Part 16
When Daniel was twenty-one a call came to North Carolina for men to help the soldiers of General Braddock, who had been sent by the king of England to fight the French and Indians. The English wished to keep control of the country north and south of the Ohio River. Young Boone volunteered and was in the battle of Fort Duquesne, when Braddock was defeated and killed, and when young Major George Washington led the colonial troops, who fought Indian fashion and saved a small part of Braddock’s army from being killed and scalped. This fight proved a turning point in the life of the North Carolina soldier, for he met in the ranks a scout named John Finley, who had been on a hunting trip in the wild country south of the Ohio. Finley drew a picture of this wild region that warmed the heart of Daniel Boone. One of the chief beauties there for the born hunter was that the Indians did not inhabit the country. They only went back and forth across it, so that they did not kill or scare away the game.
Daniel went home to North Carolina and married a beautiful girl of seventeen, and they kept house in a cabin the young husband had built with his own hands. He lived there several years with his wife and little boy, near his father’s family. But he was restless, going on hunting trips farther and farther from home, until he had followed the game over the mountains into the region of the Tennessee River.
The friend of the French and Indian War, John Finley, came to visit the Boones one fall, and they made him stay all that winter. “The call of the wild” was too strong to let Boone stay at home long after that. In the spring he and Finley, with four other men, on six horses, with bedding and a small cooking outfit on six packhorses, started off, early one bright morning, on their wonderful shooting and trapping trip. They were armed with hunting-knives, tomahawks and their trusty rifles.
When they had crossed the mountains they hunted the bear, buffalo, elk, and deer, and trapped little fur animals with such success that they soon had quite a fortune in furs. As they prepared to start east with these, a band of Indians appeared on the scene, broke up their little camp, and captured everything they had. The savages spared the white men’s lives; but they made signs that they would kill them all if they found them there again, and they took Boone and another man prisoners. The rest of the party, badly frightened, took up their weary march for home, empty-handed. Boone, and his companion, when they escaped, only went far enough to make the Indians think they also were afraid; then they came back and hunted alone in all that wild region.
After long, lonely months, Boone’s brother came and brought gunpowder and supplies, and the Boones hunted and trapped there two years longer. They started home with a rich store of furs, but some Indians came along and robbed them again. The red men afterward killed the brother, but Daniel, after hairbreadth escapes, reached North Carolina, safe and sound, but poorer than when he went away.
Still, Daniel Boone was rich in wood lore and Indian craft. He gave such attractive accounts of the beautiful country and the chances to get rich quickly that quite a number of heroic people were persuaded to go back with him and settle in the land. He started over the mountains again with ten in his own family, besides neighbors and friends. No one could have followed the way but a cunning scout like Daniel Boone, to whom every leaf, every sound, every mark in the earth had its own secret message. During the journey the party were attacked by Indians, and Boone’s eldest son, a lad of seventeen, was killed.
This experience discouraged the others and they tried to induce their leader to go back with them. He sturdily refused, saying, “There are nearly a hundred of us. We can beat the Indians yet.” Nevertheless, it seemed wiser to wait awhile before pushing on across the mountains; so they went back a little way and settled for a year or two on a little mountain river.
By this time many people in the Carolinas and Virginia had heard about the Promised Land of Daniel Boone. He was engaged to mark the way or “blaze the trail” through to Kentucky. This trail was afterwards traveled so much that it was called the Wilderness Road. Taking thirty men with him, Boone once more set out on the way to settle Kentucky. They came to a halt in the heart of that country, and built a stockade on the Kentucky River. This enclosure, a little longer than a square, with a fort at each of the four corners and eight smaller cabins in the space inside, was surrounded by a high fence of sharpened logs standing upright. To this strong stockade the rest of the party gave the name of Boonesboro, in honor of the Kentucky pioneer. Later, Boone returned for his family and brought them to their new home.
Many and exciting were the adventures of the settlers. One afternoon two girls went out canoeing on the river with the daughter of Daniel Boone. When the three girls had passed a bend in the river and were too far away for their shrieks to be heard at the fort, a fierce-looking Indian sprang out from the bushes on the farther bank and pulled in their canoe. Other savages stifled the girls’ cries and plunged with them into the darkening forest.
Before long the absent ones were missed and the alarm was given. The empty canoe was found, and a search party was formed, led by the fathers of the missing girls. The hunt lasted two days and two nights. On the morning of the third day the anxious fathers saw smoke rising from an Indian camp. As the camp was over fifty miles from Boonesboro, the savages had become careless. Boone and two other men crept up near the camp and shot the two Indians guarding their three white captives. The other red men jumped and ran for the woods. The happy fathers and their friends returned to their anxious families at Boonesboro with the daughters unhurt.
While Washington and his little armies were waging the War for Independence along the eastern coast, Daniel Boone and his pioneers were fighting just as bravely for their country. Though they did not realize it then, the Backwoods Territory formed by far the greater part of the future United States. Boone was the leader who remained on guard while others did the things which are oftener described in the history of the country. He helped the pioneers with his advice, and defended the families of the men who went out and fought in the historic battles.
One reason why the Indians feared and revered this “White Chief” was that Daniel Boone, as if by magic, had often escaped death at their hands. But once his good fortune seemed to fail him. Near Boonesboro was a salt “lick,” or a spring of salt water, where salt was left spread around the spring like frost or a white powder on the ground. Deer, buffalo, and other animals often came there to lick up the salt, and pioneers often hid near by and shot them. Boone and thirty men had come from the fort to gather a supply of salt to have on hand in case they should be attacked by Indians. Boone and his men were surrounded and captured; and, as this was during the War for Independence, they were taken to Detroit to be dealt with by the British Governor Hamilton. On the way through deep snows and zero weather they were all in danger of starving. At a solemn council some of the Indians proposed to get rid of their prisoners by torturing and burning them to death. There were one hundred and twenty of the savages, and the vote stood fifty-nine for the killing to sixty-one against. There was no doubt that the Indians’ regard for Daniel Boone saved the lives of all those white men. Though this seemed to have been done by a single vote, it was a strange thing that sixty-one hostile savages were willing to keep alive and feed their prisoners at the risk of starving themselves.
At Detroit, Hamilton offered the Indians five hundred dollars if they would let Daniel Boone go free, as he wanted to use him as a British scout. The savages refused and took him to their chief village in the Ohio country. Boone knew their language, but he pretended not to understand a word they said among themselves. He seemed to be very fond of their mode of life and acted pleased when they told him they were going to make him a chief. He won their good will by not wincing when they tortured him to see if he could prove himself worthy of that great honor.
The white chief was the best marksman in all the tribe. When they let him go off hunting by himself they counted the bullets and measured the gunpowder they gave him. But he cut the bullets in two and used very small charges of powder, thus saving nearly half to use when he should find a chance to escape. Hearing the others talking of an attack they were going to make on Boonesboro, he slipped away one morning while out hunting, when he would not be missed till night. Not daring to shoot game for food, nor wishing to waste time to dress and cook it, he was nearly starved when he reached the Kentucky fort, after going one hundred and sixty miles through a region full of hostile tribes.
The Indians must have wasted many days searching for him, as it was six weeks before his adopted tribe and other savages arrived at Boonesboro. Daniel Boone held the fort for ten days, with fifty white men and boys and twenty-five women and children, against four hundred and fifty red men. Several times the Indians set fire to the fort, but the brave white men put out the fire at great risk to their lives. The Indians tried to tunnel under the log fence, but the cunning white chief met and beat them back at every point. At last the savages gave up the fight and slunk away.
Now that so many settlers had moved to Kentucky, the old hero found that country too crowded to suit him, so he and his family moved to a wilder region on the Missouri River, “to find elbow room,” he said. After hundreds of thrilling adventures and narrow escapes, the Indian hunter died in bed, with his wife and three of his children around him. A friend who was near him in his latter days said of Daniel Boone: “Never was old age more green nor gray hairs more graceful.”
GEORGE ROGERS CLARK, THE YOUNG HERO WITH A GREAT IDEA
Soon after the beginning of the War for Independence, George Rogers Clark, a tall, broad-shouldered, red-haired, blue-eyed young man of twenty-four, left his home in Virginia and went over the mountains to join the settlers in Kentucky. He had already had some adventures in the wilderness along the Ohio River, hunting wild game and fighting wilder Indians. Not long after Clark’s arrival, the pioneers joined together and sent him and another man back to Virginia to see if they could have Kentucky adopted as a county of that state. Virginia had just been declared one of the thirteen United States. Clark and his companion were also to try to get the legislature to grant them money enough to buy gunpowder, which was now the greatest need of the Kentucky settlers in fighting the Indians.
When the two young delegates, in coonskin caps and leather leggings, arrived at the Virginia capital they found to their dismay that the legislators of the new state had just adjourned and gone home. Patrick Henry, the fiery orator who had shouted in that very capitol building, “Give me liberty or give me death!” was now governor of Virginia. The young men from Kentucky went and told him they must not go back without that powder; so Governor Henry got them five hundred pounds, and arranged to make it all right when the State legislature should meet again. Clark succeeded also in having Kentucky made a county of Virginia.
While the battles of the Revolution were being fought along the Atlantic coast, there was a terrible state of affairs in the great valley of the Ohio. Henry Hamilton, the British governor at Detroit, then in charge of the forts and trading posts on the Wabash and Mississippi rivers, was doing one thing that made the settlers’ blood boil wherever they heard of it. He had hired all the Indians he could to fight on the British side by furnishing them with scalping-knives and paying them a bounty, or money prize, on every scalp they brought in to prove that they had killed an American man, woman, or child. The savages went everywhere on the warpath, murdering as many people as they could to earn as much bounty money as possible.
In the midst of this horrible warfare a bright idea came to George Rogers Clark, but he kept it to himself. He sent two men across the Ohio and up the Mississippi and Wabash rivers to see what was going on at the British trading-posts there. The word they brought back made the young man start at once for Virginia--this time alone. He called again on Governor Patrick Henry and on his old neighbor, Thomas Jefferson. Both of those great patriots approved his plan and charged him on no account to let it leak out before he was ready to act, for fear some wily Indian or dishonest Frenchman might give warning and spoil it all.
When George Rogers Clark started again from Virginia he wore the badge of a colonel in the Continental army; and he had the promised support of the state. He went west by way of the Ohio River as far as what is now Louisville. The settlement he started there owes its name to the news which Clark heard from some men who joined him there; that the king and the people of France had pledged money, men, and ships to help the United States in the War for Independence. The new town was named in honor of the French king.
The first thing the young commander had to do was to raise a company of about two hundred men for his secret purpose. All he told his recruits was that they were to go on a mission to put a stop to the terrible outrages of the “British” Indians upon the settlers. It was not until they were again floating down the Ohio River toward the Mississippi that he told them that they were out to capture three towns on the Mississippi and the Wabash, which, as his two friends had found out for him, were not well guarded by the British. Most of the people in these towns were French settlers, but were under British rule. When they had nearly reached the place where the Ohio flows into the Mississippi, they left their boats and marched through tangled forests and across the plains toward Kaskaskia, the nearest of the three towns. They arrived on the Fourth of July, 1778, the second anniversary of American independence. They hid for a whole day in a clump of trees and bushes on the shore of the Mississippi. After nightfall Clark detailed half his men to surround the village, and led the rest to the fort, where he found the French commander of the fort giving a dance by the flaring light of several torches. Some of the women of the settlement and several Indians were present. The young Virginian went right in and stood there smiling--it was so different from what he had expected!--when an Indian spied him and gave an ear-splitting warwhoop.
The dancers stopped as if shot. All stared at the tall young officer with the keen but kindly eyes. After a moment the newcomer raised his voice and said, “Go on with the dancing, but I wish to announce that you are no longer subjects of King George. This fort and this place now belong to the State of Virginia.” As he spoke, his men burst in and took the French officers prisoner. Clark added, to the village people,
“You can go to your homes, but you must stay there. All who leave their houses to-night will do so under pain of death. The town is guarded by my men.”
The French settlers spent the night in fear, for Clark disarmed the village at once. Some of their chief men came to him next day to beg him to spare their lives. The young commander shook hands with them and told them that they need not be afraid of any one but the British. “King Louis of France,” he explained, “is the friend of America. He is going to help us in our fight for liberty.”
The French were all glad to hear the good news and lost no time in swearing to be true to the United States government.
In his record, Clark went on:
“The scene was changed from almost dejection to that of joy in the extreme--the bells ringing, the church crowded, returning thanks--in short, every appearance of extravagant joy that could fill a place with almost confusion.”
To Colonel George Rogers Clark and his sturdy pioneers this easy campaign so far seemed like a pleasure excursion. They were well received also at Fort Cahokia, on the Mississippi across from St. Louis. Then a French volunteer took a few men to Fort Sackville at Vincennes and placed them on guard there. Thus the three scattered strongholds of the British in the Northwest Territory came to belong to the new State of Virginia.
When Governor Hamilton got word, by Indian runner, of all that had happened, he came down from Detroit to Vincennes on the Wabash with five hundred English and Indians in canoes. He easily retook Fort Sackville, for Clark had not been able to spare more than half a dozen men to hold it.
By that time winter had come on, and the Wabash began to rise and flood its banks. The river overflowed this part of the country so regularly that the region was called “the drowned lands.” The flood, of course, made it impossible for Hamilton to march his men to the Mississippi. He announced that he would wait until spring before retaking the other forts. So he sent away his Indian allies and ordered part of his troops back to winter quarters at Detroit.
When the young Kentucky colonel heard of this he saw a chance to spring another surprise. He started out with one hundred and seventy men to travel two hundred and fifty miles through, rather than over, trails almost impossible to pass because of snow, ice, and overflowing streams. The worst part of all the journey was at the last, near Vincennes, where the whole country looked like a large lake. Clark himself led the way, feeling out the path with his feet. He placed the tall, stalwart men among those who were smaller and weaker. Sometimes they had to wade in the icy waters up to their necks. Only the hardiest of the pioneers could endure long hours in such cold water. Some of the men became numb and unconscious. Their robust companions carried them in their arms or held them on floating logs until they came to a dry knoll like an oasis in the desert. There the active men would rub and warm the chilled bodies of the rest. Meantime a meal would be prepared of duck, venison, or other game, which Clark and his more able-bodied men had been able to shoot, dress, and cook in the ways best approved by hungry pioneers. After they had eaten and dried their clothes, they would make up lost sleep. Clark himself was a wonder of endurance, cheerfulness, and tact. He started his men singing the favorite songs of the frontier, like, “Keep Your Powder Dry,” and encouraged and animated them by every means in his power.
It took five days to wade the last nine miles. Washington’s crossing the Delaware in boats was a short and easy passage compared with this feat of George Rogers Clark. But the humor of the American pioneer, who made a joke of his hardest experiences, saved the day. Clark wrote of the “antic little drummer-boy” who floated across a river on his drum; but he did not tell how a tall soldier took that drummer on his shoulder and led the way through deep waters, while the boy beat a merry march for that shivering, laughing company.
Near Vincennes they met a man out shooting ducks. From him they learned that Hamilton and his garrison did not dream of being attacked. By this man Clark sent in to the people of the settlement this warning:
“To the Inhabitants of Post Vincennes:
“_Gentlemen_: Being now within two miles of your village with my army, determined to take your fort this night, and not willing to surprise you, I take this method to request such of you as are true citizens and willing to enjoy the liberty I bring you, to remain in your houses; and those, if any there be, that are friends to the king, will instantly repair to the fort, and join the _hair-buyer general and fight like men_! Those who are true friends of liberty may depend on being well treated; and I once more request them to keep out of the streets, for every one I find in arms on my arrival I shall treat as an enemy.
(Signed) G. R. CLARK.”
As a result of this notice, the Indians took to the woods and the French villagers shut themselves in their homes. Clark and his men soon rushed into the town and surrounded Fort Sackville. The next day a party of “British” Indians came into town on their ponies, grinning and shaking the scalps they had taken from a number of Kentucky settlers. These Indians on the warpath did not know of the presence of the little American army until some wrathful Kentuckians fell upon and killed every one of them in plain view of Hamilton and his soldiers. The besieged garrison fought desperately for days, but the pioneer sharpshooters with their deadly aim forced them to surrender.
The British never attempted to take the little river fortresses again. And when the treaty of peace was signed between the young United States and old England, that vast Northwest Territory was safe in the hands of the new nation. But for the great thought so heroically carried out by George Rogers Clark and his men, that western empire--now occupied by the states of Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin--would at the end of the war have belonged to England. As Clark said to Governor Patrick Henry when he outlined his plan of capturing the three river forts and holding all that territory for the United States of America: “A country which is not worth defending is not worth claiming.”
LEWIS AND CLARK, TWO ADVENTURERS IN THE FAR WEST
William Lewis, a nephew of General Washington’s sister Betty, lived near Thomas Jefferson’s beautiful estate in Albemarle County, Virginia. Two years before Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, a boy was born into the Lewis family. This baby was given his mother’s maiden name, Meriwether.
Twenty-five years after writing the Declaration Jefferson became President of the United States and went to live in the still unfurnished White House in the new city of Washington. Then he chose for his secretary Meriwether Lewis, whom he had seen grow up from boyhood. He was such a remarkable young man that later ex-President Jefferson wrote, in a story of the life of his former secretary:
“When only eight years of age, he often went out in the dead of night alone with his dogs into the forest, to hunt the raccoon and opossum (which, seeking their food in the night, can then only be taken), plunging through the winter’s snows and frozen streams in pursuit of his object.
“His talent for seeing things led him to a true knowledge of plants and animals of his own country. At the age of twenty, yielding to the ardor of youth and a passion for more dazzling pursuits, he engaged as a volunteer in a body of militia called out by President Washington. At twenty-three he was promoted to a captaincy and appointed paymaster of his regiment.”