Colonel Smith was not the first whose captivity was passed in the
Ohio country, but there is no record of any earlier captivity, though
hundreds of captives were given up to Bouquet by the Indians. In spite
of the treaties and promises on both sides, the fighting went on, and
the wilderness was soon again the prison of the white people whom the
savages had torn from their homes. The Ohio tribes harassed the outlying
settlements of Pennsylvania and Virginia, whose borders widened westward
with every year; but they were above all incensed against the pioneers
of Kentucky. Ohio was their home; there they had their camps and towns;
there they held their councils and festivals; there they buried their
dead and guarded their graves. But Kentucky was the pleasance of all the
nations, the hunting ground kept free by common consent, and left to the
herds of deer, elk, and buffalo, which ranged the woods and savannas,
and increased for the common use. When the white men discovered this
hunter’s paradise, and began to come back with their families and waste
the game and fell the trees and plow the wild meadows, no wonder the
Indians were furious, and made Kentucky the Dark and Bloody Ground for
the enemies of their whole race, which they had already made it for one
another in the conflicts between the hunting parties of rival tribes.
It maddened them to find the cabins and the forts of the settlers in the
sacred region where no red man dare pitch his wigwam; and they made a
fierce and pitiless effort to drive out the invaders.
Among these was the famous Daniel Boone. He had heard of the glories of
the land from a hunter who wandered into Kentucky by chance and
returned to North Carolina to tell of it among his neighbors. Two years
afterwards, in 1769, when a man of forty, Boone came to see for himself
the things that he knew by hearsay, and he found that the half had not
been told. But among other surprises in store for him was falling into
the clutches of an Indian hunting party which ambushed him and the
friend who was with him. They both escaped, and soon afterwards Boone’s
brother and a neighbor, who had followed him from North Carolina,
chanced upon their camp. Boone’s friend was before long shot and
scalped by the Indians; the brother’s neighbor was lost in the woods and
devoured by the wolves. Then the brother went home for ammunition, and
Boone was left a whole year alone in the wilderness. The charm of its
life was so great for him that after two years more he returned to North
Carolina, sold his farm, and came to Kentucky with his family. Other
families joined them, and the little settlement founded in the woods
where he had ranged solitary with no friend but his rifle and with foes
everywhere, was called Boonesborough.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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