Daniel Boone by Reuben Gold Thwaites

Author:Reuben Gold Thwaites
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-06-04T16:00:00+00:00

Such, however, was the stubbornness of the defense, in which the women were, in their way, quite as efficient as the men, that the forces under Black Fish could make but small impression upon the valiant little garrison. Every artifice known to savages, or that could be suggested by the French, was without avail. Almost nightly rains and the energy of the riflemen frustrated the numerous attempts to set fire to the cabins by throwing torches and lighted fagots upon their roofs; a tunnel, intended to be used for blowing up the walls, was well under way from the river bank when rain caused it to cave in; attempts at scaling were invariably repelled, and in sharpshooting the whites as usual proved the superiors.

But the result often hung in the balance. Sometimes the attack lasted throughout the night, the scene being constantly lighted by the flash of the rifles and the glare of hurling fagots. Besiegers and garrison frequently exchanged fierce cries of threat and defiance, mingled with many a keen shaft of wit and epithet; at times the yells and whoops of the savages, the answering shouts and huzzahs of the defenders, the screams of women and girls, the howling of dogs, the snorting and bellowing of the plunging live stock, together with the sharp rattle of firearms, created a deafening hubbub well calculated to test the nerves of the strongest.

At last, on the morning of Friday, the eighteenth, the Indians, now thoroughly disheartened, suddenly disappeared into the forest as silently as they had come. Again Boonesborough was free, having passed through the longest and severest ordeal of attack ever known in Kentucky; indeed, it proved to be the last effort against this station. Within the walls sixty persons had been capable of bearing arms, but only forty were effective, some of these being negroes; Logan's Fort had sent a reenforcement of fifteen men, and Harrodsburg a few others. Of the garrison but two were killed and four wounded, while Boone estimated that the enemy lost thirty-seven killed and a large number wounded. The casualties within the fort were astonishingly small, when the large amount of ammunition expended by the besiegers is taken into account. After they had retired, Boone's men picked up a hundred and twenty-five pounds of flattened bullets that had been fired at the log stronghold, handfuls being scooped up beneath the port-holes of the bastions; this salvage made no account of the balls thickly studding the walls, it being estimated that a hundred pounds of lead were buried in the logs of one of the bastions.

A week later a small company of militiamen arrived from Virginia, and several minor expeditions were now made against the Shawnese upon their own soil. These raids were chiefly piloted by Boone's salt-makers, many of whom had now returned from captivity. Boone is credited with saying in his later years, although no doubt in ruder language than this: "Never did the Indians pursue so disastrous a policy as when they

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