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145 13 The Siege of Boonesborough Boone told the settlers at Boonesborough about the Indian forces being readied to attack their little fort. He said that “he was now come home to help his own people fight and they must make what preperration they could but the indeans would certainly be there in a few days.”1 There was much to be done and little time to do it. Boone told Filson that he had “found our fortress in a bad state of defence.”2 William Bailey Smith, the major who had brought fifty reinforcements to Boonesborough in the fall of 1777, put Boone in charge of restoring the defenses. One of the palisade walls had fallen down almost completely and had to be rebuilt. The gates and posterns were strengthened. At the southeastern and southwestern corners new bastions, or blockhouses, were built, two stories high, with the second story projecting out over the first and with openings left in the floor to permit defenders to fire on attackers who came close to the walls. (“What is meant by a block house?” Daniel Trabue wrote, describing the ones at Logan’s Station at this time, and then answered his own question: “The upper story to be much biger than the lower story and to Jut over so that you may be up on the upper floor and shoot Down if the indeans was to come up to the walls, and they cannot climb up the walls of these houses.”)3 Because the old well inside the fort did not give much water, work was started on digging another one. Women cast lead into bullets, smoothed the mold marks off the cast bullets, and prepared bandages. Brush around the fort was cut down.4 Boonesborough asked the neighboring settlements for reinforcements. Men were scarce. The small settlements had been further depleted by supplying men to George Rogers Clark on his bold expedition to take the fight west to the British by attacking the British stations at Kaskaskia and Cahokia in Illinois and Vincennes along the Wabash in Indiana. Clark had realized Frontiersman 146 that “if the Indians destroyed Kentucky they’d attack our frontiers—obliging the states to keep large bodies of troops for their defense” and, as he knew that “the commandant [Henry Hamilton] of the different towns of the Illinois country and the Wabash was busily engaged in exciting the Indians against us, their reduction became [Clark’s] first object.”5 Aided by Kentucky riflemen, Clark was able to capture Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Vincennes in the summer of 1778 and, after the British retook Vincennes in December 1778, to take it again in February 1779. Despite the depletion of their own ranks, however, Logan’s Station sent aboutfifteenmen,andHarrodsburgafew,tobuttressBoonesborough.6 Toincrease the firepower “arms and ammunition were given to the Negro men” in the fort, and any “well-grown boy became a fort soldier, and had his port-hole assigned him.”7 Still, there were not many rifle bearers in Boonesborough— perhaps sixty, as against the more than four hundred Indians who were about to attack them. One more rifle bearer joined the Boonesborough settlers on July 17— William Hancock, one of the captive salt-boilers, who had been adopted by Captain Will, the Indian who had taken Daniel Boone captive when Boone was hunting in Kentucky in 1769. To prevent Hancock from escaping, Captain Will had Hancock sleep naked, while Captain Will slept with his head on the doorway to block the way out. Hancock waited until a night when Captain Will had drunk too much rum. That enabled the unclothed Hancock to flee his soddenly sleeping adoptive father. Carrying with him only three pints of raw corn, Hancock rode a stolen horse to the Ohio, swam across the river, and made it to Boonesborough nine days after he left Captain Will. He arrived at the fort, still naked, so weak that he had to be carried inside. Hancock reported that the Indians were coming four hundred strong and intended, if the settlers declined to come over to the British, to batter down the fort with four swivel guns that the British were providing to them from Detroit.8 That was a scary prospect: the fort’s frail palisade could not withstand pounding even from light artillery. The only good news in Hancock ’s report was that Boone’s escape had caused the Indians to postpone their expedition into Kentucky for three weeks so they could send...

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