The Taking of Jemima Boone: Colonial Settlers, Tribal Nations, and the Kidnap That Shaped America

Dedication

Dedicated to the memory of Ian Pearl,

1972–2020

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Cast of Characters

Prologue

Book I: The Taking

Chapter 1: Duck

Chapter 2: Bloody Ground

Chapter 3: The Plan

Chapter 4: Ends of the Earth

Book II: Retaliation

Chapter 5: Fallout

Chapter 6: Rise of Blackfish

Chapter 7: Families

Book III: The Reckoning

Chapter 8: Risen

Chapter 9: Before the Thunder

Chapter 10: The Last Siege

Chapter 11: Aftershocks

Author’s Note

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

About the Author

Also by Matthew Pearl

Copyright

About the Publisher

Cast of Characters

Prologue

REBECCA BOONE NOTICED SOMETHING MISSING as she looked out over the garrison at Moore’s Fort in southwest Virginia: men. Instead, she saw the other wives of the hunters and military officers staying at the fort. The early 1770s on the frontier—the sparsely populated stretches of Virginia and the areas westward across mountainous borders—meant residing either in standalone cabins or in cabins clustered into stations or forts, which included protective structures to keep attackers at bay. Conflicts with American Indian tribes came at a quick and bloody clip, so most frontier men were commissioned as soldiers by colonial governments, whether or not they wanted to be.

On this summer day, those men were out of sight. Some were away from the fort playing ball; others napped in the fields. They hadn’t even bothered bringing guns with them. The father of one of the men, nicknamed Old Daddy, had stayed behind, but conventional wisdom held the elderly as irrelevant to the defense of the fort—much the way women were viewed. With Rebecca was her adolescent daughter Jemima. She had raven hair and tenacity like her mother’s, and a stubborn, independent streak like her father’s. Daniel Boone, the accomplished woodsman, was away on a mission into Kentucky, a purported promised land to which he had been drawn for years to the point of obsession. He continued to look for a way to settle there, against odds and logic.

Responsibility for the family, as often was the case, fell to Rebecca. Faced with the distressing sight of this unguarded fort, Rebecca decided to take a stand against the men. She instructed eleven-year-old Jemima to take a rifle. If the men weren’t going to use their weapons, the women would.

Rebecca and Jemima, along with Jemima’s older sister, Susannah, joined the other women of the fort. Upon a signal, they fired into the air as fast as they could. Then they raced to slam both gates of the fort, one in front and one at the back, locking them.

The men came stampeding toward the fort. They were all exceeding mad, one woman recounted of the events she witnessed as a nine-year-old. In their headlong rush, some of the men tumbled into a pond outside. One man scaled the wall—in the process unwittingly proving that this fort would not keep out enemies particularly well. He discovered the ruse. As the other men realized the trick by the ladies, they began to argue among themselves over the cause, and two or three fistfights broke out. Calls were made to have the women whipped. Jemima, holding a smoking rifle, watched the startling scene unfold around her, and the sight of this girl gripping the weapon alongside the other armed women likely squelched the idea of whipping anyone.

Rebecca had just demonstrated to young Jemima a crucial lesson. When the men in authority stumbled, women would have to rise up.

Jemima carried the lesson to Kentucky, where the family set up not just a home but a community, and she continued to build on it as she entered the folklore of the American frontier when she was kidnapped in July 1776. Theodore Roosevelt, writing in the late nineteenth century, observed that the epic story of Jemima’s kidnapping reads like a page out of one of Cooper’s novels, but the Rough Rider got it backward. In fact, the real incidents inspired James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, the 1826 adventure novel intertwining the fates of the colonists and Indians, a book that went on to become one of the most popular in the English language. But the transformation of life into literature can make the true story harder to observe independently from what it inspired. Another early chronicler of the West once complained about Cooper’s advantages compared to the chronicler’s attempts to gather facts about the Boones’ frontier: A novelist may fill up the blank from his own imagination; but a writer who professes to adhere to the truth, is fettered down to the record before him.

The records of the Boones’ experiences are deep and complex, however. Cooper’s novel and other literary and artistic interpretations retain only traces of the verve, excitement, and stakes of these original events. Nor was Jemima’s kidnapping a standalone moment, but rather part of a chain reaction that included another kidnapping, all-out military combat, and a courtroom drama that effectively put those preceding events on trial. Jemima Boone was in the middle of it all from the moment that chain reaction began.

Book I

The Taking

Chapter

1

Duck

ON THE DAY HER LIFE would be transformed, Jemima Boone was occupied like many girls her age—escaping chores and testing parental boundaries. This was July 14, 1776, ten days after the completion of the Declaration of Independence, but news of that turning point in the year-old Revolutionary War had not reached Jemima and her fellow settlers beyond the borders of the former colonies. While the fledgling American government was still spreading the word of its determination to form a nation independent from England, the frontier remained in limbo, caught in a struggle among Indians, settlers, the British, and nature itself.

Jemima strolled the banks of the Kentucky River with two friends downhill from the hardscrabble settlement where they had moved with their families. That year-old settlement was Fort Boone—or Boonesboro, as it was increasingly called—named for Jemima’s father, Daniel, but gesturing at her whole family’s contributions. Alongside Jemima walked Betsy and Fanny Callaway. Betsy, sixteen, had dark hair and complexion, and Fanny, fourteen, would be described as a fairy blonde. At thirteen, Jemima was the youngest of the trio and, having arrived before Betsy and Fanny, had eagerly welcomed companions near her own age.

They constituted a significant portion of the girls at the settlement, the total population of which was fluid but not more than a hundred. Childhood came with considerable autonomy on this frontier, but it also absorbed pressures and responsibilities. Considered an adult at sixteen, Betsy had recently gotten engaged, and the younger girls began to attract suitors. Now that they were in their teens, they were expected to contribute to one of the settlement’s scarcest resources: children.

Late the previous year, Dolly, an enslaved Black woman brought to Boonesboro by the Callaway family, had given birth to a son, the first non-Indian known to be born in Kentucky. Dolly’s motherhood is one of many early milestones achieved by members of the community who had no say in their arrival to this wilderness. Jemima’s older sister, Susannah, had by now given birth to a daughter, making Jemima more conspicuous in her status as next in line among Boones to start a family. In the short history of settlers pushing into Kentucky, there had yet to be a wedding. The teens and their families were still among the only non-Indians settled in Kentucky—the result of the controversial westward expansion that now faced obstacles at every level.

With summer blazing, the girls had felt confined at home, and this excursion broke up the monotony. It also held out the possibility of coming home with flowers, which could spruce up the spartan cabins in the settlement. The Callaway girls’ half sister, Kezia, who was seven and known as Cuzzy, and some of the other younger girls begged to go along, but the older ones sent them home disappointed. The trio kept walking until they reached the settlement’s lone canoe. One of the eligible young men at the fort, twenty-four-year-old Nathan Reid, had offered to row them out when he had heard about their plans earlier. But Reid never showed, and they may have already forgotten about his offer. The three friends didn’t need anybody’s help with the canoe or the river. Jemima had earned the childhood nickname Duck for taking to the water so naturally.

Climbing into the unadorned vessel, the three girls floated along the dark water, vegetation stretching above magnificent cliffs into the sky. Jemima had recently hurt herself stepping on a sharp stalk, the same kind of cane stalks lining the river’s edges. Draping her leg over the side of the canoe into the water soothed her but left her guard down.

THE BOONES HAD led the way to Kentucky before the Revolutionary War as they balanced a desire to stake out a new phase of life against portents of violence, which were often ignored. On one of Daniel Boone’s early expeditions through the treacherous passages, including the Cumberland Gap, he had encountered members of the Shawnee tribe, for whom the vast natural resources of Kentucky had not only material but also spiritual importance. The Shawnee creation origin story stressed the value of isolation and independence, envisioning the tribe on an island as the only people in the world. Kentucky, at least up to this point, might as well have been that mythic island. On this occasion, an Indian known to the explorers as Captain Will—a Cherokee by heritage who had shifted tribal allegiance to the Shawnee—warned Boone and his companions against incursions into this untrammeled territory, which was separated from Virginia by mountain ranges and rivers and had only recently begun to be mapped.

Now, brothers, Captain Will said, go home and stay there. Don’t come here anymore, for this is the Indians’ hunting ground, and all the animals, skins and furs are ours; and if you are so foolish as to venture here again, you may be sure the wasps and yellow jackets will sting you severely.

The American Indians who frequented Kentucky, including from the Shawnee and Cherokee tribes, faced the prospect of the first permanent incursion into an area they had inhabited for some ten thousand years. The eighteenth century had brought with it greater but still limited exposure to outsiders, through European trade and religious missions. Boone and his fellow explorers represented a sea change, an attempt to set a course toward seizing Kentucky. The exact meaning of the name Kentucky has been lost, but it’s believed to mean the Land of Tomorrow in one Iroquoian dialect, unintentionally matching these colonists’ objectives, a grave threat to the local tribes’ futures.

The solemn warning from Captain Will failed to dissuade the explorers, who continued to marshal resources for additional scouting trips into Kentucky. Daniel Boone occupied a role during this formative moment of American history harder to categorize than the politician or the military commander, though at times he served as both. Boone was a settler in the most literal sense of the word. That was his true vocation—to settle areas new to him and often to the colonists. Hunter, woodsman, explorer, surveyor: these skills all helped make him this consummate settler. Though Boone generally sought peaceful coexistence with Indians, he relentlessly pushed into other people’s territories, prompting conflict—thus his preoccupation with Kentucky.

Boone’s early, temporary excursions into the Land of Tomorrow gave him a sense of the beauty and unknown dangers he could expect. On one hunting jaunt, he and fellow woodsmen read from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, a fantasy voyage into unknown lands. The edition they read from likely contained a map of Brobdingnag, land of giants, situated by Swift somewhere in North America. The trips also led to property claims on the land by the travelers, in turn prompting a demand for surveyors to record those claims. One such team of surveyors put their lives on the line to parcel off two thousand acres below the Elk River for George Washington, then a representative to the Virginia legislature, and in two other spots recorded seven thousand acres for another legislator, Patrick Henry, who was ready to carve out a large piece of property in a place unknown to him. Washington and Henry, like other influential politicos, believed they could get rich from pushing into the territory. Joining the rolls of early surveyors was Hancock Taylor, whose nephew Zachary later became president of the United States. As he traveled in 1774, Taylor stopped to christen a spring with his daughter’s nickname, Jessamine. While Taylor’s team floated down the Kentucky River, Indians riddled their canoe with bullets, killing one of Taylor’s men and shooting Taylor twice. As an indication of the vital importance ascribed to land claims by the settlers, Taylor was brought the survey book on his deathbed. Another surveyor told him he ought to sign them, according to a later deposition, and he did before he passed away. With lives risked and lost through these explorations, actually living in Kentucky seemed about as farfetched as settling Brobdingnag.

Fanciful notions gave way to material plans as the settlers completed a series of treaties with tribes in the mid-1770s, sometimes forced onto the Indians by the military might of the settlers. For one of these negotiations, a group of land speculators had asked Boone to help draw up an agreement with the Cherokee over lands on the south side of the Kentucky River. This I accepted, Boone later remembered, as related by his biographer. This brought Boone to an assembly of Cherokee and colonial representatives at the Watauga River, in present-day Tennessee, in the spring of 1775, shortly before the Revolutionary War began. Even when strife with Indians spread, Boone usually came off as fair-minded, poised, and hospitable, a natural ally to them. He advised another settler about how to comport himself. Approach Indians, Boone opined, frankly and fearlessly, showing not the slightest sign of fear or trepidation. By kind acts and just treatment, keep on the friendly side of them. For Boone, philosophy doubled as strategy. Among the like-minded leaders of the Cherokee was the aged Oconostota, who had been lobbying for peace with colonists for decades.

This crowd gathered at Sycamore Shoals, named for its giant trees, on the southern bank of the Watauga. Richard Henderson was among the colonists’ leaders in the venture. Henderson, thirty-nine, was an attorney and judge who had pushed back against restrictions on land expansion, especially into Kentucky, where by this point settlers had a track record of false starts and aborted explorations. Henderson saw a chance to make a fortune with a new colony. He spearheaded the weeks-long treaty negotiation. Along with the delegates, witnesses, and other attendees, the scenery filled out with wagons overflowing with goods and weapons, payment by the settlers for the Cherokee land. Covering twenty million acres in parts of what are now two states, the treaty was one of the largest land exchanges in American history. It paved the way for Boone and others to call for permanent settlement.

Another pioneer who arrived at the gathering, Richard Callaway, would have been taken for a ghost by others present. Though only in his fifties, Callaway had been on his deathbed with a serious illness the last time most of the attendees would have heard of him. He had rushed out a final will, which reflected property transactions over two decades amounting to thousands of acres. An orphan at a young age, Callaway had followed his older brothers in accumulating land and serving in a variety of governmental and bureaucratic roles, which helped the clan consolidate power and influence. Tall and muscular with streaks of gray growing into his black hair, Callaway was a man proud of his family name and accomplishments, and with the unexpected recovery of his health came renewed ambitions for a larger fortune and more power. No level of societal respect or wealth ever seemed to be enough for Richard Callaway.

The settlers took pains to appear fair, having translators present from both sides, but not everyone approved of the dealings. Some observers later claimed settlers plied tribal negotiators with alcohol, despite other testimony that insisted liquor was kept away until after the treaty was finalized. Even putting aside the contested integrity of the proceedings, some members of the Cherokee community disagreed in principle with concessions made by their leadership, especially what they considered to be the egregious surrender of vital tribal hunting grounds in Kentucky.

Dragging Canoe, part of the younger generations of Cherokee leaders, broadcast his displeasure. The man had received his name—Tsi-yu’gunsi’ni—from an incident in his boyhood, when he had insisted that he could haul a canoe for a war party but instead could only drag it. His strong will carried over into adulthood. He stamped his foot and gave a scathing speech about the land deal, though he did not stand in the way of its completion. He called the Kentucky lands involved in the deal bloody ground that would be dark and difficult to settle. Dragging Canoe’s declaration got the settlers’ attention, as did its ambiguous wording. Some who heard his speech thought the bloody ground referred to a history of violence in Kentucky among competing tribes; others interpreted it as a warning of violence to come against the settlers. Dragging Canoe added some details that supported the latter interpretation when he remarked that even if the Cherokee respected the settlers’ new claims, other tribes certainly would not—the Shawnee a prime example. Truth was, Dragging Canoe himself had no plans to accept this turn of events.

Years earlier, the British had forbidden private purchase of lands from American Indians such as the one Henderson engineered, having cited the great dissatisfaction of the said Indians involved in such transactions. During this final stretch before war broke out between the colonies and their motherland, authorities came down hard. The royal governor of North Carolina, the colony from which Boone and many of the others involved in the Sycamore Shoals treaty had traveled, rushed out a proclamation against the unwarrantable and lawless undertaking by Henderson, taking pains to point out the inferior classes of people the new settlement could attract. A settlement may be formed, read the proclamation, that will become an Asylum to the most abandoned Fugitives from the several Colonies. The leaders of the venture now faced the prospect of becoming fugitives themselves. Lord Dunmore, the royal governor of Virginia, added a proclamation that Richard Henderson, and other disorderly persons, his associates (Daniel Boone would have counted chief among these) who had made pretense of a purchase made from the Indians, should be immediately fined & imprisoned.

Such brewing controversies loomed, but at the same time felt far removed geographically and philosophically from Watauga. To observe Daniel Boone during those days was to see a man surrounded by friends and admirers, settlers and Indians alike, a trailblazer watching his long-gestating dream to push into Kentucky turn into reality. While in Watauga at this formative moment, the Boone family lived in a cabin bustling with activity. Daniel and Rebecca, who was pregnant at the time, were joined by their six children, including daughters Jemima and Susannah, along with Susannah’s new husband, William Hays.

Jemima had grown into a precocious twelve-year-old with long dark hair that reached almost to her feet. Her personality tended toward being hopeful, bold, and strong-willed—in her own way, as strong-willed as Dragging Canoe, who had refused to admit he couldn’t carry his tribe’s dugout. With the backdrop of historic events and meetings, Jemima actively engaged with the many new people who passed through the treaty grounds.

Since the time Jemima was a baby, the family had relocated from Virginia to North Carolina, with a detour by her father to journey into Florida and secure land there; instead of going south, the brood moved several times to remote spots with simple cabins. Jemima’s was a life of constantly changing and widening horizons. When Daniel was with his family, he danced at celebrations and holidays, played tricks on his loved ones, and provided meat for feasts. But just as often he was off on hunts and expeditions, at one point being away for the better part of two years. When they would move and say good-bye to older family members, it came with the knowledge they’d probably not see them again—as when Jemima, at ten years old, last saw her grandmother, Sarah Boone, a farewell filled with tears.

Their family now prepared for yet another transformation, with a change of scenery almost entirely unique among settlers in the history of the American colonies, and with little idea what to expect.

BEFORE BEGINNING HER own journey, Jemima, as usual, had to watch her father leave without them. The treaty was not even complete when Daniel started for Kentucky with an advance team. He left so abruptly that some later debated whether or not he ever was present at Sycamore Shoals. Though bidding good-bye to him had become routine, this particular trip carried different connotations than earlier ones. Boone, who had served the interests of military and political leaders, now chased a purpose at once grander and more personal. He was staking claim to a new community built on his values and those of his family and collaborators, resting upon a vision of industrious citizenship and personal independence. There were ample reasons to doubt the wisdom and viability of pushing into Kentucky, including the proclamations that declared them outlaws subject to arrest. One member of the North Carolina government, hearing of the Kentucky project and related settlement plans hatched by Boone’s benefactor, Richard Henderson, reportedly asked if Dick Henderson had lost his head. Such profound doubts about their success would only have motivated Boone, who thrived on overcoming challenges, sometimes to his detriment. The act of proving himself tended to put Boone in increasingly difficult circumstances, in which he then had to prove himself again and again, until losing touch with his original purpose.

Boone’s thirty-person advance party into Kentucky included his younger brother, Squire, Rebecca’s cousin Billy Bush, a young clerk named Felix Walker, Captain William Twitty, and Richard Callaway, the stern colonel of the North Carolina militia. Once successful, Boone planned to return for his family. During the group’s trek, they used blades to cut through thickets, unifying trails previously forged by Indians and settlers with buffalo traces made by migrating animals, and thus cleared fresh passages through the dense wilderness. The way ahead was never easy; as one traveler wrote, it was either hilly, stony, slippery, miry, or bushy. Mountains surrounded them, towering hundreds of feet overhead. Part of what appealed so strongly to Boone and his compatriots about Kentucky were these inhospitable but majestic qualities—its representative status as a frontier.

Delightful beyond conception, one early settler phrased his impression of the land. At one point in the early days of exploration, Boone’s party saw a vast plain filled with buffalo (these were American buffalo, or bison), between two and three hundred, a mix of calves and adults, moving at different paces, some rushing, others loping—a gorgeous demonstration.

A new sky and strange earth seemed to be presented to our view, Walker later wrote. Walker, twenty-one, had bright blue eyes and stood about as tall as Boone. Crossing into Kentucky confirmed the stories he’d heard from trailblazing explorers including Boone. Wild game and rich vegetation seemed to be everywhere. It appeared that nature, in the profusion of her bounty, had spread a feast for all that lives, both for the animal and rational world. Being in the front guard of this expedition felt like being with Columbus and crew coming upon America—the mythologized version of that odyssey, at least—and, at times, even felt like being the first to enter the Garden of Eden (without, in Walker’s sunny view, any forbidden fruit). Boone, according to a likely dramatized account passed on by one of his grandsons, turned to the group and likened their circumstances to another biblical episode, that of the compassionate landowner Boaz: We are as rich as Boaz of old, having the cattle of a thousand hills. Walker, in a somewhat odd juxtaposition that did not bode very well for success, also thought to compare their party to that of Don Quixote. The Bible, Columbus, Cervantes—the choice of references reflected the feeling of epic importance they attached to the journey.

Conceiving of themselves as versions