FRANCIS ELLEDGE, ancestor of the Pike county Elledges, was among the wounded in the fierce fighting with the Indians
when the whites abandoned Squire Boone's Station in Kentucky, September 14, 1781. This ambuscade occurred about
21 miles out from Boone's and about eight miles from Linn's. Moses Boone, a son of Squire, later referred to this
battle as Boone's Defeat. The men, when attacked by the Indians, cut the packs from their horses to let the women
and children mount and "the packs were scattered along the way for a mile, from the 13 to the 14 mile tree."
How Francis Elledge came to be in this exodus of the whites from Squire's Station is unknown. It is probable that
he and his wife, Charity Boone, had been living, for a time at least, in Squire Boone's stockade. It is probable
that Jesse Elledge, the early Pike county preacher, was cradled in this stockade. It is likely that Charity and
her infant son, Jesse, were in this ill-fated flight from Squire Boone's. Charity's son Benjamin, 1834 settler
at Griggsville, was born four months after the flight. Edward Boone Scholl, son of Squire Boone's niece, Mary Boone,
in his recollections of things told him in his youth, related that "among those wounded in an ambuscade when
the whites left Squire Boone's station was an Elidge who had married my mother's sister Charity."
Two or three children of a Mrs. Holt were killed in this ambuscade in which Francis Elledge was wounded; among
the killed was also Mrs. John VanCleve, sister-in-law of Squire Boone's wife (Jane VanCleve), with two of her small
children, and a grown daughter of a Mr. Hansbury. Rachel VanCleve, about 18, and one of her little sisters, daughters
of John VanCleve (kinsman of the early Pike county settlers of that name), were taken prison but were later rescued
by the whites, unharmed.
Squire Boone's son, Isaiah, two of whose daughters later married into families prominent in pioneer Pike county
history, was a participant in this running battle with the savages, although he was then only a lad of 9. Riding
a pack horse, he dismounted and retreated with the others. At the crossing of Long Run, he was threatened by an
Indian, but the plucky boy held the savage warrior at bay with his gun, which, however, had got wet in crossing
and would not go off. A man by the name of George Yunt came to Isaiah's aid, shot the Indian, and ordered Isaiah
to throw away his gun and clear himself. It is related that Isaiah, while running, took off his shot pouch, which
was a fine one, and held it in his teeth by the strap while he stripped off his coat. Dropping the pouch accidentally,
he was so hard-pressed he did not have time to stop to pick it up. Soon after he was put on a horse and lost his
three- cornered hat, sent him by his brother Jonathan from Kaskaskia, in the Illinois country, then a county of
Virginia.
At Floyd's Creek, at a point known as Floyd's Fork, the refugees from Squire Boone's Station battled again with
the Indians on the day following the ambuscade. About nine were killed in this engagement. Here, the boy, Isaiah
Boone, was only a few feet from Captain Hall as they were trying to escape across a stream. An indian reached to
tomahawk Isaiah when Captain Hall saved his life by shooting the Indian.
In 1787, Isaiah, then about 15, started to make settlement with his father at Chickasaw Bluffs but, finding it
unsafe, went to New Orleans and took Spanish protection, setting up a gunsmith shop in the Spanish town. There
he remained three years. In 1794, Isaiah and his brother Enoch enlisted in Mad Anthony Wayne's campaign, in Bland
Ballard's company, Isaiah going as a sergeant. Isaiah married, but his wife's name is not of record. In the fall
of 1846 he was living near Mauckport, Indiana. Two of his children, Adaline Boone, who married Perry Marshall Baldwin,
and Emily Boone, who married Marshall Samuels, settled near Hannibal, Missouri, about 1850. A descendant, Moses
Samuels, named for Squire Boone's son Moses, married Malinda Jackson (a daughter of Malinda Scholl, whose first
husband was Edward Elledge), in Pike county in 1852. Several of Perry Marshall Baldwin's kinsmen intermarried with
the Elledge family in Pike county nearly a century ago.
After Floyd's Defeat, which befell on September 15, 1781, the Indians pursued the fleeing settlers no farther.
A day or so later, about 300 men from the Falls (the Falls of the Ohio, where now is Louisville), and from other
settlements along the Beargrass, marched out, buried the dead and went to the relief of Squire Boone's Station.
They reached there probably about the 17th of September, and rescued the families of Squire Boone and the Widow
Hinton, together with the stock which had wandered back, and much of the plunder that had been abandoned by the
moving families when they were attacked.
About two weeks later, one night after dark, it is related that Squire Boone went back on horseback to see the
Indians had molested his station and crops. Finding everything all right, he started to return. About midnight
he reached Long Run, slid off his horse and holding him by the bridle, lay down on the ground and slept until about
daylight. On awakening, he and his horse discovered at the same time three Indians who had camped but a few rods
away and were then getting up and stirring up their fire. Boone knew if he shot he could certainly kill one of
them, but his horse, which was afraid of a gun, would in that case get away. After debating it, he decided the
better plan would be to mount and get away as quickly as possible, which he did. However, he always regretted it
as a lost opportunity. — Mrs. Hazel Atterbury Spraker, in "The Boone Family."
Squire Boone married into the VanCleve family, several of whose members located in Pike county in an early day.
His wife was Jane VanCleve. Savage warriors in Kentucky and the Ohio country wore VanCleve scalps at their belts.
Tragedy seemed to stalk this family during the Indian troubles. Mrs. John VanCleve and two of her small children,
as already related, were killed by the Indians on the retreat from Squire Boone's Station in Kentucky in 1781,
and two other daughters were captured and later rescued.
Rachel Scholl Denton, Pike county Abraham Scholl's sister, in a letter in 1844 when she was 71, related the murder
by the Indians of Betsy VanCleve who, while going to or returning from church on nolin (Nolin) creek, in 1785,
had her horse shot from under her and, taken captive, was tomahawked by her captors when the whites pressed them
in pursuit. Betsy was a daughter of Mrs. Squire Boone's brother Ralph. Another account says that Betsy was tomahawked
and scalped when returning from church near Squire Boone's old station on Sunday, May 23, 1790, when about one
and a half miles from meeting and in sight of a settlement. The attacking Indians had sprung upon the returning
churchgoer from behind logs where they had secreted themselves. Betsy, scalped and mangled, was found still alive
by another party returning from church, but died soon after.
Moses Boone, a son of Squire, and long a neighbor of the Benjamin and Boone Elledge families in Indiana, was appointed
in 1808 a judge of Harrison county in Indiana Territory, by William Henry Harrison, then governor of the Territory,
and was reappointed by Governor Thomas Posey. He was one of the three commissioners who directed the building of
the first state house in Indiana, at Corydon. Moses Boone, in 1846, was living near Manhattan in Putnam county,
Indiana; he probably died there in 1852.
Another of Squire Boone's sons, and the one most intimately associated with Benjamin and Boone Elledge, was Enoch
Morgan Boone. Enoch was born "in a canebreak," according to Collins' History of Kentucky, page 600, on
the Kentucky river, at Daniel Boone's Fort Boonesborough, October 16, 1777. He was five years older than Benjamin
Elledge, and six years older than Boone. His parents claimed he was the first white male child born at the famous
fort of Boonesborough.
On February 8, 1797, in Shelby county, Kentucky, Enoch Boone married Eliza Goldman, a member of the Goldman family
so well known in the early days of Pike county. She was a sister of Abraham Goldman, who came to Pike county in
1829 and settled on Section 23, Griggsville township, and who helped build the first log house in the town of Griggsville
after the place was laid out in 1834.
Abraham Goldman was the father of Jacob Goldman, a native of Clark county, Kentucky, where he was born October
15, 1816; he told of enjoying many a deer and wolf hunt in early Pike county and of once seeing 36 deer in one
herd on Griggsville Prairie; also of killing nine wolves on one occasion. He saw the first steamboat that plied
the Illinois river; in his old age, he told of how he grubbed and picked brush, rolled logs, etc., and after a
hard day's work, of grinding corn in a hand-mill until 9 or 10 o'clock at night to procure bread for the following
day. He once told of how, in the early days of Pike county, they used harness and single and double trees of their
own manufacture, made of hickory bark, corn shucks and poles. He helped raise the first house in Pittsfield, just
back of the site now occupied by the Windmiller Hotel on the south side of the square, and hewed the first timber
that was used for building purposes in Griggsville. He was often chased by wolves when bringing home his game on
old "Blaze," but his faithful dog "Tiger" was ever on the alert for his protection. He was
twice married in Pike county, first to Bethlehem Wade and second to Otelia Jaritz, who crossed the ocean in 1834.
He became the father of 12 children.
Another son of Abraham Goldman and nephew of Eliza Goldman Boone, was Benjamin Goldman, who was born in Clark county,
Kentucky, December 24, 1824, and who married Elizabeth, daughter of David and Anna Dunniway, who brought their
family of five children to Pike county in 1836 and settled in what is now Detroit township, the journey being made
by boat while their teams, coming through by land, arrived with all the hair worn off their legs, so terrible were
the roads and swamps through which they passed.
Ellen Goldman, a niece of Eliza Boone, married Samuel Brakefield of Griggsville, June 28, 1849. He was a native
of Pennsylvania who settled in Pike county about 1848 and was killed at a railroad crossing at Griggsville, June
13, 1874.
Eliza (Goldman) was born in 1775 and died in 1855. Collins' Kentucky History gives her maiden name as "Lucy
Galman."
Enoch Boone, in the fall of 1792, going from Berks county, Pennsylvania, to Kentucky alone, being then about 15,
fell in with a family of the early Applegates, who were then heading westward, destined at a later date to locate
in Pike county, Illinois. This was the Benjamin Applegate family, who were encountered by young Boone at Reading,
Pennsylvania, from which point they were starting to Kentucky, with a team. Enoch joined the family and helped
drive the team to Pittsburgh. Then he embarked on flatboat down the Ohio to Limestone (now Maysville) Kentucky,
making the trip in six days without seeing any Indians.
Enoch, on this trip down the Ohio, stopped for a while with his uncle, Daniel Boone, at Point Pleasant, West Virginia,
scene of the great Indian battle. From Daniel he obtained some bear meat, after which he proceeded to Limestone
and then to Cincinnati, thence to the mouth of the Kentucky and across country to Shelby county. He became a soldier
in the Indian troubles before he was 17, and was in the Wayne campaign, taking part in many Indian fights. He moved
to Indiana about the time his father located on Buck Creek, in present Harrison county, and lived in Grassy Valley,
in the then Territory of Indiana. He received a captain's commission from William Henry Harrison, then governor,
and did much boating down the Ohio and the Mississippi. He died, according to Boone Scholl, on his wedding anniversary,
February 8, 1862, at the home of his son-in-law, Judge Collins Fitch, on the Ohio river, near Garnettsville, Meade
county, Kentucky.