Daniel Boone: The Pioneer of KentuckyAbbott, John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot)
History
Daniel Boone: The Pioneer of Kentucky
Abbott, John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot)
Boone, Daniel, 1734-1820
The fortress at Boonesborough consisted of ten strong log huts arranged
in a quadrangular form, enclosing an area of about one-third of an acre.
The intervals, as before stated, between the huts, were filled with
strong palisades of timber, which, like the huts themselves, were
bullet-proof. The outer sides of the cabins, together with the
palisades, formed the sides of the fort exposed to the foe. Each of
these cabins was about twenty feet in length and twelve or fifteen in
breadth. There were two entrance gates opposite each other, made of
thick slabs of timber, and hung on wooden hinges. The forest, which was
quite dense, had been cut away to such a distance as to expose an
assailing party to the bullets of the garrison. As at that time the
Indians were armed mainly with bows and arrows, a few men fully supplied
with ammunition within the fort could bid defiance to almost any number
of savages. And subsequently, as the Indians obtained fire-arms, they
could not hope to capture the fort without a long siege, or by assailing
it with a vastly overwhelming superiority of numbers. The accompanying
illustration will give the reader a very correct idea of this renowned
fortress of logs, which was regarded as the Gibraltar of Indian warfare.
Having finished this fort Daniel Boone, leaving a sufficient garrison
for its security, set out for his home on the Clinch river to bring his
wife and family to the beautiful land he so long had coveted for their
residence. It seems that his wife and daughters were eager to follow
their father to the banks of the Kentucky, whose charms he had so
glowingly described to them. Several other families were also induced to
join the party of emigration. They could dwell together in a very social
community and in perfect safety in the spacious cabins within the
fortress. The river would furnish them with an unfailing supply of
water. The hunters, with their rifles, could supply them with game, and
with those rifles could protect themselves while laboring in the fields,
which with the axe they had laid open to the sun around the fort. The
hunters and the farmers at night returning within the enclosure, felt
perfectly safe from all assaults.
Daniel Boone commenced his journey with his wife and children, and
others who joined them, back to Boonesborough in high spirits. It was a
long journey of several hundred miles, and to many persons it would seem
a journey fraught with great peril, for they were in danger almost every
mile of the way, of encountering hostile Indians. But Boone, accustomed
to traversing the wilderness, and accompanied by well armed men, felt no
more apprehensions of danger than the father of a family would at the
present day in traveling by cars from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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