BEFORE THE OPEN FIREPLACE, with its huge backlog, Pike county pioneers in the long winter evenings swapped stories
of the wilderness and related tales of Indian cunning and the horrifying incidents of the border wars of John Shaw's
thrilling narrative. Children, crouched in the dark corners of the cabin, drank in these tales of border prowess
and learned early to copy the cunning of the savages themselves. Daniel Boone's feats, some of them authentic,
others imaginary, were told and re-told in the pioneer cabins.
To stories of Boone, children of the pioneers thrilled to their fingertips. In the wilderness of Pike county, youth
- hero-worshipping-aped the ways of the famous scout.
Boone was a neighbor of the first comers to Pike, in days when a frontier neighborhood was a vast region comprising
several modern counties. Since 1799, Boone had dwelt on his Spanish land grant about 30 miles from the southern
tip of original Pike county, in Missouri Territory. There he died, September 26, 1820, lacking less than a month
of 86 years. Boone died in the fall of the year in which the Rosses came. Prior to that, more than sixty families
had settled here between the two rivers, in what are now Pike and Calhoun counties.
Once, according to legend among the early settlers, when the haze of autumn covered all the landscape and the small
of wood smoke was in the air, the great scout, in his old age, camped for several weeks in what is now eastern
Pike county and, impressed with the wild beauty of the region, passed the word to relatives who later settled there.
It was even said that Boone, familiar with some tragic happening of border days, had searched for a cache of hidden
treasure in the region that now is Pearl township. The story has also been handed down from generation to generation
in the family of Ottwell, first settles in what is now Pearl, that during two winters of the early settlement there,
Indians from Wisconsin encamped at the mouth of Bee Creek and on Ottwell's Island in the river, and searched for
hidden treasure, which, so far as the early Ottwells knew, was never found. These legends of Boone, related by
Rebecca Burlend and handed down to her descendants, appear to have been in general circulation as late as the early
1830s.
The first Pike county Boones came in 1822. They were Zachariah and Dinah (Boone) Allen, their sons, Jonathan Boone
and Lewis Allen, and their daughter, Polly Boone Allen. In the same year came Joseph Jackson and his wife, Malinda
Scholl Jackson, the daughter of Peter and Mary (Boone) Scholl.
There are many Boone descendants in Pike county who are deeply interested in their family's history and proud of
their traditional relationship to Daniel Boone, the pioneer, yet lacking the records whereby to trace their Boone
ancestry.
Numerous of the Pike county Garrisons, for instance, have told the writer they have always understood there was
some connection between the Boone and Garrison families but none was able to trace it. Mrs. O. C. Bollman of Peoria,
a daughter of the late William Zachariah Garrison, a son of Enoch W. Garrison of Pearl township, who was a grandson
of a Boone and a great great grandson of the parents of Daniel Boone, writes as follows:
"I remember hearing both my father and grandfather say many times that they were in some way related to Daniel
Boone, but never learned how the relationship came about." The Garrisons, as a matter of fact, trace back,
as do numerous other Pike county families, in a direct line of descent to the first Boone ancestor in America.
In order to understand the various Pike county Boone connections that these articles are intended to develop, it
is necessary that we first know something of Boone genealogy in America. The most comprehensive genealogy of the
Boone family and the most complete and authoritative account of their connections is the book by Mrs. Hazel Atterbury
Spraker entitled "The Boone Family" (Rutland, Vermont, The Tuttle Company, 1922). Mrs. Spraker's book,
however, lacks the Pike county data which affords a clue to some of the so-called "lost Boones." Clues
to descendants of the Jonathan Boone family (Jonathan being an elder brother of Daniel) are, for instance, now
picked up here in Pike county for the first time.
George Boone (the third known Boone of that name) and his wife, Mary Maugridge Boone, left Devonshire, England,
August 17, 1717, to take ship at Bristol for America. They arrived in Philadelphia October 10, 1717, and were met
there by two sons and a daughter, George (fourth of the name), Squire (destined to father Daniel) and Sarah Boone,
George Boone III, first Boone ancestor in America, had been a weaver in England.
Squire Boone, son of George Boone III, married Sarah Morgan in Berks county, Pennsylvania, on September 23, 1720.
She was a daughter of Edward Morgan, soldier of the Revolutionary war. They moved to Bucks county, Pennsylvania,
where some of their children were born. They became the parents of seven sons and four daughters, as follows, in
the order of their birth: Sarah, Israel, Samuel, Jonathan, Elizabeth, Daniel, Mary, George, Edward, Squire and
Hannah.
Squire Boone (the elder), with his family, moved May 1, 1750 to the banks of the Yadkin in Davidson (then Rowan)
county, North Carolina. Squire Boone died in 1765; his wife in 1777, aged 77. They are buried in Joppa cemetery,
Mocksville, North Carolina.
Persevering inquiry over a long period of time has assembled a very considerable amount of information, as in Mrs.
Spraker's book, with reference to most of Squire Boone's children (brothers and sisters of Daniel) and their descendants;
but of Jonathan Boone, numerous of whose descendants are here in Pike and neighboring counties, little is known.
No very definite information exists even as to whom he married, although statements of his descendants here in
Pike point to his having married into the noted family of Callaway, as did Daniel Boone's second daughter, Jemima.
Knowledge of the Boones in America is obtained chiefly from the original manuscript of the old James Boone genealogy;
the early records of the Society of Friends (Quakers) in Pennsylvania; and the Draper collection of manuscripts
in the library of the Historical Society of Wisconsin. The collector of these latter manuscripts was Dr. Lyman
C. Draper, to whom Col. John Shaw related his thrilling narrative of the Pike county border which has appeared
in preceding chapters.
As to Jonathan Boone, whose daughter Dinah has slept for 113 years in an unmarked grave near Milton, Mrs. Spraker,
in her book, says:
"Except for his (Jonathan's) birth as recorded among the children of Squire Boone, practically all that is
known about Jonathan is found in the following excerpt from the Draper Manuscript, which is a statement of Enoch
M. Boone (son of the younger Squire Boone). a nephew of Daniel Boone, made in August, 1858:
"Jonathan Boone came early to Kentucky. -------- remembers him at Squire Boone's Station as early as 1783,
and tended Squire Boone's mill. After a few years, settled on Green river and after living there several years
then settled at the Big Falls of the Wabash (near Mt. Carmel, Wabash county), on the Illinois side, not more than
15 miles, if that, above the mouth of the Wabash, where he built a mill. There he died about 1808--don't know where
his wife died, nor how old he was. Left several daughters, got mostly married on Green river; and left three sons,
John, Joseph and Daniel, who settled in the lower county."
John Boone, a brother of Dinah, according to the Draper Manuscript, settled "somewhere in Kentucky";
Joseph settled above the Big Cypress Bend in Mississippi State, and died there subsequent to 1827, leaving a family;
Daniel settled at St. Antoine, Texas, and was killed there by Indians. As to the sisters of Dinah Boone (Enoch
Boone's statement indicates there were sisters), nothing is known. No references to them has come down to the Jonathan
Boone descendants in Pike county.
On the west side of the Milton road, near where Detroit, Montezuma, Newburg and Hardin townships corner, south
of the old David Shuler place and north of the old Larkin Thornton place (now the Arthur E. Sneeden place), on
the east half of the northwest quarter of section 31, Detroit township, stood, in a very early day, a log house
that was the beginning of the Boone Settlement.
Here dwelt that romantic character of early times, the man known as Boone Allen, "one of Marion's men,"
and hero of the Indian wars, who had fought with Daniel Boone and Abraham, Peter and Joseph Scholl, and James Thompson
and others who have appeared or will appear upon the scene of this history.
Zachariah (Boone) Allen was a soldier of the Revolutionary war and of the Indian wars of George Washington's time
and of the dark and bloody days with the Boones in Kentucky. He served for seven years in the War of Independence
and was in his old age when he came to Pike county in 1822. All that has previously been recorded of him in Pike
county history is the following (Page 203, Chapman's History of Pike County, 1880):
"A Mr. Allen (father of Lewis) came to the county this year (1822), and was probably the first settler in
the neighborhood of Milton. His wife was a sister of the celebrated Daniel Boone."
Governor Henry Horner of Illinois, speaking of Pike county's romantic history while dedicating a section of State
Route 100 at Pearl October 30, 1935, referred to a sister of Daniel Boone having once lived in that part of the
county.
The historian of 1880 and Governor Horner were in error in designating this early Boone as a sister of Daniel.
She was, instead, a niece of the noted hunter ans Indian scout.
Zachariah Allen's wife was Dinah Boone, a daughter of Jonathan Boone, third son of Squire and Sarah (Morgan) Boone
and older brother of Daniel. Dinah Boone's mother appears, from the relations of Pike county relatives, to have
been Polly (Callaway) Boone, although there is some evidence suggesting that Jonathan Boone may have married a
Mary Carter of North Carolina, there being of record in St. Luke's parish, Rowan county, North Carolina, two direct
conveyances of property to Jonathan Boone by James Carter and also a conveyance of personal property at Bristol
Hall to Mary, wife of Jonathan Boone, from her father, James Carter. There were, however, other Jonathan Boones
in North Carolina at that time. There is also the possibility that Jonathan Boone was more than once married. There
is also a tradition of a Benjamin Boone, a reputed son of John or Jonathan and Elizabeth (Dagley) Boone.
Statements of Jonathan Boone descendants in Pike county suggest that Jonathan Boone, brother of Daniel, may have
stopped in Virginia when the Boone family migrated across that state to North Carolina in 1750, and that he there
married a daughter of the Virginia Callaways and settled down among his wife's people. At any rate, in the statement
of a Pike county descendant, we find the Jonathan Boones emigrating, along with the Callaways, from the Colony
of Virginia to Kentucky in 1775.
Squire Nathan Thornton of Milton, a great grandson of Jonathan Boone and 30 years ago in possession of a very complete
record of his Boone forebears, relating the story of those forebears in 1906, told of his grandmother, Dinah Boone
Allen, setting out from Virginia at the age of 17 in company with her father, Jonathan Boone, and his brother-in-law
and her uncle, Mr. Callaway (doubtless Col. Richard Callaway), to Kentucky. In Kentucky she married Zachariah Allen,
who had settled in Boone county, that state, when Boone first opened the region to white settlement. It appears
that the Jonathan Boone family, after staying a while in Daniel Boone's fort at Boonesborough, then settled at
Squire Boone's Station, where Squire had a mill. This was the younger Squire Boone, brother of Daniel.
Zachariah Allen was born in 1754; his wife in 1759. She was 20 and he 25 when they were married in Kentucky, at
"green-up" time, on the "banks of Green," in Warren county, in 1779. It seems probable that
Dinah Boone went from Virginia to Daniel Boone's new fort on the Kentucky river late in 1775. Boone had completed
his fort in the summer of that year and had called it Boonesborough. News of the battle of Lexington had reached
his frontier band while they were engaged in erecting the stockade. Salt running low at the fort, Daniel Boone,
taking a party of men with him, went back over the Wilderness Road, the men to obtain the much-needed salt, and
Boone to get his family, whom he had left on the banks of the Clinch following the failure of the first attempted
family migration into Kentucky in 1773.
Boone was accompanied on his trip back to the settlements by Col. Richard Callaway, who had arrived at Boonesborough
earlier in 1775. Callaway also was returning for his family, in Virginia. Boone returned to his fort in September,
1775, with his family, his horses, his cattle and his household goods, along with a number of other families who
had joined in the great adventure.
"The older boys of the party," we are told, "drove the cattle, which were usually in the lead to
set the pace; the little children were packed in baskets made of hickory withes slung on gentle horses, or else
packed between rolls of bedding. The scouts ranged the forests far and wide."
Boone's wife, Rebecca, and his daughter, Jemima, then 13, were the first women to set foot on the banks of the
Kentucky river. On the wild border, the effect of woman's presence was instantaneous. Says Ranck: "The men,
and especially the younger ones, immediately improved in appearance, for there was a sudden craze for shaving and
hair-cutting. An ash hopper, soap kettle, and clothes line were set up. Hickory brooms and home-made washboards
multiplied. The sound of the spinning wheel was heard in the land, and an occasional sight could be had of a little
looking-glass, a patchwork quilt, knitting needles or a turkeytail fan."
Such was the wild Kentucky border upon which Dinah Boone, pioneer ancestor of scores of Pike county people, found
herself at the age of 17, for in a few weeks after Boone's return to Boonesborough with his family, we find Col.
Richard Callaway coming in "at the head of a party that included three married women and quite a bevy of young
ladies," one of whom was doubtless the girl, Dinah Boone, who occupies a nameless Pike county grave, and through
whom so many Pike county families trace their Boone lineage. Two of Dinah's companions, members of that "bevy
of young ladies" who went in the Kentucky wilds under the escort of old Colonel Callaway, doubtless were the
Colonel's two daughters, Elizabeth (Betsy) and Frances, the former grown, the latter about 13 or 14, who, with
Jemima Boone, Daniel Boone's second daughter, a few months later (July 14, 1776) were captured on the Kentucky
river by Indians, a capture that formed the groundwork for many a thrilling narrative of the west.
It appears likely that in this party coming in under Colonel Callaway was the Colonel's family and the family of
Jonathan Boone, as the recorded circumstances of this arrival at Boonesborough seemed to dovetail in the main with
the account of Dinah Boone's removal to Kentucky, given in 1906 by her grandson, Squire Thornton, who said: "With
her father, Jonathan Boone, and his brother-in-law and her uncle, Mr. Callaway, she (Dinah) left Virginia at the
age of 17 years, the family home being established in the neighborhood where Daniel Boone achieved his world- wide
fame."
Dinah Boone, it appears, would have been 17 in 1775, and it also appears from the above and other references that
Dinah Boone Allen's mother was a Callaway, a member of the noted Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri Callaways.
The Boones and Callaways apparently had intermarried long before the marriage of Daniel Boone's daughter, Jemima,
to Flanders Callaway, son of James Callaway of Virginia, about 1782. A Samuel Callaway is mentioned by a historian
of North Carolina as a kinsman of Daniel Boone at least as early as 1775. In John H. Wheeler's "Historical
Sketches of North Carolina" appears the following memorandum:
"Daniel Boone, who still lived on the Yadkin, though he had previously hunted on the western waters, came
again this year to explore the country, being employed for this purpose by Henderson & Company. With him came
Samuel Callaway, his kinsman, and the ancestor of the respectable family of that name, pioneers of Tennessee, Kentucky
and Missouri. Callaway was at the side of Boon when approaching the spurs of the Cumberland Mountain, and on viewing
the vast herds of buffalo grazing in the valleys between them, he exclaimed, ‘I am richer than the man mentioned
in the Scripture who owned all the cattle on a thousand hills; I own the wild beasts of more than a thousand valley's."
It will be noted that this historian spells the pioneer family's name without the generally accepted final "e".
Daniel Boone himself, at least at one period in his life, spelled his name "Boon," and some of the Pike
county Boones also spelled the name without the final "e", as shown by their signatures to old documents
of official Pike county records.
The identity of Jonathan Boone's wife being unknown to Boone genealogists, the Pike county information upon that
matter is important and is therefore presented with considerable detail. Known dates in Jonathan Boone history
suggest that he was married about 1750, or about the time the Boone family moved from Pennsylvania to North Carolina.
Jonathan was born in 1730.
Squire Nathan A. Thornton, last of the Boone Allen grandchildren, died at the Pike County Home in 1912. He had
been an attorney-at-law and a police magistrate at Milton. Losing both health and wealth, he was removed in his
last illness from his office quarters at the southeast corner of the Milton square to the County Home, where he
died September 10, 1912. In his possession had been the family records and those of his Boone ancestors. Other
descendants who are still living know nothing of the lost records.
Squire Thornton's mother, Polly Allen (Boone) Thornton, last Pike county grandchild of the Jonathan Boones, died
on Buckhorn, in Pike county, in 1882. She was the youngest and the latest surviving of the Boone Allen children.
Aunt Polly Thornton, by which name she was known, was said to have been named for her grandmother Boone, wife of
Jonathan Boone. Frank Lindsey, 77, of Milton, whose maternal ancestor, Aaron Reynolds, was a comrade of Daniel
Boone on the Kentucky border and whose exploits with Boone will be related in another chapter, remembers "Aunt
Polly" well and remembers that "Aunt Polly" was a Boone. She was a small, fine-featured woman, vigorous,
hardy and hard-working. She, as was common among the Boone woman in Pike county, loved her pipe. Mr. Lindsey says
he has often seen Aunt Polly sitting in front of the fireplace, smoking her old stone pipe with its reed stem as
black as a coal. In her old age, he says, Aunt Polly sat by the fire and smoked her pipe until "she just dried
up and withered away."
Mrs. Chloe (Thornton) Kenyon, wife of Joseph G. Kenyon, and a great great granddaughter of the Boones and a direct
descendant from the first Boone in America, lives today in the original Boone settlement in the first house west
from the Bolin corner on the Milton road. Two rooms of the house in which she lives were embraced in the old Larkin
Thornton house which in early days stood a short distance north.
Mrs. Kenyon is a daughter of James Monroe Thornton, a granddaughter of Larkin and Polly (Allen) Thornton, a great
granddaughter of Zachariah and Dinah (Boone) Allen, a great great granddaughter of Jonathan and Polly (Callaway)
Boone, a great great great granddaughter of Squire and Sarah (Morgan) Boone, and a great great great great granddaughter
of George and Mary (Maugridge) Boone, the first of the Boones in America.
Mrs. Kenyon, who was 57 last December 3, remembers her grandmother, Polly Thornton, who died at her father's house
on Buckhorn. Although only in her fifth year when her grandmother died, she has always felt a bit hard towards
her because the old lady would never let her light her pipe for her. Mrs. Kenyon remembers that her grandmother
always lighted the pipe with a coal from the fireplace and would never let anyone else do it for her, although,
childlike, Mrs. Kenyon always craved the privilege. She says her grandmother was a hard worker as long as she could
stay on her feet. She died at the age of 77, her face, that had been so fine-featured, wrinkled and wizened. She
is buried in the French cemetery near Milton, beside her husband who died December 21, 1878, at the age of 78.
No marker identifies their graves.