The Life and Times of Col. Daniel Boone, Hunter, Soldier, and Pioneer: With Sketches of Simon Kenton, Lewis Wetzel, and Other Leaders in the Settlement of the WestEllis, Edward Sylvester
History
The Life and Times of Col. Daniel Boone, Hunter, Soldier, and Pioneer: With Sketches of Simon Kenton, Lewis Wetzel, and Other Leaders in the Settlement of the West
Boone was not to be an idle spectator of the famous Dunmore War going
on around him. In the month of June, 1774, he and Michael Stoner were
requested by Governor Dunmore of Virginia to go to the falls of
the Ohio, for the purpose of guiding into the settlement a party of
surveyors, sent out some months before.
Boone and his friend promptly complied, and conducted the surveyors
through the difficult and dangerous section without accident,
completing a tour of eight hundred miles in a couple of months.
Shortly afterward Boone rejoined his family on Clinch river, and was
there when Governor Dunmore sent him a commission as captain, and
ordered him to take command of three contiguous garrisons on the
frontier, during the prosecution of the war against the Indians.
Boone, who had proven his coolness and intrepidity many a time, was
equally prompt in discharging the responsible duty with which the
governor honored him. It is believed that the pioneer was present at
the famous battle of Point Pleasant, which perhaps was the most furious
contest ever waged with the Indians on Virginia soil.
The Shawanoes, Delawares, Mingoes, Wyandots and Cayugas, to the number
of 1500, and under the leadership of such famous chiefs as Logan,
Cornstock, Elenipsico, Red-Eagle and others, made a fight against
General Lewis and his brave Virginians, not only with bravery, but with
a skill which came within a hair's-breadth of annihilating the entire
force of whites as utterly as was that of General Custer more than a
century later.
Finally, however, the sanguinary fight terminated in favor of the
Virginians, by a skillful maneuvre at the proper moment, and the
savages were completely routed. Not long afterward a treaty of peace
was made in which the Indians surrendered all claim to Kentucky. As the
Six Nations had done the same six years before, it may be said that all
the aboriginal title to Kentucky was extinguished when Boone settled
there.
Dunmore's War having terminated with the utter overthrow of the
combined tribes, the militia that had been called into service were
discharged, and Boone returned to his family on Clinch River.
He had already become known as a hunter and explorer possessing great
daring and shrewdness, and those were the days when such men were
needed in wresting the Western wilderness from the grasp of the wild
Indian, who was sure to fight the advancing hosts of civilization with
the treacherous fierceness which the barbarian always displays in
defending its young.
Boone, therefore, had been home but a short time, when he received a
request from a company of North Carolinians, who proposed purchasing
a large tract of land lying to the south of Kentucky River from the
Cherokee Indians, to attend their treaty to be held at Wataga in
March, 1775, with a view of negotiating with them, and determining the
boundaries of the purchase.
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