AMONG THE EARLY COMERS to Boone settlement in Detroit township were the Neeleys (or Neelys), natives of the Yadkin
region in north Carolina. Joseph Neeley and his wife Elizabeth were in what is now Detroit township as early as
1825, in which year also came Ezekiel and Phebe (Reed) Clemmons, likewise natives of Rowan county, North Carolina,
in the Yadkin county of the Boones; Mrs. Clemmons belonging also to the famous Reed's Fort lineage in Kentucky.
As early as 1827 we find Joseph Neeley, Ezekiel Clemmons, David Mize and William Meredith banding together and
erecting a log schoolroom on Section 16 in Detroit township, and employing a teacher, Abraham Jones, "to give
their children instruction and intellectual improvement."
These Neeleys were old friends of the Boone family. They had been like one family on the Yadkin. It was Samuel
Alexander Neeley, kinsman of the Pike county Neeleys, who, in the winter of 1769-70, accompanied Squire Boone into
the wilderness of Kentucky in search for Squire's brother, Daniel, who, with John Finley, John Stuart, Joseph Holden,
William Cool and James Murray, on May 1, 1769, had set out from the banks of the Yadkin to explore and hunt in
the region of present Kentucky, under the guidance of Finley who had actually been over the mountains and returned
to tell of the adventure.
One month and seven days after they left the valley of the Yadkin, this group of six adventurers struggled up the
rugged incline at Cumberland Gap and looked upon the vast, unexplored region of present Kentucky. There they found
a hunters' paradise. Turkeys were so numerous that Boone later described them as being like one vast flock through
the whole forest. "Deer were in herds. Elk roamed the woodlands. Bear were, next to deer, the most numerous.
As the party descended the mountains they became aware of a dull continuous rumbling sound that puzzled them greatly
until they found that the sound came from the trampling of innumerable buffalo."
For more than a half-year these adventurers hunted in the wild land. Boone and Stuart, pairing, at length were
captured by Indians in a dense canebrake. They later escaped; when they reached their cabin, where all had been
wont to assemble from the hunt, they found it ransacked and their companions gone. All the peltries, result of
eight months' hunting, had been stolen. Finley, Holden, Murray and Cool were never heard of again.
Boone and Stuart, thus left alone in the wilderness, resumed their hunting. In the winter their ammunition began
running low. They saw, too, many signs of Indians. In January, 1770, Boone saw two men riding through the woods.
He hailed them. They were his brother Squire and Samuel Alexander Neeley, who had set out from the Yadkin to find
Daniel and who, strange as it may seem, found him in the vast wilderness.
Squire Boone and Neeley had brought plenty of ammunition. The four started hunting, Daniel and Stuart paired as
before. Squire and Neeley hunted together. One night Daniel's partner, Stuart, did not return to camp. Boone searched
the forest. He found traces of his friend's fire, where he had spent the night. Five years later, when hewing out
the Wilderness Road, he found Stuart's bones in a hollow sycamore tree. He knew them for Stuart's because of his
name cut on the powder horn. Stuart had probably been wounded and had crawled into the hollow tree, where he died.
Neeley, disheartened, decided to start back to his home on the Yadkin, which he did, tackling the wilderness alone.
He was never heard of. An unidentified skeleton found years later may have been his.
Daniel and Squire continued to hunt. In the spring, ammunition again ran low. Squire started for the settlements
on May 1, facing alone the five hundred miles of howling uncharted wilderness, leading his packhorses carrying
the pelts. Daniel was left alone in the wilderness. Says White: "It is hard to tell whose courage most to
admire; that of the man who stayed or that of the man who went."
Joseph Neeley, kinsman of Samuel Alexander, emigrated from the Yadkin to Tennessee, and then to Illinois, and,
in the middle 1820s, to Pike county. His son, Henry Neeley, was at Horseshoe Bend on the Sangamon river before
Illinois was a state. In 1821 he went up to the trading post at Prairie du Chien on the Upper Mississippi, in a
keel- boat. Henry came to Pike county in 1831 and settled on Section 18, Detroit. He married Nancy L. Reed, descendant
of the Reed's Fort family, on March 1, 1847. He saw the first house being erected in Pittsfield in 1833 and related
that the parties building it began at the top of the rafters to lay on the roof. He died where he first settled
in Pike county August 1, 1868. His wife died at Bangor, Michigan, on June 20, 1874. His children were George M.,
Walker, Andrew J., Eliza Ellen, who married a Lile and located in Adams county, Illinois, and Sarah, who married
John Long and settled in Dunn county, Wisconsin.
George M. Neeley, son of Henry and grandson of Joseph, was born where Detroit now stands, March 1, 1839. He first
married Lizzie Melver, April 4, 1861, by whom he had two children, Alfred and Emma. On September 10, 1874, he married
Lizzie Stephens, the daughter of Elijah Stephens of Jasper county, Missouri. They had four children, two sons and
two daughters. Mr. Neeley spent about eighteen years of his life in Texas, Mexico and the southern states. He was
a justice of the peace in Detroit.
Joseph Neeley died November 27, 1849, being survived by his wife Elizabeth. His son, Huston Neeley, who had married
Sally Dunniway, December 14, 1837 and had located in Missouri, moved back from Missouri in 1843 and cared for his
father and mother in their old age. Joseph Neeley's son, Samuel A., named for the kinsman who accompanied Squire
Boone into the wilderness in search of Daniel, married Ruth Meredith, daughter of the Detroit pioneer, William
Meredith, December 31, 1829, George G. Hill, justice of the peace, officiating.
John Neeley married Julia Ann Paine, October 4, 1838, and Thomas W. Neeley married Martha McDaniel, March 7, 1847;
these were sons of Joseph and Elizabeth. Burgess Neeley married Nancy Ayers, February 12, 1834. He died August
3, 1845.
Another early comer to Boone Settlement near Milton was Stewart Lindsey, who located on Section 31 in Detroit township,
the same section on which the Boone Allens settled. He was born October 1, 1808, in Scott county, Kentucky, being
a son of Robert Lindsey, who had emigrated with his parents from Virginia to Kentucky in 1788.
Stewart Lindsey's mother was born in a stockade called Craig's Station in Woodford county, Kentucky. Stewart was
educated in a log cabin, with a triangular fireplace across one end of the room, with a window ten feet long and
one pane high. Textbooks were Webster's Speller, a Testament and Guthrie's Arithmetic. Seats consisted of split
logs with legs fastened in them.
Mr. Lindsey's maternal grandfather, Aaron Reynolds, comrade of Daniel Boone, was a noted figure on the Kentucky
border. He first appears in Kentucky's annals at the attack on Bryan's Station, August 16, 1782, this attack leading
up to the disastrous Blue Licks defeat three days later. The exploits of this Lindsey forebear at Bryan's and at
Blue Licks are among the most vivid incidents of Kentucky history.
The late William C. Dickson, who remembered having seen wild deer chased by dogs through what is now the courthouse
square in Pittsfield, related having heard Abraham Scholl say that three persons (two besides himself) who later
came to Pike county, were at Bryan's (or Bryant's, as he remembered it) the time "the women went out to the
spring." One of these was Zachariah Allen, the narrator was unable to recall the name of the other who was
mentioned by Scholl. It might have been Samuel Harding Lewis, who at the time would have been eighteen years of
age. Others of the Lewis family were present in the area of the Blue Licks at this time.
Aaron Reynolds was another of the defenders of Bryan's Station on this memorable occasion. There is no direct proof,
but it seems a reasonable conclusion that within the log walls of Bryan's was also Zachariah Allen's young wife,
Dinah Boone, who was about to become a mother. We are told by an early historian that Jonathan B. Allen, early
Pike county settler, was "born in a Kentucky stockade while his father was fighting Indians in the famous
Blue Licks defeat." The Blue Lick defeat followed three days after the attack on Bryan's, the battle on the
Licking river resulting directly from the assault on the Station. With Zachariah Allen as one of the Station's
known defenders, there is little doubt that he had found refuge for his wife within its walls.
The settlers at this period had generally housed themselves in rough stockade for protection against the Indians.
Kentucky history was at the beginning of its darkest and bloodiest period. At Detroit, the British were using every
influence to arouse the red men against the whites. The battles of King's Mountain and the Cowpens had been fought
and Yorktown was coming soon. The British must strike a decisive blow if they hoped to maintain a foothold in the
West.
What followed is a blot on American history and kindled hatreds that were slow to die. The Indians everywhere took
the warpath, often led by white men more savage and cruel than themselves, men like Girty and McKee, renegades
from their own side and filled with hatred of their kind and inspired by a relentless cruelty that led to the most
horrible atrocities in the history of the border. The frontiers were aflame; the annals of those times are filled
with raids, massacres, burnings at the stake, tortures and captivities, with deeds of brave men and heroic women,
with hairbreadth escapes, with stratagems and exploits and daring. (Stewart Edward White's "Daniel Boone:
The Pioneer.")
Things came to a crisis in July, 1782, when two British officers, Captains Caldwell and McKee, started from Detroit
in command of over a thousand Indians, a huge army for those days, by far the largest body of men, either white
or red, ever gotten together west of the mountains. Zachariah and Dinah Boone Allen, as we have seen, had settled
early in what is now Boone county, far to the north of the Kentucky, in the region of the Ohio. With the approach
of this great Indian threat (which later was largely dissipated by unfounded rumors that George Rogers Clark was
attacking the Indian villages), it is likely that Zachariah Allen sought refuge for his wife in the nearest stockade,
Bryan's Station, on Elkhorn Creek; being the one farthest north, on the north side of the Kentucky.
The attack upon Bryan's Station was preceded by one of the bravest deeds in American history, wherein woman's valiant
spirit commanded the admiration of all. Scouts, slipping into the station, brought news that the stockade was surrounded
in the night by hostile Indians, hidden in the thickets, bent upon taking the enclosure by surprise. Unfortunately,
there was no well within the log walls of the station and the water containers were almost empty. A spring, the
sole source of water supply, lay at some distance from the gates to the stockade, at the edge of the Indian-infested
thicket. Without water, those within were at the mercy of the savages.
The men counselled. A sally to the spring for water would precipitate an immediate attack and the butchery of all.
But water must be had, and the spring was the only source.
Here, a brave woman offered a plan. This woman was Jemima Sugget Johnson, wife of Colonel Robert Johnson, and mother
of Colonel Richard M. Johnson, afterward hero of the battle of the Thames (in which the celebrated Tecumseh fell),
and ninth vice president of the United States, but then a tiny infant slumbering in a rough-hewn cradle n the log
enclosure. It was the night of August 15; on all sides were the Indians. Mrs. Johnson suggested that the women
and children in the fort go to the spring in the morning as was their custom, leisurely, as though no attack were
expected, and by so doing deceive the Indians who planned to take the fort by surprise when the men went out to
the fields.
The men rebelled against this idea. It was playing with death, death or captivity of the most horrible character.
But the brave woman argued her case well. There was no alternative. She offered to lead those of her sex on the
perilous trip to the spring. She said if the others would not accompany her, she knew her ten-year-old daughter
Betsy would go with her. At last her counsel prevailed, and one of the most daring adventures on the border was
begun.
The women of the fort, all who were able to go, old and young, even to the littlest tots, 28 of them in all (their
heroic names may be read today on the monument that surrounds the historic spring), took buckets and gourds and
piggins and noggins and strolled from the gates of the fort, laughing and chatting as though they had no thought
of danger.
Straggling along leisurely, not in a compact group that would have afforded some comfort, but loiteringly, and
by twos and threes, they proceeded to the spring. Arriving there, they continued their artless chatter, taking
their turns at the spring, dipping their various utensils one after another into the water, no hurrying, no crowding,
not a single gesture to betray any uneasiness. All the time they could see the gleam of the morning sun on rifle
barrels in the thicket and they knew they could reach out and touch the brown arm of a savage in whose hand rested
the fatal tomahawk, ready to crash upon their defenseless heads at the least sign that any enemy presence was suspected.
Then, with all their utensils filled with the precious water, they started on the return trip to the fort. Again
the same carefree, loitering gait, the careless chatter, the air of freedom from danger. These actors on this wilderness
stage were playing before the most critical and hostile audience in the world and were playing their parts well.
Behind the log palisades, the men of the fort, husbands, brothers, fathers and lovers of the women and children
waited breathlessly, ready to rush forth at the first whoop and sell their lives as dearly as possible.
At last the terrible suspense ended. The women and children were in the very shadow of the log walls of the fort.
It was not until then that some of the tiniest little girls began to crowd against their mothers' skirts. The last
of the brave band was within. The gates clanged shut. Then the savages, warned by the clanging gates, realized
they had been outwitted, that their presence had been known all the time. With a whoop the assault upon the fort
began, so suddenly that two or three of the men who had tarried in the cornfield were slain.