14
INDIAN RAIDS AND THE BATTLE OF THE BLUE LICKS

LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR “HAIR BUYER” HAMILTON, AFTER BEING captured at Vincennes by Clark in February 1779, was led away a captive to Williamsburg, Virginia. He stayed close to his captors going through Kentucky because settlers threatened to kill him for the Indian raids he had encouraged. Hamilton noted that the people in the Kentucky forts were “in a wretched state, obliged to enclose their cattle every night with the fort, and carry their rifle to field when they go to plow or cut wood.”¹ In Virginia he was put in irons—handcuffs at first, then eighteen-pound fetters—on his trip to jail, on the orders of Governor Thomas Jefferson, who had been incensed by reports that Hamilton had paid for American scalps. Hamilton languished in an airless dungeon in Williamsburg until 1781, when he was allowed to go to New York and, after being exchanged for an American held by the British, to go to London.²

The British continued to incite Indian attacks on the Kentucky settlements without Hamilton. Maj. Arent Schuyler De Peyster, a New Yorker by birth and a British Army regular since 1755, took Hamilton’s place as commandant at Detroit and held that post until 1784. Soon after taking command, De Peyster ordered over £55,000 in “Indian goods,”³ including:

These were customary goods for Indian war parties, but the quantities were large—5,712 scalping knives is a lot of scalping knives. De Peyster also but tressed the traditional weaponry of Indian warfare with British artillery—not many guns, but enough to batter down Kentucky’s forts. In April 1780 De Peyster sent Capt. Henry Bird of the British Regular Army from Detroit with a small field gun and a six-pounder, as well as a squad of British bombardiers, to lead attacks on stations in Kentucky. By June 1780 Bird, the artillery unit, and several hundred Indians appeared before Ruddle’s Station on the Licking River. On June 24, after Bird’s light field gun had fired twice, the larger six-pounder was hauled up and sighted at the fort. Seeing this, the defenders raised a white flag—the first time a fort in Kentucky had been surrendered.⁴ A few days later a nearby fort, Martin’s Station, surrendered. The presence, range, and power of the two artillery pieces were compelling, though it was also true that many of the settlers in the two stations were recent arrivals from North Carolina who were suspected of being Tory sympathizers. Despite Bird’s efforts to restrain them, the Indians plundered both forts and stripped the clothes off their hundreds of prisoners. As Bird wrote in disgust, the Indians, disregarding the surrender terms, “rushed in, tore the poor children from their mothers’ breasts, killed and wounded many.”⁵ The Indians also killed all the settlers’ cattle, so there were no provisions to feed the Indian force on the way to the attack that the British had planned to make on the settlements at the Falls of the Ohio. A frustrated Bird led the Indians, their captives, and their plunder back to Canada.

George Rogers Clark organized a retaliatory raid on the Shawnee villages. He marched with his company of regular troops and the Jefferson County militia to the mouth of the Licking River, where they were joined by militia from Fayette County (presumably including Lt. Col. Daniel Boone) and from Lincoln County. Clark and this ragtag force of close to a thousand men crossed the Ohio on August 1, 1780, and marched into Shawnee country. The Indians fled north, abandoning Old Chillicothe. The village and its cornfields were torched. On August 7 the Shawnees, after first killing many of their American captives, made a stand at Piqua against the advancing Americans. The Indians held their ground in fierce fighting “till they were powder burnt,” in the words of one of the American fighters, but eventually retreated to the north and west while Clark’s men burned the town to the ground before withdrawing, heavily harassed by the Indians, back south across the Ohio into Kentucky.⁶ The whites could take no plunder other than some Indian horses; not being able to carry off the Indians’ skins and furs, they burned them up.⁷ Clark reported that his men had torched eight hundred acres of cropland and taken forty Indian scalps.⁸

For a month or two after the Clark expedition, Indian-white fighting in Kentucky subsided. In October 1780 Boone and his younger brother Ned were hunting out by the Blue Licks. On their way back to Boone’s Station, Ned stopped to gather walnuts. Boone shot and killed a bear. When he went to bring in the dead bear, he heard shots behind him. Turning, he saw Indians gathered around Ned’s body. In one telling Boone was close enough to hear the Indians say they had killed Daniel Boone. Boone ran off into the canebrake. Boone told Filson, “[The Indians] pursued me, by the scent of their dog, three miles; but I killed the dog, and escaped.” Boone ran back to Boone’s Station, getting there after dark. The next morning he went back with a score of settlers from the station and found Ned’s body, decapitated. The Shawnees may well have taken the head, rather than just the scalp, to be able to show their people that they had indeed killed Daniel Boone. In one account Boone remembers what Rebecca had told him after his long hunt years ago—she couldn’t help sleeping with Ned because he looked so much like Boone. Boone and his kinsmen pursued Ned’s killers, following their trail to the Ohio River, but the Indians had already crossed into Shawnee country, and the Boone’s Station men were too few to go into the Indian villages by themselves.⁹

The Indian raids did not stop the inflow of settlers into Kentucky. In May 1780 John Floyd told William Preston that “near three hundred large boats have arrived at the Falls this spring with families,” and there were by that time on Bear Grass Creek six stations with “no less than six hundred men.”¹⁰ While the area around Louisville was largely being settled by immigrants coming down the Ohio Valley, many thousands of others were coming into Kentucky through the Cumberland Gap on the road that Boone’s axemen had blazed, unpleasant though that trip was. John May, who was to become a large landowner in Kentucky, reported that it took him ten days in April 1780 to get from the Holston River to Harrodsburg, passing “through an uninhabited Country the most rugged and dismal I ever passed through, there being thousands of dead Horses & Cattle on the Road Side which occasioned a continual Stench; and one Half the way there were no Springs, which compelled us to make use of the water from the Streams in which many of these dead animals lay: and what made the Journey still more disagreeable was, the continual apprehension we were under, of an Attack from the Indians, there not being one Day after we left Holston, but News was brought us of some Murders being committed by those Savages.”¹¹

Early in 1781 Boone went to Virginia as Fayette County’s elected representative to the Virginia Assembly. The frontier clothes he wore made a lasting impression: “He was dressed in real backwoods stile, he had a common jeans suit, with buckskin leggins be[a]ded vary neatily, his leggins were manufactured by the Indians.”¹² Because of the British army’s advances in Virginia, the legislature had moved from Richmond to Charlottesville, but Tory rangers under the formidable Colonel Banastre Tarleton managed to raid Charlottesville and seize many of the legislators. The raiders arrived at Monticello only minutes after Thomas Jefferson, having been warned of their approach, took off through the woods.¹³ Boone himself, though dressed in frontier clothes, was taken into custody when one of Tarleton’s dragoons heard a younger man address Boone as “Colonel” or “Captain.” Boone was brought before Tarleton but was soon released.¹⁴

Why the quick release? Boone’s son Nathan believed his father, to explain his rank, had shown Tarleton his commission from Lord Dunmore.¹⁵ But the Dunmore commission of Boone was as a captain, and Boone by that time was a colonel. Or would Boone have shown the British commission, as he had to Hamilton in Detroit, to evidence his sympathy with the British cause? Had one of Boone’s Tory Bryan relatives intervened on Boone’s behalf? Did Boone give his captors his parole, at least not to fight the British? He certainly continued to fight their Indian allies and the British if they were with the Indians. But William Christian wrote to William Preston in June 1781 that “Boone, who was with Lord Cornwallis, is since paroled,” and Nathan believed that his father had been released after promising “not to take up arms any more.”¹⁶ Exactly how he gained his quick release from British custody is unclear—but all likely explanations involve Boone’s willingness to be “a trying to fool” the British (as Boone had said at his Boonesborough court-martial), to be able to go free to fight again in the future. He was evidently willing to stretch the truth to deceive his wartime enemies.

By the end of June 1781 Boone was back with the Virginia Assembly, which had reconvened at Staunton. As was true throughout his life, he did not stay still for long. He went back to Kentucky during the summer, then up the Ohio River and into Pennsylvania to see relatives there, and returned to Virginia for the fall session of the Virginia Assembly. Never a man for routine, Boone appears to have been remiss in his legislative committee work; in December the speaker of the Assembly ordered the House sergeant-at-arms to take Daniel Boone and other absent members into custody.¹⁷

Indian raids and white counterraids continued. In the first nine months of 1781 Indians killed or captured 131 in Jefferson County, the county that included Louisville. That number represented about one-eighth of the county’s population.¹⁸ In May 1781 Indians led by Simon Girty attacked Squire Boone’s settlement near Shelbyville and inflicted three wounds on Squire Boone, including a broken arm. The broken arm, badly set, ended up an inch and half shorter than the other arm. When Squire Boone’s family abandoned the settlement in September 1781, they were ambushed, and many in the group were killed.¹⁹ When John Floyd took a party out to bury the dead, Indians killed 16 of Floyd’s men. Earlier in 1781 Floyd had written to General Clark that the only reason the settlers had not completely deserted his area of Kentucky “is the inability of the Settlers to remove, having already lost most of their horses, and the Ohio River only runs one way.”²⁰ After his defeat in September 1781, even the resilient Floyd despaired: “I fear our destruction is inevitable—the attention of near 6,000 Savage Warriors is now fixed upon Kentucky.… I am greatly perplexed and embarrassed about our situation.”²¹

Although fighting between British and Americans ended in the east after Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown in October 1781, the pace of fighting between Indians and whites in the Ohio Valley quickened. In March 1782 rangers from the Monongahela Valley attacked the Moravian Christian Indian villages on the Muskingum River in Ohio, took ninety captives, and killed them by crushing their skulls with clubs and mallets—twenty-nine men, twenty-seven women, and thirty-four children.²² That white massacre of peaceful Indians did not make the Delawares, Shawnees, and other Ohio Indians more pro-American. In June 1782 Indians on the Sandusky River in Ohio routed a force of hundreds of Pennsylvania militiamen under Col. William Crawford. The Indian victors, wrongly believing that Crawford had been involved in the slaughter of the Moravian Indians a few months earlier, tortured him to death at the stake. They stripped Crawford, tied his hands behind his back, tied his bound wrists to the stake with enough scope to permit him to walk around it once or twice, fired some seventy charges of gunpowder into his naked body, cut off his ears, applied burning sticks to his flesh, and threw hot coals and hot ashes at him. After two hours, when Crawford fell forward on his stomach, the Indians scalped him. An old squaw took hot coals from the fire on a board and poured them on his bleeding head until he died.²³ Simon Girty was said to have watched Crawford’s lingering death and, when Crawford asked Girty to shoot him, to have told Crawford he could not because he had no gun.²⁴

Kentucky’s turn had already begun to come. In May 1782, near Boonesborough, Wyandots from the west killed Capt. James Estill and twenty-two of his men. In July Boone’s longtime associate and friend Nathaniel Hart was killed on his farm outside of Boonesborough. By August 1782 several hundred Indians from different tribes—Ottawas, Wyandots, Shawnees, Delawares, and Cherokees—had already crossed into Kentucky from Ohio, led by Capt. William Caldwell and, under him, the half-Shawnee Capt. Alexander McKee and the Indian agent Matthew Elliott, who had gone over to the British side in 1778, along with McKee and Simon Girty. Girty accompanied the 1782 invading force as an interpreter and was said to have incited the Indians at Chillicothe with Indian-style eloquence before the assembled tribes crossed the Ohio in the summer of 1782 for their massive raids into Kentucky: “Brothers: The Long Knives have overrun your country, and usurped your hunting grounds. They have destroyed your cane, trodden down the clover, killed the deer and the buffaloes.… Unless you rise in the majesty of your might, and exterminate the whole race, you may bid adieu to the hunting grounds of your fathers—to the delicious flesh of the animals with which it once abounded—and to the skins with which you were once enabled to purchase your clothing and your rum.”²⁵

The Indians began their attack with an attack south of the Kentucky River. Close to seventy Indians captured two boys at Hoy’s Station, some distance south of Lexington. When Capt. John Holder (who called out at the siege of Boonesborough, “I’ve no time to pray, goddammit”) went off in pursuit, he and his men were lured into ambush by one Indian running away from them at top speed near the Upper Blue Licks, and four of his men were killed.²⁶ The raid on Hoy’s Station may have been intended to cause stations north of the Kentucky River to weaken their defenses by sending reinforcements south. On August 15–17, 1782, the Indians attacked what was probably their prime target, Bryan’s Station, north of the Kentucky River and northwest of Lexington. The Indians, who greatly outnumbered the forty-two or forty-four men defending the station, burned outlying cabins and crops, slaughtered the livestock, and killed a handful of defenders. They also attempted to storm the stockade itself but lacked artillery and had limited time before relief arrived from the settlements to the south.²⁷ Simon Girty reportedly tried to talk Bryan’s Station into surrendering by threatening that artillery was on the way and that if the Indians stormed the fort, no one would be able to control them. A defender called back that the Kentucky militia was on its way: “If you and your gang of murderers stay here another day, we will have your scalps drying in the sun on the roofs of these cabins”—adding that his station still had plenty of powder and lead “to beat such a son of bitch as Girty.” Girty broke off the shouted exchange, and the Indians resumed their firing at the station.²⁸

Relief came to Bryan’s Station far more quickly than it had to Boonesborough in 1778, no doubt because there were now many more settlers in Kentucky than there had been four years earlier. Men came from Boone’s Station, Harrodsburg, Lexington, and other stations. Forty-five men came from Fayette County alone. By the morning of August 18 a total of 182 men had assembled at Bryan’s Station—but the attacking Indians were no longer there. There was just a battered station, surrounded by burned crops and dead livestock already starting to bloat and stink in the summer heat. Alexander McKee reported to De Peyster that the Indians had “killed upwards of 300 hogs, 150 head of cattle, and a number of sheep.”²⁹

More relief was on its way from the south in the form of several hundred men led by Col. Benjamin Logan. Should the Kentucky militiamen at Bryan’s Station wait to be reinforced by Logan’s men, or should they go after the attackers immediately, before the Indians could cross the Ohio back into Indian country? That was the question the militia leaders discussed on August 18. Col. John Todd of Lexington, who had fought at Point Pleasant, and Lt. Col. Daniel Boone, of Boone’s Station, led the Fayette County militia. Col. Stephen Trigg led the Lincoln County men, assisted by Maj. Hugh McGary of Harrodsburg. This was the same McGary who in 1777, after discovering that a Shawnee warrior he had killed outside Harrodsburg was wearing the shirt of his stepson, who had just been killed by the Shawnees, had cut up the Indian’s body and fed the pieces to his dogs. McGary had not become more stable since then. He had yelling fights with his new wife and with her brother.³⁰ An early Boone biographer who interviewed Boone reported that descriptions of McGary “concur in representing him to have been a man of fierce and daring courage, but of a fiery and ferocious temper, void of humane and gentle qualities, a quarrelsome and unpleasant man in civil life.”³¹ At the August 18 officers’ meeting, however, McGary sensibly advised waiting for Logan’s hundreds of men before pursuing the large body of Indians who had attacked the station. Colonel Todd claimed that guesses about the Indians’ numbers were exaggerated, described McGary’s advice as “timidity,” and said they could not afford to let the Indians escape.³²

In the culture of the frontier—and the frontier had a strong culture, even if it was without the learning and manners that the word culture sometimes connotes—to question one’s bravery was to question one’s manhood. Such an imputation tended to shorten any rational discussion of pros and cons, much as the discussion at the besieged Boonesborough of the Indians’ offer had been cut short by Colonel Callaway’s vowing to kill the first man who proposed surrender. The officers gathered at Bryan’s Station decided to go after the Indians the next morning, without waiting for Logan and his men. It is easy to imagine that Hugh McGary did not like being publicly accused of timidity.

Under Colonel Todd’s overall command the Kentucky militiamen set out after the Indians, who were heading toward to the Lower Blue Licks on the Licking River. Boone did not like what he saw. All the signs pointed to a very large force. On the one hand, the Indians seemed to be going out of their way to make their trail easy to follow—leaving trash behind, breaking off branches. On the other hand, it looked to Boone as if the Indians were “concealing their numbers by treading in each other’s tracks.”³³ Why would the Indians do that unless they were seeking to cause the whites to underestimate their strength? Were the Indians luring the Kentuckians into an ambush, the way the fleet-footed Indian had lured Holder’s men onward after the attack on Hoy’s Station? Other signs told Boone that many Indians were in front of the Kentuckians. One militiaman remembered that Boone, “by counting the Indian’s fires, concluded there were at least 500 Indians.”³⁴ That was about three times as many fighters as were in the pursuing Kentucky militia. The estimate was high. Captain Caldwell soon after the battle reported his force consisted of 300 Indians and rangers.³⁵ Even so, Caldwell’s men outnumbered the Kentucky militiamen nearly two to one.

By the following morning, Monday, August 19, 1782, the Kentuckians were at the Licking River. They could see several Indians on the top of a hill across the water. Colonel Todd asked Boone for his views. “Colonel, they intend to fight us,” Boone said, summarizing the signs he had seen along the way of the Indians’ superior numbers. “They wish to seduce us into an ambush.”³⁶ Boone knew the Lower Blue Licks intimately, having rescued Jemima and the Callaway girls near there in 1776 and having been there with the salt-boilers in 1778. Boone knew that the far side of the river had ravines that could conceal hundreds of Indians. “I say not follow,” Boone said “they largely out-number us, and it is not prudent to pursue.”³⁷ What was more prudent was to wait for Logan’s powerful reinforcements, particularly because the British and Indians were in an excellent defensive position—on high ground and with the ability to retreat if need be, while the Americans would have to ford the Licking River to attack then charge uphill in rugged terrain, and, if defeated, they would find retreat made difficult by the river they had just crossed.

McGary said, “We have force enough to whip all the Indians we will find.”³⁸ According to some accounts, Boone suggested that if an attack were made, half of the Kentuckians should ford the river upstream and attack the Indians from the flank, while the rest attacked from in front. That in itself was a risky maneuver. To split your force in front of a much larger enemy force was what Gen. George Armstrong Custer was to do, with notable lack of success, at the Little Big Horn.³⁹ McGary shouted out, “By Godly, what did we come here for?” “To fight Indians,” someone replied. “By Godly,” McGary called, “then why not fight them?”⁴⁰ Turning to Boone, he said: “I never saw any signs of cowardice about you before.”⁴¹ “No man before has ever dared to call me a coward,” Boone said.⁴² “I can go as far in an Indian fight as any other man.”⁴³

McGary spurred his horse into the water of the river, calling out, “All who are not damned cowards follow me, and I’ll soon show you the Indians.”⁴⁴ Even though the colonels in charge had made no decision, the Kentuckians rode into the river, rather than be thought cowards. “The contagion was irresistible,” Boone’s nephew Samuel Boone later said, for “the taunt of cowardice was unpalatable to a Kentuckian and stung them on to recklessness.”⁴⁵ Todd and Trigg ordered their men to join the charge, and Boone joined his men in the river. “Come on,” Boone is said to have called out, “we are all slaughtered men.”⁴⁶

The Kentuckians advanced up the ridge after crossing the river. On the left of the uneven charge Boone led the men from Fayette County, including Boone’s son Israel, Boone’s nephew Squire Boone, and two Scholl relatives. Colonel Todd and Major McGary commanded the center, Colonel Trigg the right. The Kentuckians went for the summit of a ridge a half-mile from the river, with McGary leading. Like most of the militia officers, McGary was still mounted. As the Kentuckians neared the top, the Indians began a terrific fire, particularly from concealment along the Kentuckians’ right. Many of the Kentuckians in front were cut down in the opening fire. McGary was untouched. Within minutes Colonel Todd and Colonel Trigg were both mortally wounded. The Indian left turned and broke the Kentuckians’ right flank.

McGary and his surviving men, having fired their guns, turned and ran back toward the river. An Indian rose from behind a stump in front of Boone, who was carrying not a rifle but a long English fowling piece, loaded with three or four rifle bullets and sixteen or eighteen buckshot. Boone shot the Indian dead and kept advancing. McGary rode up and shouted: “Boone, why are you not retreating? Todd and Trigg’s line has given way, and the Indians are all around you.”⁴⁷ Boone looked down the hill and saw Indians rushing for the Americans’ horses and standing between his men and the river.

Boone ordered his men into the woods on their left, for better cover as they retreated to the river. He told them to hold their fire, so as to be able to keep the Indians off as the Kentuckians recrossed the river. Boone’s oldest surviving son, Israel, twenty-five years old, stayed close to his father. Israel “had been sick with the slow fever, but was recovering.” His neck was still badly stiff. Boone got a horse for Israel, but the young man said, “Father, I won’t leave you.” Boone went to get another horse and, “amid the cracking of the guns, heard some struggling on the ground. He turned to find that Israel had fallen with blood gushing from his mouth, obviously a mortal wound.” Israel’s “arms were stretched out and shivering.”⁴⁸

Boone mounted the horse he had wanted Israel to take and rode west to a different place to cross the river, not the ford where the Americans had crossed to make their attack. The main body of Kentuckians struggled to make it back across the river near where they had crossed before. They were pursued by Indians who, having fired their rifles, were closing in with knives and tomahawks and clubs. As Boone told Filson: “When we gave way, they pursued us with the utmost eagerness, and in every quarter spread destruction. The river was difficult to cross, and many were killed in the flight, some just entering the river, some in the water, others after crossing in ascending the cliffs.”⁴⁹ More would have died had the Indians not paused for plunder and for scalps of the fallen Kentuckians and had not one of Boone’s men, once he was across the river, formed up some of the fleeing men and had them fire a volley to give pause to the oncoming Indians.

On the retreat Boone encountered Colonel Logan, riding up from Bryan’s Station with hundreds of additional Kentucky militiamen. Logan turned back and waited for a few days for an attack that never came. On August 24 Boone rode with Logan’s men back to the Blue Licks to bury the dead Kentuckians. Five hot August days had gone by since the fighting. Boone later recalled finding “their bodies strewed every where, cut and mangled in a dreadful manner. This mournful scene exhibited a horror almost unparalleled: Some torn and eaten by wild beasts; those in the river eaten by fishes; all in such a putrefied condition, that no one could be distinguished from another.”⁵⁰ Vultures circled in the air above the bodies, many of which had been scalped. One witness said “the smell of a human was the awfullest smell he ever had in his life.”⁵¹ Nathan Boone said that, though Israel’s “face was blackened and swollen,” Boone was able to recognize him “from the locality and some marks.” Boone was never able to remember the Blue Licks battle and the death of Israel without being deeply affected, often to tears.⁵²

The Battle of the Blue Licks
Courtesy of Neal O. Hammon, redrawn by Mary Lee Eggart

Boone “blamed himself to some degree for the Blue Lick battle.” He had not been able to prevent the Kentuckians’ charge into the Indians’ ambush, and “he let his zeal get the better of his judgment.”⁵³ There was a more personal cause for remorse. Just as Boone had exposed his oldest son, James, to hazards that led to his being killed by Indians in 1773 at the age of sixteen, Boone now must have felt responsible for the death of his next oldest son, Israel, at age twenty-five. While Boone’s daughter-in-law Olive said that Boone had tried to persuade Israel not to go, Boone’s granddaughter Delinda Boone Craig said that Boone had told her that he had made Israel go. Israel, confined by sickness to his bed, had not volunteered with the other young men at Boone’s Station to ride to the relief of Bryan’s Station. Boone reproved Israel, saying: “I did not hear your name when they were beating up for volunteers—I had expected to hear it among the first. I am sorry to think I have raised a timid son.” Israel enrolled. According to Delinda: “Boone always blamed himself for the loss of his son.… Israel, he said, ought not to have gone, and would not have gone but for his chiding.”⁵⁴ Whichever version is correct, there is no dispute about Boone’s lasting remorse at Israel’s death. Nor can it be denied that Boone had led his first two sons to their early deaths.

The fighting on the far side of the Licking River had not lasted much more than fifteen minutes. It resulted in the worst defeat Kentuckians suffered during the Revolution. Over sixty Kentuckians were killed, more than a third of the militiamen who had gone into the fight. Boone wrote to Virginia governor Benjamin Harrison that “sixty six of our Brave Kanetuckians fell the matchless Masscraed victoms of [the Indians’] cruelty.”⁵⁵ Another six or eight Kentuckians were taken prisoner. Many of the surviving Kentuckians were badly wounded, including Boone’s nephew Squire Boone, whose thigh bone was shattered. Of the two dozen militia officers fifteen of them, well over half, were killed. Many of the officers had remained on their horses during the battle and had made fine targets as a result. The dead American officers included Col. John Todd, the commanding officer, and Col. Stephen Trigg, who had commanded the Kentuckian right. The Indians lost no more than eleven killed.⁵⁶

Less than two weeks after the battle, an unusually low-spirited Boone wrote urging Governor Harrison to send relief quickly or risk seeing the settlements melt away: “I have Encouraged the people here in this County all I Could, but I Can no longer Encourage my Neighbours nor my Self to risque our Lives here at Such Extraordinary hazards. the Inhabitants of these Counties are very much alarmed at the thoughts of the Indians bringing another Campaign into our Country this fall, which if it Should be the Case will Break these Settlements, So I hope your Excellency will take it into Consideration and Send us Some Relief as quick as possaple.”⁵⁷

Relief came, but largely in the form of Kentuckian self-help. Virginia did not send troops. Instead, George Rogers Clark, who had been criticized for weakening the defenses of the bluegrass country by moving much of Kentucky’s militia west to the Falls of the Ohio, and militia leaders such as Boone assembled a force of Kentucky militia for a punitive expedition into Ohio. By late October 1782 between one thousand and eleven hundred men had assembled at the mouth of the Licking River. Clark led the overall force, assisted by John Floyd and Benjamin Logan. Boone, who on September 25 had been promoted by the Virginia Council to full colonel and made the lieutenant of Fayette County in place of the slain John Todd, commanded the Fayette County militia.⁵⁸ The men crossed the Ohio River on November 1, 1782, and for close to three weeks went through Indian country north of the river. The Indians receded before them to the north. The Kentuckians killed only twenty Indians but plundered Old Chillicothe, Piqua, and four other villages on the Miami and Little Miami rivers, and destroyed an estimated ten thousand bushels of corn. As part of the campaign, Boone led a detachment of one hundred men to a village called Willstown, at the junction of the Miami and Stillwater Creek. Finding that the Indians had fled, his men took what they could carry, including pelts, and burned all the cabins in the village. Benjamin Logan, leading a separate detachment, plundered and burned the trading post run by the French-Canadian trader Lorimier, who had helped to outfit expeditions against the white settlers in Kentucky and who had been with Blackfish when Boone was taken captive in 1778.⁵⁹

As Boone put it, the Kentuckians on Clark’s expedition “burnt [the Indian towns] all to ashes, entirely destroyed their corn, and other fruits, and every where spread a scene of desolation in the country.… This campaign in some measure damped the spirits of the Indians, and made them sensible of our superiority. Their connections were dissolved, their armies scattered, and a future invasion put entirely out of their power.”⁶⁰ According to Clark, “The quantity of provisions burned surpassed all idea we had of the Indian stores.”⁶¹ The Kentuckians also took, to exchange for white captives held by the Indians, a number of captives—including, one Kentuckian later remembered happily, a young woman he described as the “most splendid looking squaw I ever saw.”⁶² Governor Harrison, who initially had been irritated at Clark for launching the expedition without consulting with him, was delighted with the results. He wrote to Clark, “Your expedition will be attended with good consequences; it will teach the Indians to dread us, and convince them that we will not tamely submit to their depredations.”⁶³

After the Clark expedition the Shawnees remaining in Ohio moved their towns farther north, farther away from Kentucky. The move made it harder for whites to kill the remaining Shawnees but also made it harder for Shawnees to mount large attacks into Kentucky. The peace between the Americans and the British also reduced the chances of major Indian attacks in Kentucky. While the fighting in the thirteen colonies had already virtually ended with the surrender of General Cornwallis at Yorktown in October 1781 and preliminary articles of peace were signed in November 1782, the signing of the peace treaty in September 1783 enabled the Americans to point out to the Indians in the Ohio Valley that the Indians should not expect any more military support from the British against the American settlements.

Filson’s telling of Boone’s life through 1783 ends with Boone saying: “My footsteps have often been marked with blood.… Two darling sons, and a brother, have I lost by savage hands.… But now the scene is changed: Peace crowns the sylvan shade.… I now live in peace and safety, enjoying the sweets of liberty, and the bounties of Providence, with my once fellow-sufferers, in this delightful country, which I have seen purchased with a vast expence of blood and treasure.”⁶⁴ The lushness of the prose is certainly attributable to Filson, not Boone. Filson, having invested heavily in warrants to buy land in Kentucky, was writing to lure settlers into Kentucky and so had a strong economic interest in describing Kentucky as a land of “peace and safety.” Even in Filson’s telling, however, Boone noted that after Clark’s expedition the Indians “continued to practice mischief secretly upon the inhabitants, in the exposed parts of the country.”⁶⁵

Violence and killings between Indians and whites in Kentucky persisted for more than a decade after the Battle of the Blue Licks. In that period there were also to be battles in Ohio between Indians and whites that were much larger than the Blue Licks battle—but the battles were not in Kentucky; they occurred, rather, as allied Indian groups sought to defend their lands north and west of the Ohio River. Apart from an attack on Kincheloe’s Station a few weeks after the Blue Licks battle, there were no more large-scale Indian attacks on white settlers in Kentucky. The Kentuckians began to leave their stockaded stations—to “settle out” and work their own land and, at least in the inner bluegrass area, to live in cabins that looked more like houses than forts.⁶⁶ A settler who reached Boonesborough in May 1784 reported that “the picketing of the fort was gone, but the cabins were occupied and the bast ends [bastions] stood.… That fall they began to move out.”⁶⁷

Settlers were to pour into Kentucky in ever-greater numbers. Even during the fierce fighting of the Revolution, Kentucky’s population had grown from about two hundred in the settlements at the start of 1776 to an estimated thirty thousand in 1783.⁶⁸ By 1790 Kentucky’s population would more than double, to seventy-four thousand.⁶⁹ The growth in the number of settlers in Kentucky mirrored the overall growth in the number of settlers coming down the Ohio after 1783.⁷⁰ In the economy of Kentucky, as the number of settlers soared, farming and trade were far outstripping hunting and trapping in importance, to the benefit of Kentucky’s economy but to the detriment of the frontiersman lifestyle that Boone enjoyed and excelled in. In all these ways the success of the 1782 Clark expedition, in which Boone played an important part as commander of the Fayette County militia, marked a turning point for Kentucky and for Boone.

Matthew Harris Jouett, George Rogers Clark, based on a portrait by John Wesley Jarvis painted after Clark’s death. Clark captured Vincennes, and Lt. Col. Henry Hamilton, from the British.
Filson Historical Society, Louisville

Eighteenth-century surveying instruments from the Smithsonian Museum of American History—theodolite, chain, compass, Jacob’s staff, chaining pins, and drafting instruments
Photograph by Adam Jones

John Filson’s purported self-portrait. Collector and Filson biographer Reuben T. Durrett “discovered” this sketch in a book believed to have once been owned by Filson.
Filson Historical Society, Louisville

Title page of John Filson’s The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke (1784), which included as an appendix “The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon.” Boone vouched for the accuracy of Filson’s book.
Filson Historical Society, Louisville

Charles Balthazar Julien Fevret de Saint-Mémin (1770–1852), Le Soldat du Chêne, an Osage Chief, from McKenney and Hall, History of the Indian Tribes of North America (Philadelphia: Frederick W. Greenough, 1838–44)
Courtesy of University of Cincinnati Digital Press

“Col. Daniel Boon.” Daniel Boone. Stipple engraving by J. O. Lewis after Chester Harding, 1820.
Missouri Historical Society Photographs and Prints Collections. NS 34096. Scan © 2006, Missouri Historical Society.

The home of Nathan Boone in St. Charles County, Mo., in which Boone died in 1820
Photograph by the author

$$$$$$Thomas Cole, Daniel Boone at His Cabin at Great Osage Lake, c. 1826. Oil on canvas, 38 ¼″ x 42 ⅝″.
Courtesy of Mead Art Museum, Amherst College. Accession number AC P.1939.7.

George Caleb Bingham, Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap, 1851–52. Oil on canvas, 36 ½″ x 50 ¼″.
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis. Gift of Nathaniel Phillips, 1890.

Daniel Boone Protects His Family. Color lithograph by H. Schile, 1874. Based on Horatio Greenough’s monumental sculpture The Rescue (1836–53).
Missouri Historical Society Photographs and Prints Collection. NS21599. Scan © 2007, Missouri Historical Society.

H. D. Nichols, daguerreotype of Lyman C. Draper, c. 1858. Draper spent decades gathering the world’s largest collection of interview notes and other materials relating to Boone.
Courtesy of Wisconsin Historical Society (WHi 35)

Monument at Boone’s tomb in Frankfort
Photograph by the author