The Taking of Jemima Boone

The True Story of the Kidnapping and Rescue That Shaped a Nation

Matthew Pearl

• Editorial: Harper
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780062937810
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Early American History

"A rousing tale of frontier daring and ingenuity, better than legend on every front."—Pulitzer Prize–winning author Stacy Schiff

A Goodreads Most Anticipated Book

In his first work of narrative nonfiction, Matthew Pearl, bestselling author of acclaimed novel The Dante Club, explores the little-known true story of the kidnapping of legendary pioneer Daniel Boone's daughter and the dramatic aftermath that rippled across the nation.

On a quiet midsummer day in 1776, weeks after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, thirteen-year-old Jemima Boone and her friends Betsy and Fanny Callaway disappear near the Kentucky settlement of Boonesboro, the echoes of their faraway screams lingering on the air.

A Cherokee-Shawnee raiding party has taken the girls as the latest salvo in the blood feud between American Indians and the colonial settlers who have decimated native lands and resources. Hanging Maw, the raiders' leader, recognizes one of the captives as Jemima Boone, daughter of Kentucky's most influential pioneers, and realizes she could be a valuable pawn in the battle to drive the colonists out of the contested Kentucky territory for good.

With Daniel Boone and his posse in pursuit, Hanging Maw devises a plan that could ultimately bring greater peace both to the tribes and the colonists. But after the girls find clever ways to create a trail of clues, the raiding party is ambushed by Boone and the rescuers in a battle with reverberations that nobody could predict. As Matthew Pearl reveals, the exciting story of Jemima Boone's kidnapping vividly illuminates the early days of America's westward expansion, and the violent and tragic clashes across cultural lines that ensue.

In this enthralling narrative in the tradition of Candice Millard and David Grann, Matthew Pearl unearths a forgotten and dramatic series of events from early in the Revolutionary War that opens a window into America's transition from colony to nation, with the heavy moral costs incurred amid shocking new alliances and betrayals.

Notes

Prologue

Rebecca Boone noticed: Martha McCorkle (as “Mrs. Samuel Scott”), 1840s, Draper Manuscript Collection (DM) 11CC225–226, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, WI.

Jemima carried the lesson: Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, vol. 1 (New York: Putnam, 1889), 326; Stephen Railton, introduction to The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004), xii; John Alexander McClung, Sketches of Western Adventure (Cincinnati: U. P. James, 1839), 40.

Chapter 1: Duck

Jemima strolled the banks: Will. M. Bransford, “The Capture and the Rescue, Part 1,” Southern Lady’s Companion 2, no. 8 (Nov. 1848): 170 (though a romanticized account, this contains information provided by the Callaway family); George W. Ranck, Boonesborough (Louisville: John P. Morton, 1901), 41.

Late the previous year: Harry G. Enoch and Anne Crabb, African Americans at Fort Boonesborough, 1775–1784 (Richmond, KY: Fort Boonesborough Foundation, 2019), 30–31.

With summer blazing: Eudocia Estill, 1852, DM 24C31; Richard French, 1840s, DM 12CC203; Nathan and Olive Boone, 1851, DM 6S94; Daniel Boone Bryan, 1844, DM 22C14(10).

The Boones had led: Jerry E. Clark, The Shawnee (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015), 52–53.

“Now, brothers”: Lyman C. Draper, The Life of Daniel Boone, ed. Ted Franklin Belue (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1998), 216; Maureen Hancock Ward, The Hancock Brothers from Virginia (Richfield, ID: Hancock Family Organization, 1992), 11.

Boone’s early, temporary excursions: John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (New York: Henry Holt, 1993), 83; Anna M. Cartlidge, “Colonel John Floyd: Reluctant Adventurer,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 66, no. 4 (1968): 326; Neal O. Hammon, “The Fincastle Surveyors in the Bluegrass, 1774,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 70, no. 4 (Oct. 1972): 283, 286, 292.

Fanciful notions: John Filson, The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke (Wilmington, KY: James Adams, 1784), 46; Felix Walker, “Narrative of an Adventure in Kentucky in the Year 1775,” DeBow’s Review 16, no. 2 (Feb. 1854): 150–55; William Pitt Palmer, ed., Calendar of Virginia State Papers and Other Manuscripts, 1652–1781, vol. 1 (Richmond: R. F. Walker, 1875), 282ff; Ranck, ix; Joseph McCormick, 1870, DM 30C110–113.

Another pioneer: (Richard Callaway’s birth year has been in dispute. Possibilities include 1717, 1722, and 1724.) Charles W. Bryan Jr., “Richard Callaway, Kentucky Pioneer,” Filson Club History Quarterly 9 (Jan. 1935): 35–50.

The settlers took pains to appear fair: Stan Hoig, The Cherokees and Their Chiefs: In the Wake of Empire (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1998), 58; Palmer, ed., 282.

Dragging Canoe, part of the: Neal O. Hammon and Richard Taylor, Virginia’s Western War, 1775–1786 (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2002), 3; Palmer, ed., 283, 292.

Years earlier, the British had forbidden: “Proclamation Respecting New Governments in America,” Gentleman’s Magazine 33 (1763): 479; Ranck, 149, 181.

Such brewing controversies: Draper, Life, 363, note t; Delinda Boone Craig, 1866, DM 30C47; Faragher, 91.

Before beginning her own journey: Draper, Life, 363, note s; Ranck, 5.

Boone’s thirty-person advance party: Neal O. Hammon, “The First Trip to Boonesborough,” Filson Club History Quarterly 45 (July 1971): 249–63; Ranck, 192.

“Delightful beyond conception”: Willard Rouse Jillson, Tales of the Dark and Bloody Ground (Louisville: C. T. Dearing, 1930), 73; Ranck, 166.

“A new sky and strange earth”: Walker, 152; Harry G. Enoch, Pioneer Voices (Winchester, KY: 2012), 3.

Conceiving of themselves as versions of Columbus: Draper, Life, 337–38; Hammon and Taylor, Virginia’s Western War, 7.

Boone wrote weeks later: Walker, 154; Ranck, 169, 183.

Into these combustible circumstances: Sidney Lee, ed., Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 55 (New York: Macmillan, 1898), 102–3; John Ferdinand Smyth, A Tour in the United States, vol. 1 (London: G. Robinson, 1784), 331; Ranck, 32–33; Wilbur H. Siebert, “Kentucky’s Struggle with Its Loyalist Proprietors,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 7, no. 2 (Sept. 1920): 114–15.

The far bank of the Kentucky River: Stephen Hempstead, 1863, DM 16C76; Moses Boone, c. 1846, DM 19C48; S. Paul Jones, 1889, DM 21C8(3); William Phelps, 1868, DM 24C57; Willis A. Bush, 1853, DM 24C59(4); Estill, DM 24C31; Samuel Dixon, 1852, DM 24C30; Evisa Coshow, 1885, DM 21C28; Daniel Boone Bryan, DM 22C14(10).

Changes had swept the region: Ranck, 31–32.

A figure thrashed: French, DM 12CC204; Ranck, 180; Enoch and Crabb, African Americans at Fort Boonesborough, 62–63.

“Simon! How you scared me!”: Nathaniel Hart Jr., c. 1843, DM 17CC192; Daniel Boone Bryan, 1843, DM 22C5(9); Bush, DM 24C59(4); Nathan and Olive Boone, DM 6S94; Craig, DM 30C47.

Chapter 2: Bloody Ground

During that same era: Henry Timberlake, The Memoirs of Lieut. Henry Timberlake (London: J. Ridley, 1765), 33, 112.

Most of their exchange: Robert S. Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies (Toronto: Dundurn, 1993), 41; Delinda Boone Craig, 1866, DM 30C78.

That pattern played itself out: Reuben Gold Thwaites and Louise Phelps Kellogg, eds., Documentary History of Dunmore’s War, 1774 (Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society, 1905), 12; Robert G. Parkinson, “From Indian Killer to Worthy Citizen: The Revolutionary Transformation of Michael Cresap,” William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 1 (Jan. 2006): 100–101; Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History, Condition and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States, part 4 (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo & Co., 1854), 624; Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 357.

Soon after that: Peter C. Mancall, “‘The Bewitching Tyranny of Custom’: The Social Costs of Indian Drinking in Colonial America” in American Encounters: Natives and Newcomers from European Contact to Indian Removal, 1500–1850, eds. Peter C. Mancall and James H. Merrell (New York: Routledge, 2000), 194–215; James H. Perkins, Annals of the West (St. Louis: James R. Albach, 1851), 142.

According to one account: Colin G. Calloway, The Shawnees and the War for America (New York: Viking, 2007), 51.

When the dust settled: Thwaites and Kellogg, Documentary History, 433; Jerry E. Clark, The Shawnee (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2015), 56–57; Samuel Hazard, ed., Pennsylvania Archives, vol. 4 (Philadelphia: Joseph Severns, 1853), 497.

Whatever resistance Cornstalk put up: Joseph C. Jefferds, Captain Matthew Arbuckle: A Documentary Biography (Charleston, WV: Education Foundation, 1981), 62; Harry G. Enoch, Captain Billy Bush and the Bush Settlement (Winchester, KY: 2015), 14; Edward Eggleston and...