Frontiersman: Daniel Boone and the Making of America

9. Dark and Bloody Ground: An Introduction to Kentucky during the Revolutionary War

91 9 Dark and Bloody Ground An Introduction to Kentucky during the Revolutionary War The Revolutionary War was a long one. The fighting with the British began in April 1775, more than a year before the Declaration of Independence. The peace treaty was not signed until September 1783, though fighting in the coastal colonies substantially ended with the defeat of Gen. Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown in October 1781. The fighting in distant Kentucky lasted even longer, however, and, in proportion to the population of settlers, was far bloodier. Between 1775 and 1782 some 860 Kentuckians in the central bluegrass region alone died war-related deaths.1 Relative to the population during those years, that loss was seven times as great as the comparable number of war-related deaths in the thirteen coastal colonies. George Rogers Clark, an American military leader on the frontier, estimated that “upward of two thousand souls have perished on our side, in a moderate calculation,” during the Indian wars in Kentucky.2 The Kentuckians kept close track of the progress of the Revolution unfolding in the east and honored revolutionary turning points in the names they gave to Kentucky towns (Lexington, for the early clash in Massachusetts; Washington and Georgetown, for the commander of the rebel army; Louisville , Paris, and Versailles, for America’s French ally) and counties (Bourbon and Fayette, again for the alliance with France).3 The fighting and the issues in Kentucky, however, were largely different from the fighting in the coastal colonies. Knowing about those differences helps in understanding the engagements in which Boone was involved, including the attacks on Boonesborough in 1776, the capture and rescue in 1776 of Boone’s daughter and the Callaway daughters, the Indians’ capture of Boone and the salt-boilers from Boonesborough in 1778, the siege of Boonesborough in 1778, the Indians’ crushing defeat of the Kentucky militia at the Battle of the Blue Licks in 1782, Frontiersman 92 the subsequent American retaliation against the Shawnees north of the Ohio River, and the campaigns against the western tribes that led to the opening up of the Northwest Territories to American settlement. The fighting in Kentucky during the Revolutionary War, unlike that in the coastal colonies, was not, for the most part, directly with the British, but with Indians funded and armed and incited by the British and sometimes accompanied by British or Canadian soldiers. Kentucky’s struggling was frontier warfare, marked more by raids and hand-to-hand combat—and by destruction of crops and homes—than by pitched battles or prolonged sieges. There was much less fighting in Kentucky between American settlers (pro-independence Whigs vs. pro-British Tories) than there was in the Carolinas, although there were white renegades who led Indian attacks on the settlers, and there were also acute tensions between settlers in Kentucky (Harrodsburg vs. the Transylvania proprietors, for example; squatters vs. claimants under officers’ warrants; Virginians vs. settlers from North Carolina vs. Pennsylvanians). The killing in Kentucky also lasted much longer. Indeed, it went on more than ten years after Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown in 1781. Just as the battling in the Ohio Valley during the French and Indian War had been three-cornered—French and French colonists versus British and British colonists, with each assisted by Indians seeking to preserve their lands—so the fighting in the Ohio Valley during the Revolution involved three forces: Americans, Indians, and British. None of the three was a monolith; rather, each was a congeries of disparate groups, often with conflicting aims.4 Several of the American colonies (notably Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and North Carolina but also Connecticut) had conflicting claims to land in the Ohio Valley. Americans from different colonies, in the years since 1763, had staked claims to lands in Kentucky and elsewhere in the Ohio Valley (including lands north of the Ohio River that the British Parliament in October 1774, in the Quebec Act, had proclaimed were part of Quebec).5 These settlers and absentee claimants alike sought to preserve their land interests during the Revolution. Americans of widely different backgrounds— former officers in the French and Indian War such as George Washington; grantees of the Transylvania Company; settlers with claims under Virginia land law based on preemption or improvements—had claims that involved much of the best land in Kentucky. They shared a strong common interest in 93 Dark and Bloody Ground keeping the land...