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115 11 The Shawnees Capture Boone For a time after the capture and rescue of the girls, white settlers in Kentucky feared Indian attacks, but few occurred. Settlers were able to raise and harvest large crops of corn in 1776.1 The Cherokee threat in the south receded, after combined militia forces from Virginia and both Carolinas in July and August crushed the Cherokees, burning many of their towns and cornfields.2 Dragging Canoe’s followers, calling themselves “AniYuniwiya ,” or “the Real People,” split off from the accommodationist Cherokees and moved to the Chickamauga Creek region in southeast Tennessee, near what is now Chattanooga, becoming known to the whites as Chickamaugas .3 The situation in Kentucky, however, deteriorated at year-end 1776 and grew steadily worse over the next two years. The shortage of gunpowder and lead in Kentucky was acute. The settlers at Harrodsburg in June 1776 elected George Rogers Clark and John Gabriel Jones as delegates to the Virginia convention, directing them to petition to organize Kentucky as a new county of Virginia. Clark and Jones not only did this but also sought powder and shot for Kentucky. In August Clark convinced Virginia’s Executive Council to grant Kentucky five hundred pounds of gunpowder. Jones was killed and Clark’s cousin Joseph Rogers was captured by the Indians on Christmas Day 1776 as they attempted to get the powder into Kentucky.4 Virginia’s organization of Kentucky as a county in December 1776, which effectively quashed the Transylvania Company’s claims to most of Kentucky, also deprived John Floyd of what looked like a lucrative opportunity. The Transylvania Company proprietors in December 1775 had appointed Floyd as Transylvania’s principal surveyor—but by late 1776 that position had become meaningless because Transylvania did not exist as a legitimate political Frontiersman 116 entity with the authority to register land claims. Floyd came east to Williamsburg to look for an attractive position that would have the approval of the Virginia government. Not finding one, he tried a different way to improve his fortunes: he bought a privateer and went after British commerce in the Caribbean, before his ship was captured by a British man-of-war. Sent to prison in England, Floyd escaped, made his way to France, borrowed money from Benjamin Franklin in Paris, and sailed back to Virginia. Not until October 1779 did Floyd return to Kentucky and again become an important factor in Boone’s life. Virginia’s organization of Kentucky as a county of Virginia also increased the threat of Shawnee attacks on Kentucky, because Shawnees disliked Virginians much more than Americans from other colonies. Virginia’s governor Lord Dunmore in 1774 had launched the war against the Shawnees that bears his name. Settlers in Pennsylvania, anxious to preserve good fur-trading relations with the Shawnees, had been quick to tell them “that Pennsylvania had no part in the mischief already done, and that the Virginians were entirely at fault.”5 In truth, Virginians had launched Dunmore’s War, had fought the Shawnees at Point Pleasant, and had waged the subsequent campaigns in OhiothatledCornstalkandotherShawneechiefstogiveupShawneehunting rights in Kentucky. While the Shawnees doubtless viewed all American colonists with suspicion, they must have been particularly suspicious of the Virginians . As Detroit’s commandant Henry Hamilton wrote in 1775 to Sir Guy Carleton, the governor of Canada, the Indians were “not likely to continue upon terms with the Virginians. . . . The Virginians are haughty Violent and bloody, the savages have a high opinion of them as Warriors, but are jealous of their encroachments. . . . In the inroads of the Virginians upon the savages, the former have plundered, burnt and murdered without mercy. Tis to be supposed from the Character of the Savages that opportunity only is wanting to retaliate, and that there can be but little cordiality between them.”6 Hamilton was in his early forties when he arrived in Detroit as its governor late in 1775. Although classically educated, he served in the British army from 1755 until 1775. He thought like a soldier, and he knew how the Indians fought from his own experience as a British soldier in the French and Indian War. Taken captive by the French in 1760, he had seen, “not without a very unpleasant feeling, the Savages employed in scraping and dressing Englishmen ’s scalps.”7 From the moment he arrived in Detroit, Hamilton urged his superiors to play the Indian card—to stir up the western Indians and the [3.17.6.75] Project...

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