She was in great distress lest her children should perish with hunger, or the Indians kill them. They dared not hunt near the settlements, lest they should be discovered. The coon was dressed by singeing off the hair over a blaze of fire, and after throwing away the contents of the intestines, the animal was chopped in pieces and boiled in a kettle with the head, bones, skin and entrails, and made into a kind of soup. When done, and partially cooled, the children, mother, and Indians sat around the kettle, and with horn spoons, and sharpened sticks for forks, obtained a poor and scanty relief from starvation. They approached the Ohio river with caution, lest white people might be passing in boats. They camped in the woods near the present site of Hawesville, and made three rafts of dry logs, with slender poles lashed across with thongs of elm bark, and placed them near the river, that they might push them in and cross over before they became soaked in water and heavy. The wily Indians were too cunning to cross by daylight lest they should be discovered, and Mrs. Gilham was exceedingly terrified at the danger of crossing by night. However they all got over safely. The warriors considered it a great achievement to capture a white woman and three children in Kentucky, and elude all pursuit, and reach their own villages on Salt Creek, in the Illinois country, without being discovered. And they exercised all their cunning and sagacity to accomplish this daring feat. When they reached the wilderness south-west of the Ohio river, they were in the Indian country, and proceeded slowly. They hunted with such success in the country between the Ohio and White river that they had plenty of provisions. They kept to the right of the white settlements near Vincennes, and along the valley of White river, and crossed the Wabash below Terre Haute, and proceeded through the present counties of Clark, Coles and Macon to their towns in Logan county.[39] There they held a season of feasting and frolicing with their friends for their successful enterprize. And here we will leave Mrs. Gilham and her children, distributed as they were among different Indian families, and suffering all the hardships of Indian captives, until the war was over in 1795.