The Story of the Thirteen ColoniesGuerber, H. A. (Hélène Adeline)
History
The Story of the Thirteen Colonies
Guerber, H. A. (Hélène Adeline)
United States -- History -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775
Although his army was small, it was composed of brave men, used
to the woods and to the Indian way of fighting. They followed him
boldly through the wilderness, fording rivers and streams. We are
told that they once came to water so deep that their little drummer
boy, seeing it would rise above his head, used his drum as a raft,
begging the tallest soldier to steer him safely across.
Marching thus from point to point, Clark's forces took all the forts
in the Illinois country; but as he had few men, he could not send
fair-sized garrisons to all. Some time after Vin-cennes´ submitted,
a large British force appeared to capture it, and loudly commanded
the American officer there to surrender. After some parley, this man
consented to do so, provided he and his garrison were allowed to
march out with all the honors of war.
The British officer granted this request; but imagine his surprise
and anger when he saw the officer march out, followed by only one
man! These two composed the whole garrison, and could boast that
they had held the fort of Vincennes against a force of eight hundred
men. When Clark heard what had happened, he marched over with a
large force and recaptured the fort.
LXXV. BOONE IN KENTUCKY.
As you have heard, the land south of the Ohio suffered much from
Indian raids. This part of the country had already been the scene of
so many Indian battles that it well deserved the name of Kentucky,
or the "dark and bloody ground." Six years before the Revolutionary
War began, Daniel Boone, a hardy pioneer, first crossed the
Alleghany Mountains and came into this beautiful region. Seeing the
tall forest trees and plentiful game, he thought it would be a good
place to live in.
After wandering about it for months, and escaping from the hands
of some Indians who had taken him captive, Boone made up his mind
to settle there. He therefore went back to North Carolina for
his wife and daughter, and, with his brother and several other
pioneers, returned to Kentucky where he formed a settlement called
Boones´bor-o (1775). Like all pioneer villages, this was merely a
collection of a few log huts, surrounded by a tall palisade to serve
as a rampart against Indian attacks.
Boone's daughter and two younger girls, little suspecting danger,
once went out in a canoe to pick flowers along the banks of a
stream. Suddenly several Indians sprang out of a thicket, seized
them, and bore them off into the woods. While the younger girls
cried helplessly, Boone's daughter, seeing it was of no use to
struggle, quietly followed her captor. But she took care to leave
the print of her shoe here and there where the soil was damp, to
break twigs of bushes, and to fasten shreds of her dress to the
briers along the way, so that her tracks could be followed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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