A tradition exists that while in Virginia that summer Boone called upon his former host at Detroit, then a prisoner of war, and expressed sympathy for the sad plight into which the English governor had fallen; also some indignation at the harsh treatment accorded him, and of which Hamilton bitterly complained. The founder of Boonesborough was soon back at his station, for he served as a juryman there on the first of July. During his absence immigration into Kentucky had been greater than ever; three hundred well-laden family boats had arrived in the spring from the Pennsylvania and New York frontiers, while many caravans had come from Virginia and the Carolinas over the Wilderness Road. Attacks by Indian scalping parties had been numerous along both routes, but particularly upon the Ohio. As a reprisal for Bowman's expedition of the previous year, and intending to interrupt settlement, Colonel Byrd, of the British Army, descended in June upon Ruddle's and Martin's Stations, at the forks of the Licking, with six hundred Indians and French-Canadians, and bringing six small cannon with which to batter the Kentucky palisades. Both garrisons were compelled to surrender, and the victors returned to Detroit with a train of three hundred prisoners--men, women, and children--upon whom the savages practised cruelties of a particularly atrocious character. This inhuman treatment of prisoners of war created wide-spread indignation upon the American border. In retaliation, George Rogers Clark at once organized an expedition to destroy Pickaway, one of the principal Shawnese towns on the Great Miami. The place was reduced to ashes and a large number of Indians killed, the Americans losing seventeen men. Clark had previously built Fort Jefferson, upon the first bluff on the eastern side of the Mississippi below the mouth of the Ohio, in order to accentuate the claim of the United States that it extended to the Mississippi on the west; but as this was upon the territory of friendly Chickasaws, the invasion aroused their ire, and it was deemed prudent temporarily to abandon the post.