and valor as a woodsman and forest soldier, rendered him be- loved and esteemed by all.
After the expedition of Wayne had given a final blow to the power of the Indians, and the infant com- monwealth of Kentucky was beginning to stride for- ward toward wealth and power with the long, rapid
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steps of the young giant States of the West, a sad scries of reverses, disgraceful to the State for which he had fought so bravely, overtook Kenton. True as steel, and confiding and unsuspicious to a degree al- most incredible and quite unknown except as the companion quality of such crystal honesty and child- like sincerity as his, and a rude and unlettered man withal, what should the heroic wanderer of the woods know of the details of legal formularies ? How could he, spending thirty years in incessant, exhausting perils and combats, exposed to a thousand deaths and to tortures unutterable, worse than death, in the long defence of the infant settlements of Kentucky-how could he dream that any one would rob him of the land he had bought with his blood-that the com- monwealth he had done so much to establish would suffer him to be beggared within her own limits by speculating knaves, engineering him out of his right- ful property by the shrewd villainies of laws mis- applied, and principles of justice perverted into in- struments of oppression ? But those who rushed so rapidly into Kentucky, after her borders were freed from the Indians, gave small heed to the men who had secured them peace. Kenton, like Boone and so many more of the pioneers of the forest, had igno- rantly omitted one and another form, or entry, or item of description, in the proceedings taken to secure the lands selected in so much peril, and de-
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served by such inexpressible hardships and toils. One kuave after another brought suit, founded on subse- quent and more formal proceedings, for clearing woodland or prairie. Kenton's estate was wrenched piece-meal from him ; his body was taken for debt, on covenants in the deeds to those very lands which he had substantially given away; and he was im- prisoned for a year on the very spot where he had planted the first corn raised by a white man in the north of Kentucky, and had afterward built his fron- tier station.
Reduced almost to beggary, he moved out of his ungrateful adopted State in 1802, and settled at Ur- bana, now no longer young, and with the cheerless prospect of an old age of penury among strangers. In 1805, he was chosen brigadier-general in the Ohio militia. Five years afterward, being at a camp- meeting, under the influence of the rude but effective preaching of a strong, simple-hearted man of God, he became convicted of sin, and would fain range himself within the church of God. With a natural reluctance to expose his spiritual moods and exercises to the observation of others, he requested a minister present to accompany him into the woods and pray with him, saying at the same time, " But don't make a noise about it !" The plain and sincere clergyman knelt down with the old frontiersman and wrestled with God in prayer for him ; restraining his fervor
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however, as required. And now the powerful ap- peals and sympathies of the wise, though homely, preacher, and the influences of Him that answereth prayer, worked mightily within the honest, simple soul of the old man; and in a great whirlwind of fears and terrors, and mingled joy and pain, in the new feelings and perceptions that break in upon his soul, he rises almost distracted and hastens back toward the crowded meeting, crying aloud in his trouble, and borne far beyond any regard to human criticism or human presence ; while the quaint old preacher, with that wonderful mingling of profound admonition and comicality, so strangely characteristic of his class, and so eminently effective upon their peculiar people, halloed after him, retorting his late request,-" Look here ; don't make a noise about it!" But Kenton found peace in believing, and became a sincere member of the Methodist church.
In 1813, when Shelby and the Kentucky volun- teers so bravely marched to the aid of Harrison, against the banded tribes of the Northwest, Kenton accompanied the army, and was present as a privi- leged member of Gov. Shelby's family, at the battle of the Thames, his last fight. Returning home, he lived on in obscure poverty, in his hut in the woods, until 1820, when he removed to near the head of Mad River, in Logan County; within sight of Wapatomika, where, forty-two years before, the In-
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dians had tied him to the stake to burn him to death.
In this distant spot he was still plagued with law- suits and executions in Kentucky ; and in 1824, being seventy years old, in rags, and on a wretched horse, he journeyed to Frankfort, to petition the State of Kentucky to release from forfeiture for taxes some poor tracts of mountain land still left to him. Rambling up and down the city, which had grown up where he had wandered in primeval woods, a spectacle to boys and a stranger to men, he was recognized by an old friend or acquaintance, well clothed and hospitably entertained. And soon, when the news went out that General Simon Kenton was in the town, the fame that such noble and ancient men get in their old age, as if they were dead, gathered many to see the renowned hunter and warrior of two generations back. They carried the old man to the capitol, placed him in the speaker's chair, and introduced him to a great multitude of men, after our wonderful American fashion which thus gratifies the curiosity of a multitude under the shallow pretence of doing homage to one. And the simple-hearted old man, believing in every word and every smile-and indeed, doubtless no small share of that inexpensive admiration was sincere enough as far as it went-was wondrously lifted up, and was afterward wont to say, that that was the proudest
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day of his life. His petition was granted, however, at once. Judge Burnet and Governor Vance, of Ohio, then in Congress, a little afterward also ob- tained for him a pension of twenty dollars a month, which preserved him for the rest of his life from extreme want. Living twelve years longer, loved and respected by all who knew him, quiet and ob- seure, Simon Kenton died in April, 1836-in fullness of years, for he was eighty-one.
I have ventured upon all this detail, and have followed the life of this famous old pioneer so far be- yond the period described by the title of this lecture, because that life is such a full and vivid picture- such a complete epitome and type-of a life whichi was led by so many of those who dwelt in the cabin homes of the wilderness in that wild and perilous period. Nor do my contracted limits suffice for more than a swift and shadowy outline of the story. The multiplied details of Kenton's life of hardships, enterprise, battle, peril and escape, would fill vol- umes. And the full history of all the startling dangers, the bold and wild exploits, the desperate escapes, the fearful miseries of those times, would make a library of strangest adventure.
11*
Lecture VI.
THE
CABIN HOMES
OF THE WILDERNESS
DURING THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.
CABIN HOMES OF THE WILDERNESS,
DURING THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.
THE wilderness hath a schooling all its own, and its tuition is not one destitute of profit or compensa- tion. I would not undervalue the worth of litera- ture, the acquisition of science, or the training im- parted in colleges. Perhaps few men have paid a higher price for these. And yet there is a majesty, a splendor, in a lonely forest, a boundless prairie, in the great primeval forms of nature while they are yet untainted and undesecrated by the play of human passions and human appetites, fresh as a virgin world from the hand of the Creator, which imparts to the human soul a grandeur and nobility of charac- ter rarely acquired in the pursuits of trade or com- merce, or in the common, fixed and plodding occupa- tions of every-day life. A peculiar muscularity is given to the form, a vigor to the step, a freshiness to the thought; the will is untrammelled, scarcely even limited by the thought of any impossibility ; self- reliance is developed to the very highest point ; an independence of action and of being that leans only on the Everlasting arms that are around and under-
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neath us all. Here, in the spring or early summer, when the grove perfumes the atmosphere, and loads it as with fragrance from on high-when the prairie stretches its illimitable ocean-like surface before the eye-when the tall and rustling grass is interspersed and interwoven with flowers of a thousand hues and a thousand aromas-here, where the buffalo roams at his own wild will, and the deer stalks proudly on, clad in his red summer garment-where the stately elk, with his spreading antlers, seems the monarch of the forest, and where the low growl of the bear is heard ever and anon, and at nightfall comes upon the breeze the howl of a pack of wolves from the far dis- tance-here, where man is surrounded by nature in her simplest, and sternest, and most inviting forms, does he cultivate to the very utmost all the vast self- supporting powers of humanity ; his gun, his own sagacity, an unerring and unblenching eye, an un- quivering muscle, his only supports this side of Providence. If he is wanting to himself in the wil- derness, he is lost indeed.
Such a wilderness as this was the boundless West at the commencement of our Revolution. Here was the great normal school for western character, and admirably were the pupils that came to receive the instruction of this university qualified to enter it. Men for the most part destitute of the culture of the schools, unblessed with the tuition of art, or science,
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or literature, accustomed to battle with the storm in the wild mountains and wilder woods of the western skirts of the colonies, trained in the fierce sports of the border, now rush like a tide down the western slopes of the Alleghany Mountains, to take possession of these illimitable and magnificent regions; to trans- fer them from the sway of barbarism and solitude, and transform them into busy and peopled haunts of living and working men. These new-comers were men strong of frame, compact and muscular, Hereu- lean of stature, of dauntless courage, of determina- tion incapable of discouragement or fear, carrying their lives in their hands, ready, if necessary, to crim- son the soil of that new world with their heart's blood. There is hardly a more striking commentary upon, or interpretation of, the pristine radical ele- ments of Anglo-Saxon character in the whole range of the records of our race, than is to be found in the history of its occupancy of Kentucky and the North- western Territory.
These men thus came to take possession just at the period when the Revolutionary struggle was begin- ning; when the whole firmament of the political sky of America was overcast and darkened by lowering and thunderous clouds; when the might of the mo- ther country was lifting itself in all its majesty to chastise the rebellious colonies; when white men in red coats, with epaulettes upon their shoulders and
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commissions from the third George in their pockets -men who claimed and acknowledged the ties of human kindred with the colonists upon this side the water-were absolutely suborning the red savages of the West to deeds of unparalleled cruelty and blood- thirstiness; when these servants of the third George actually set a price upon the scalps of their bre- thren, and not only this, but upon the scalps of women and children of Anglo-Saxon blood. Col. Hamilton, commandant at Detroit, acting, as he af- firmed, under the authority, the advice and consent, of the government of England, absolutely offered a price for the scalps of women and children, torn from their bleeding skulls by the ruthless savages of the border. Thenceforth and forever, as long as that man's name finds a place in history, let him be called by the homely but terrible name given him by the heroic General Clark, who took him prisoner at Vin- cennes, "Hamilton the hair-buyer."
And now, when to the dangers of the wild, dark woods, the perils of those lurking savages, to whom the perpetration of the most treacherous murders, and of the most horrible cruelties, is as the breath of their nostrils, are added the intensifications and re- inforcements of that gloomy time; when the wild invading fury of the red men, already savage and devastating enough, was stimulated by these inhuman promises of gain, and by the prospect of immediato
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and powerful foreign aid; when the forces of Eng- land were mustering all along the borders of the lakes ; when the British commanders and agents were subsidizing, and enrolling and equipping, the half- savage Canadians of Montreal and Detroit, and the savages of so many boundless forests from Niagara to distant Chicago, from the headwaters of the Sus- quehanna and the great Council House of Onondaga to the distant shores of Huron and Superior; when this furious and redoubled tide of desolation and slaughter was gathering, to be poured out upon these infant and seemingly helpless settlements of the West, were not these pioneers, who, daring to take their lives in their hands-yea, and the lives of their wives and young children-and trusting in nothing besides their God, except their woodcraft and their rifles, plunged far beyond the mountain boundaries of civilization into that blood-stained borderland ; and who maintained and protected the infant settlements so long, so well, against such overwhelming and des- perate odds-were not these of heroic mold, of even gigantic resolution and valor, and most justly entitled to our admiration and our love ?
Such were Boone, Kenton, Logan, Harrod, Callo- way, McGary, Todd, and many more than I can even name here ; all the leading settlers of Kentucky. In the preceding lecture were presented sketches of one or two lives among them, in the account of which I
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somewhat transgressed the limits of the period strictly under consideration, but no further than was neces- sary to complete the picture of the men, which is that of the times. The present lecture is in its nature necessarily a continuation of that ; and in it I shall aim to afford such glimpses of some of the more im- portant of the varied movements and adventures which took place in the great valley during the Revo- lution, as may enable the student to gain a broad and connected view of the complexion and progress of this stirring chapter in our history.
Perhaps almost enough has already been said for my purpose, so far as regards the territory of Ken- tucky. But it will not be inappropriate to afford the means of a still fuller apprehension of the perils and the bravery of the times, by a brief account of some of its innumerable adventures.
In the year 1776 there were but about one hun dred fighting men in Kentucky. Of these from thirty to fifty were usually in garrison at Boonesborough, or absent on expeditions thence.
Let me delay a moment to describe this famous old fort, whose site is now occupied by an obscure and decaying village of the same name. Boonesborough was the first fort built in Kentucky, and was estab- lished by Daniel Boone in 1775. It stood in a small cleared space on the bank of the Kentucky River ; and occupied a parallelogram about two hundred
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