WE MAY WELL BELIEVE that in the long winter evenings of the 1820s before the blazing logs in the rude fireplaces
of the Boone cabins near modern Milton, the first settlers sometimes gathered and swapped stories of the wilderness.
In those cabins dwelt men and women who had lived lives of continuous adventure; Zachariah Allen, Revolutionary
patriot and one of Marion's noted band; Dinah Boone Allen, member of the "bevy of young ladies" who in
1775 had traveled Boone's Trace to Cumberland Gap, where, one afternoon in 1769, Daniel Boone, "wearing the
coonskin cap that crowned him king of solitary adventurers," had stood upon the mountain's summit and gazed
upon the beautiful landscape of the promised land of Kentucky.
Here, too, we may well believe, would often gather the sons and daughters of Dinah Boone, children of the wilderness,
cradled on the "dark and bloody ground," all of them capable of summoning up remembrances of many a moving
chance by flood and field; here, too, doubtless, would sometimes gather those of the Boone kin from across the
Mississippi, along with neighbors in the early settlement who had come out of the east and who had known the Boones
and adventured with them in Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Ohio and Indiana. In a few years,
more than twenty families from the older Boone settlements had settled around the early Boone Allen cabins.
The Boones were a social people. They delighted in neighborhood gatherings. On foot, on horseback, in the rude
vehicles of their day, they went far afield to visit kin and friends. Their one and two-room cabins were often
filled to o'erflowing. Their puncheon floors resounded to shuffling feet, to the tune of a squeaky fiddle. The
small cabins could not accommodate all the dancers at once. By blazing log heaps in the cabin clearings the others
made merry while waiting their turn on the floor.
Weddings, and all the fun and frolic that accompanied them in those days, were gala occasions. Sometimes Lewis
Allen, Dinah Boone's son, was the wedding minister; sometimes it was Elijah Garrison, Dinah Boone's son-in- law;
sometimes it was John Garrison, son of Abraham, 1825 comers to this region. They went for miles to these early
weddings, sometimes in wagons or oxcarts, more generally on horseback. "Some had crude saddles of a sort but
many rode quite simply with blanket and surcingle, the women sitting behind and clinging tightly to the men's waists.
Everybody was out for a good time. The practical joker was in his element."
Some of the oldest inhabitants of Montezuma and pearl remember the gatherings in the early home of Uncle Zack and
Uncle Enoch Garrison, the grandsons of Dinah Boone. Neighborhood gatherings at their places were of almost weekly
occurrences. Wesley Brown of Pearl says it was not uncommon to see 25 to 35 people gathered at Enoch Garrison's
on Sunday."
Mr. Brown recalls the early one-room cabin of Isaac Groce, who married Lucy Ann Garrison, and whose children, at
the time he recalls, were Rosa and Matilda and Joseph and William, the latter still living at Pearl at the age
of 70. "Rose and Till and Joe and Bill" he says was a popular refrain in the hills of Pearl those many
years ago. Rose and Till and Joe and Bill were great granddaughters and grandsons of Dinah Boone. When the boys
of the neighborhood came courtin,' they and the girls talked it over by the ramshackle cook stove in the one-room
cabin. Once, he relates, the fire got low and one of the ardent young swains tried to revive it; the door to the
stove came apart and the girls' father, the only one who could fix it, refused to get up at that time of night.
But love laughed at locksmiths then as always. Rose married James W. Mulligan of Greene county in 1881 and Tillie
married James Mohaney of Pearl in 1882; both are dead.
The old-time festivities belong to an almost forgotten past. There were "raisings" and "log rollings"
and "quiltings" and "apple-paring" and "husking bees." While the younger generation
made merry at some of these gatherings, the older men and women sat by the fireplace and smoked their pipes and
recounted many a tale of stirring adventure on the frontiers.
Of one such occasion of adventurous recital in the log house of the Boone Allens on the Milton road, we have authentic
record. This record, based upon personal recollections of Noble Shaw and Rebecca Burlend, has to do with a visit
of Mima Boone, daughter of Daniel, to the home of her Pike county relatives, an event that appears to have been
long remembered among the early settlers of Detroit and Montezuma.
One historian has stated that Daniel Boone's daughters, of whom there were four, "all married, living and
died in Kentucky." This is incorrect. Jemima, second daughter of Daniel and Rebecca Boone (born in 1762),
came with her father and mother to Upper Louisiana (present Missouri) sometime in the period 1797-99, and her father,
in his old age, after the death in 1813 of his wife Rebecca, spent at least part of his time in Mima's home, she
being the wife of Flanders Callaway. It was in her home in September, 1820, that the great scout ate the generous
helping of sweet potatoes that set up the disorder from which he died three days later (September 20, 1820) in
the home of his son, Nathan, at the age of nearly 86.
Visitors to the neighborhood of the little town of Femme Osage, about 30 miles from St. Charles on the old Boone's
Lick Trail, may still see the two-story stone house (finished in 1820) built there by Nathan Boone and in which
his father died, the old house now being owned by Colonel Francis M. Curlee, a St. Louis attorney; nearby may be
seen the famous "judgment tree," a spreading American elm, believed to be 200 years old, under which
Daniel Boone, sitting as syndic or judge over a great district when all that region was under Spanish rule, without
any knowledge of law and with scant patience for legal technicalities, handed down decisions which, says Thwaites,
"based solely on common sense in the rough, were respected as if coming from the supreme bench."
And once, in the very early days of Pike county, Mima Boone came over from her Missouri home to visit her relatives
in Pike county, Illinois, and, in the cabin home of the Zachariah and Lewis Allens, on the Milton road, she was
seen by at least some of the early settlers of that region to whom she related the story of her capture by Indians
while canoeing on the Kentucky river in the time of the American Revolution.
Noble Shaw, native of North Carolina, who came to the county with his father Aaron in 1829, and Rebecca Burlend,
who came in 1831, both recounted the story of a daughter of Boone who was captured by the Indians, as they learned
it from settlers who were here long before they came and who claimed to have heard the story from the lips of the
heroine of the tale.
Rebecca Burlend's relation, in a letter to a daughter in England, is as follows:
"There was at this time much talk about trouble with the Indians and all of us were worried and frightened.
We had heard much about the cruelty and treachery of Indians from settlers who had been here for a long time, some
of them being former settlers of Kentucky, where there had been much Indian trouble and bloodshed. A. Mr. Allen,
who preached on Blue River, and a Mr. Clemens (this would be Lewis Allen and Ezekiel Clemmons) stopped one day
at our house on Big Blue; they told of having heard a daughter of a Mr. Boon, who was a relative of Mr. Allen,
and was visiting at his and his father's house some years previously, tell of being captured and dragged into the
wilderness by Indians in Kentucky during the American Revolution. It seemed that three young females, two of Mr.
Boon's daughters and another who I think they said was a relative, had been captured while they were out on a river
in a canoe, but were afterwards rescued. It seemed that Mr. Allen and the girls who were taken captive were related
— cousins, I believe."
It will be noted that the story of the capture here related differs materially from the true facts, as established
in other relations of Mima Boone and the relations of her father and of other historians of the incident. The three
victims of Indian capture were Jemima Boone and two of Colonel Richard Callaway's daughters, Elizabeth and Frances,
cousins of Dinah Boone. It is interesting to note, however, that G. Mercer Adam, in an introductory note to Cecil
B. Hartley's "Life of Daniel Boone," subscribes in part at least to the story as related in early Pike
county, when he says, in reference to the capture, that "two of his (Boone's) daughters were surprised while
canoeing on the river, though immediately rescued."
Mrs. Burlend's recollections fix the date of Mima Boone Callaway's visit in 1825. Ezekiel Clemmons, the first Pike
county Clemmons, and a native of Rowan county, North Carolina, in the Yadkin country of the Boones, arrived in
the county some time in that year; Zachariah Allen died in the latter part of the same year. According to Mrs.
Burlend, the visit must have occurred between the time of the Clemmons family's arrival and the death of Boone
Allen. Dinah Boone had died two years before. Mima's husband, Flanders Callaway, also was then dead; he, born in
Virginia December 9, 1758, died in Missouri August 19, 1824. He had been one of the treaty commissioners chosen
by Daniel Boone at the famous siege of Boonesborough during the Revolution, in 1778, and when running to the fort
after breaking from the treacherous Indian council, the little finger of his left hand had been shot off. He had
been one of Jemima's rescuers when she was captured by the Indians in 1776.
Mima Boone was 63 when she visited in the Boone Allen cabin near present Milton. She doubtless had ridden over
on horseback from her Missouri home, as she was accustomed to travel the wilderness trails in that fashion. It
is known that at an early date, probably prior to 1808, she and her husband had ridden horseback all the way from
the settlement in Upper Louisiana (in what is now Missouri) to Kentucky, to visit friends and relatives. Jemima
Boone, born in North Carolina on October 4, 1762, died in Montgomery county, Missouri, in 1829, four years after
her Pike county visit.
Hers was an eventful life. Her father, captured by the Shawnees in 1778, remained so long in captivity that his
wife and the younger children, giving him up as dead, abandoned Boonesborough and returned over the perilous trail
to their old home on the Yadkin, in North Carolina. Mima, marrying Flanders Callaway, nephew of Colonel Richard
Callaway, continued to live in her father's fort on the Kentucky. Her father, escaping his Shawnee captors, in
a thrilling flight through the wilderness, covering 160 miles in four days, reached the fort in time to warn of
impending attack.
In the memorable siege of the fort that followed. Mima Boone Callaway was wounded in the shoulder by a ball from
the rifle of the renegade negro, Pompey, who was with the Indian besiegers. He had gained a protected position
in a tree, from which he could shoot down into the stockade. Mima's father, seeing his daughter wounded, climbed
to a point of vantage and, spotting the sharpshooter who had shot Mima, tumbled him from his perch like a squirrel
from a tree with a ball from his trusty rifle in the center of the renegade's forehead. It was a wonderful shot,
said to be "near two hundred measured yards."
Mima once told of running many bullets in the siege, taking them in her apron too hot to handle and distributing
them. She also aided in putting out the fires on the roofs of the cabins in the stockade, kindled by arrowheads
wrapped in fiercely burning flax (looted from an outside cabin) and with the inner oily fiber of the shellbark
hickory. She said the women in the fort would dress in men's clothes and parade around to make an increased show
of numbers. In recorded recollections of Mima Boone's own statements, and in Mrs. Spraker's Boone volume, in the
Draper Manuscripts, and in Stewart Edward White's story of Boone are found the mention of incidents in Mima Boone's
life herein related.
Something about Mima Boone's capture by the Indians doubtless will be of interest to the hundreds of Boone and
Callaway descendants in this part of the county who may not be familiar with the story. The capture of Mima Boone
and the two Callaway girls afforded the groundwork for several works of western fiction that were eagerly read
in Pike county two generations ago, but around these various tales was woven a network of romance not wholly justified
by the facts.
The story told by the daughter of Boone in the pioneer cabin of the Boone Allens in that far day of 1825, in the
presence of Lewis Allen, Ezekiel Clemmons and perhaps others of the Boones and their early neighbors, must have
turned upon the following facts, constituting the generally accepted version as related by White, John Floyd and
other historians of the incident.
According to this version, three young females, members of the families of Boone and Callaway, went out from Boone's
fort at Boonesborough, on the bank of the Kentucky river, after Bible reading one hot Sunday afternoon, July 14,
1776, and taking an elm or birchbark canoe, paddled down and across the river from the fort to a rock that projected
into the stream, being all the time within sight of the fort. The three girls were Jemima Boone, 14, Frances Callaway,
about the same age, and Betsy Callaway, who was older. The two Callaway girls doubtless had been companions of
their cousin, Dinah Boone, on her journey from Virginia to Kentucky less than a year before.
While paddling about the rock and dabbling in the water (Mima Boone was once described by a relative as being "fond
of water as a duck"0 five Indians pounced upon the canoe from the thick growth on the river bank and seized
the frightened girls whose outcries were quickly stifled by threats of the tomahawk, although it is related that
Betsy Callaway managed to strike one of the Indians on the head with her canoe paddle before she was overpowered.
Dragging their captives into the thick cane, the Indians plunged into the wilderness, heading for the Warriors'
Trace leading to the Ohio.
Although the capture had occurred within sight of the fort, it had gone unobserved there and it was not until milking
time that the girls were missed and the alarm spread. Then the abandoned canoe was sighted and an investigation
of the river bank at the spot revealed what had happened.
Those from the fort, dividing into two parties, pursued as far as possible when night, settling upon the wilderness,
balked even men as experienced as they in following a covered trail. For the Indians, after entering the wilderness,
used every known device to confuse and baffle pursuit.
One party of pursuers, mounted, under Colonel Callaway, father of two of the captives, hastened to a crossing of
the Licking river, hoping to intercept the savages. Daniel Boone, father of the other captive, at the head of eight
picked men, among whom were Flanders Callaway, Jemima's lover, and Samuel Henderson and John Holder, lovers of
the Callaway girls, pursued on foot.
At daybreak, Boone and his party renewed the pursuit. Even though the Indians exercised the utmost ingenuity in
covering their trail, the captive girls (whose dresses had been shortened and their legs wrapped with the torn
clothing that they might be hurried more rapidly through the wild tangle of virgin undergrowth) succeeded, even
though watched by the keenest eyes in the world, in leaving signs to guide the pursuing party, sometimes dragging
their feet, at other times eluding the sharp eyes of their captors long enough to leave a shred of clothing on
a bush.
Boone, unraveling the trail and pursuing through the wilderness faster than the fleeing Indians, finally took a
short cut, and again picking up the trail in an old buffalo trace, thereby gained much time. As darkness was falling
upon the second day, Boone and the girls' lovers sighted the Indian party, which had just made camp and started
a fire to cook some meat. Huddled at the foot of a tree only a few feet from the fire, could be seen the three
poor little girls, "tattered, torn and despairing."
The situation called for the greatest cunning and caution of which Boone was capable. The slightest sound, the
crunching of a leaf, the snapping of a twig, and the tomahawks of the savages would be buried in the skulls of
their helpless captives.
Selecting three of his best marksmen and most experienced Indian fighters, among them one John Floyd, Boone crept
upon the encampment, inch by inch, until within striking distance, when, at a given signal, the four guns cracked
and the entire party rushed the encampment. Floyd, recounting the affair, said:
"Mr. Boone and myself had a pretty fair shot, just as they began to move off. I am well convinced I shot one
through; the one he shot dropped his gun, mine had none. The place was very thick with cane, and being so much
elated on recovering the three little broken-hearted girls, prevented our making any further search. We sent them
off without their moccasins and not one of them with so much as a knife or a tomahawk."
Three weeks later following an historic sequel to the foregoing adventure, when Betsy Callaway married her rescuer,
Samuel Henderson, theirs being the first wedding in Kentucky; Squire Boone, Daniel's younger brother, performing
the wedding ceremony in his capacity of Baptist elder. Later, Frances Callaway married John Holder, and Jemima
Boone married Flanders Callaway, two of the young backwoodsmen who had helped rescue them. At the wedding of "Miss
Betsy" there was "dancing to fiddle music by the light of tallow dips, and a treat of home- grown watermelons
of which the whole station was proud." Fanny, the first child born of the Henderson marriage (May 29, 1777),
was the first white child of parents married in Kentucky.
And even as the pioneer Boones and Callaways danced to the fiddle music at Miss Betsy's wedding, the fires of warfare
smoldered on the Kentucky frontier; British agents were everywhere, inciting the Shawnees and Cherokees to deeds
of violence upon the whites. The Revolutionary war was in progress; beyond the mountain ranges, in old Philadelphia,
the Liberty Bell had rung.
Thus to the Pike county descendants of the Boones and Callaways, comes a glimpse of the romance and the peril that
surrounded their ancestors on the Kentucky frontier. Amid the scenes herein described, Dinah Boone lived as a girl;
amid similar scenes her children were cradled.