men, who seem to have been out on a survey, were resting and refreshing themselves at a large spring, some three miles below Harrodstown, when they were ambushed and fired on by Indians. Jared Cowan was killed, while Jacob Sandusky and a comrade, believing that the whole command had been surprised, made their way to the falls. Descending the Ohio and Mississippi rivers in a bark canoe, they returned to Philadelphia by sea, and thence home. A fourth man of the party got back to camp with the intelligence of the attack. Captain Harrod, at the head of a company, went down and buried Cowan, and secured his papers. 1 About the same period, Douglas, who had returned to Kentucky with his men, was engaged surveying lands on Elkhorn, Hickman, and Jessamine creeks, on the opposite side of Kentucky river. Also, John Floyd and Hancock Taylor led survey parties, locating lands by virtue of military warrants, in Woodford and Fayette counties, and along the Ohio river to the falls. In the latter part of July, Hancock Taylor, whose brother Richard was the father of President Zachary Taylor, while surveying near the mouth of Kentucky river, was shot and seriously wounded by the Indians. 2 He died a few days after, while being borne back on the return to Virginia, and was buried two miles south of the present site of Richmond. Thus early, amid the opening incidents of pioneer days, was offered up to the atrocious spirit of savage warfare one of the noblest, most enterprising, and promising men of the heroic period that gave germ and birth to transmontane civilization. He was an honored member of a distinguished family that, from its numerous branches, has given to both Virginia and Kentucky many worthy citizens, who have reflected honor upon their generation in varied responsible callings His memory deserves the tribute of our praise, though his dawning reputation and his chosen mission found a tragic end, almost at their inception. In the drift of events which have made up the narrative of history for 1774, a storm-cloud had gathered, whose ominous threatenings aroused the colonial government of Virginia to a sense of impending danger, and whose fury was destined to be spent on the border settlements in the Ohio valley. The Miami tribes of Indians, on the north side of the river, watched with angry jealousy the continued intrusion and usurpation by the whites of their favorite hunting-grounds. This passionate feeling was warmed into a spirit. of violent resistance by the irritating remembrance that they had been ignored in the treaty of Stanwix, under the demands of the Six Nations, and that both their tribal dignity and rights had been humiliated; and that, so far, the white party to the treaty had failed to appease with the gratuities which had been promised and were expected. Some massacres of peaceful Indians on the upper Ohio were reported, and this served the pretext of preparation for open hostilities. Around the powerful Shawanees, as the central figure, and under the principal lead of the great chief, Cornstalk, a north-western Collins, Vol. II., p. 518. 2 Marshall, p. 138; Collins, Vol. II., p. 238. BOONE'S JOURNEY OF WARNING. 31 confederation was formed, and fifteen hundred warriors, painted and armed for war, rendezvoused at the towns on the Scioto. The recent individual massacres in Kentucky and elsewhere were but the isolated raindrops that precede the emptying of overhanging clouds. 1Amid the preparatory measures for inevitable hostilities, Governor Dunmore called upon Daniel Boone, whose fame as a frontiersman and scout was everywhere known, to undertake a journey through the wilderness, and, with warning of the dangers at hand, recall all hunters and survey parties from Kentucky. Boone selected Michael Stoner for his companion in this hazardous service. The latter was already trained in the arts and experience of backwoods life. Isaac Lindsay, with four others from South Carolina, made record of a visit to Kentucky in 1767, and following the waters of Cumberland to the mouth of Stone river, in Tennessee, there met Stoner and James Harrod, who had come down the Ohio from Fort Pitt, and reached that point, on a long hunt. From that time, Stoner seems to have been an active, though an unobtrusive, participant in the adventures and perils of the pioneer scenes that make up the early history of Kentucky. Boone and Stoner set out in June, through the pathless wilderness, and with that energy and endurance which marked their careers, pushed on to the falls of Ohio. Visiting and warning the explorers in turn, they reached Harrodstown on their route at the time the town plat was being laid off. In this work Boone seems to have taken an interest, as a lot was assigned to him, adjoining one to Evan Hinton, and on these two lots a double cabin was built, which was known indiscriminately as "Boone's cabin," or "Hinton's cabin," until it was burned, with others, by the Indians, in March, 1777. Admonished by the raiding bands of savages, the murders of some of their comrades, and finally by the warning message of Lord Dunmore through Boone and Stoner, Harrod and Hite, with all their comrades, by the closing days of July were on their return march to Virginia. They buried their hopes and ambitions for a brief while, and left the untamed wilderness once again to the solitudes of centuries, which they had so lightly and so briefly disturbed with the crack of the rifle and the ring of the ax. Should they ever come again?-to conquer, to possess, to enjoy? The latter part of August, Boone and his returning friends reached Virginia, he and Stoner having made the trip, twice through the wilderness and twice over the mountains, of eight hundred miles, in sixty days. At this time, Governor Dunmore had called into the field a force of three thousand regulars and volunteers, to meet the Indian army threatening to cross the Ohio and invade Virginia. The governor commissioned Captain Boone to take charge of three forts on the Kanawha frontier. Dunmore, as chief in command, concentrated the main army at Fort Pitt. General Andrew Lewis, skilled in border warfare, led eleven hundred men of the left wing, composed of veteran pioneers and Indian fighters, made up mainly of the 1 Butler, p. 27; Hartley's Daniel Boone; Boone's Narrative; History of the Backwoods. settlers, across the mountains to the mouth of Great Kanawha. Here he met the invading army of the Indians, fifteen hundred strong, and defeated them in the sanguinary battle of the Point, on the 10th of October. The vanquished warriors retreated across the Ohio, and to their towns on the Scioto. The McAfees and their men, Harrod and Hite and their men, and most of the Kentucky explorers, were actively engaged as volunteers in this short campaign. Their unerring rifles did execution in the sanguinary battle which had such important bearing on the future of the great West. The disaster of Braddock's defeat, near Fort Pitt, but a few years before, brought about by foolish pride and conceit of a military martinet in refusing the warnings and counsels of Washington, and the inefficiency of unpracticed regular troops against the tactics of savage warfare, was yet fresh in the memories of the colonists. They apprehended a like possible result under the lead of Lord Dunmore and the regulars under him. This feeling hastened the march of General Lewis across the mountains, and precipitated the battle by the backwoods veterans of the left wing. Governor Dunmore, soon after the defeat, crossed his army below Pittsburgh and marched to the Indian towns, and there received their capitulations. A treaty was negotiated, in which the Shawanees and their confederates again agreed to give up all title to the country south of the Ohio, and all claim to it as a privileged hunting-ground. The results of this short war in several ways promised most auspiciously to the future colonization of Kentucky. The men of the hunting and survey parties became, for some months, the army comrades of many colonial citizens, to whom they pictured, in radiant colors, the beauty and attractions of the new land of their adoption and adventure. The fever of emigration again became epidemic, and many new recruits began their preparations to follow the dim trail of the first pioneers, who had blazed the way, in the coming spring. Again, now that the Indians were signally defeated, and a treaty of peace made, they hoped that the settlers would in future build their homes and fortunes without the hazards and dangers of savage assaults. Vain hope! Well for the posterity of to-day, that the veil of mystery and silence that obscured the future was silver lined with cheerful hues, and that there were hearts of faith and stern resolve to lift it to the view of history in the fullness of time. PROCLAMATION OF GOVERNOR DUNMORE. 33 CHAPTER VII. Obstructions removed, and new inducements attract many toward Kentucky. Treaties with Ohio tribes proclaimed; also with the southern tribes. Transitory nature of Indian titles. Indecisive results of tribal wars illustrated in the Mohawk conquests. Kentucky a ground of dispute among all tribes from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. The Transylvania Company purchases Judge Richard Henderson, the leader. Boone negotiates the treaty of Wataga with Chief Oconistoto. "Boone's Road" made into the heart of Kentucky. He leads his party to Madison county. Locates and founds Boonesborough. Meet Henderson coming in. His diary. Enlarges and strengthens Boonesborough. A city plat laid off. The birth-place, the early life and characteristics of Daniel Boone. Born at Exeter, Bucks county, Pennsylvania. Boyish passion for hunting. School-boy incidents. Removed to North Carolina, on Yadkin river. Born for an adventurous life. "Regulators" resist these. The collision at Alamance, North Caro- Kentucky remained almost deserted until the early months of the spring of 1775, after the recall of the explorers and settlers by Governor Dunmore, the year previous; yet the outlook was more inviting to emigration and enterprise than ever before, and busy notes of preparation engaged the attention of many during their stay in winter quarters for the time. Not only did the desire of the hunt, and of the founding of a new home and fortune in the cheap and fertile lands of the West, form the inspiration of motive to individual citizens; but persons of bold conception of plan and ability in execution began to confederate together and organize men and capital for vast land enterprises, looking to the amassing of great wealth with some, and most probably with a few, to the dream of empire itself. The treaty at Chillicothe, but a few months before, gave assurance that there would, for a time at least, be immunity from the incessant murders and pillage of savage incursions. In January, 1775, Governor Dunmore, by proclamation, announced that "the Shawanees, to remove all ground of future quarrel, have agreed not to hunt on this side of the Ohio river." These tribes of the north were now doubly pledged to abstain from hostilities in the future. But the Cherokee nation, whose habitations were on the upper Tennessee waters, yet made claim, under the treaty of Hard Labor, in South Carolina, October 14, 1768, to this same territory, which the Six Nations had ceded to the English crown at Stanwix, they assuming the right of conquest over the Cherokees, as over the Shawanees. 1 The treaty of Lochaber, in South Carolina, with the Cherokees, October 18, 1770, confirmed this asserted right of the nation to the territory south of the Ohio and west of the Kanawha as their hunting-grounds. Out of the apparent conflict and confusion of these triangular title claims of different tribal confederacies to the territory of Kentucky, it is sufficient to the purposes of our State history to know that the issue was an ancient and unsettled dispute between the Cherokees of the South and the Miamis of the North-west. The Mohawk confederacy, or Six Nations of the North-east, composed of the Mohawks, Tuscaroras, Oneidas, Onondagas, Cayugas, and Senecas, claimed over both by virtue of conquest. During the treaty at Fort Stanwix, now Rome, New York, the Six Nations declared to Sir William Johnson, the English agent, who was eminent for his knowledge of Indian matters, that, "you who know all our affairs must be sensible that our rights go much farther to the South than the Kanawha; and that we have a very good and clear title as far south as the Cherokee (Tennessee) river. This we can not allow to be the right of any other Indians without doing wrong to our posterity, and acting unworthy of those warriors who fought and conquered it. We expect, therefore, that this, our right, will be considered." At this treaty were present representatives from both the Cherokee and Miami tribes, who acquiesced in the agreed stipulations, thus consenting to the superior claim of their former victors in war. Indeed, Hayward, in his history of Tennessee, relates an anecdote of the Cherokees who attended this treaty convention. Having killed some game for their support while on the route, on arrival at the treaty ground, they tendered the skins to the Six Nations, saying, "These are yours; we killed them after passing the Big River"—the name they gave the Tennessee. But we must not estimate the conquests of tribes of savages by other tribes, by the results of similar conquests among the civilized nations. The Indians seldom made provisions to occupy and hold lands from which they might drive out other tribes. By habit, and from necessity, they were shifting and transitory in their war expeditions. Accustomed at such times to depend on such game as they could procure for their food supplies, a few days halting in any one locality served to destroy or drive off the wild game, and compel a change to new fields and fresh supplies. In that mutability so incident to Indian life, permanent order and stability must not be anticipated in their tribal conditions and relations. The dominion of one nation over another was often relaxed or removed by the shifting events of a few years. 1 Collins, Vol. II., p. 496. 2 Butler, pp. 81 and 378-304. |