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130 12 Boone among the Shawnees Boone and the salt-boilers were at the Shawnees’ mercy. According to one of the men with Boone, Joseph Jackson, the Shawnees came very close to killing all of their captives on the spot. Many of the Shawnees argued that only the blood of whites could avenge the killing of Cornstalk and the other hostages at Fort Randolph and that, despite Blackfish’s promise to Boone, they should kill all the white captives and march quickly to attack Boonesborough. As Jackson remembered it years later, the warriors sat in a circle to debate the question. Blackfish invited Boone to sit in the circle, with Pompey beside him to interpret. One after another, the Indians stood to argue the matter. Finally, Blackfish allowed Boone to speak. Boone spoke in English, pausing for Pompey to translate: Brothers! What I have now promised you, I can much better fulfill in the spring than now. Then the weather will be warm, and the women and children can travel from Boonesborough to the Indian towns, and all live with you as one people. You have got all the young men; to kill them, as has been suggested, would displease the Great Spirit, and you could not then expect future success in hunting nor war. If you spare them, they will make you fine warriors, and excellent hunters to kill game for your squaws and children. These young men have done you no harm. . . . I consented to their capitulation on the express condition that they should be made prisoners of war and treated well. Spare them, and the Great Spirit will smile upon you.1 The warriors voted. The vote was 59 for death, 61 for life. The Shawnees loaded up, packing the kettles, salt, axes, and guns they had taken from the whites, and started north toward the Shawnee towns. When they stopped 131 Boone among the Shawnees that night, the Indians cleared in the snow a path some hundred yards long, which Pompey told Boone was for running the gauntlet. Boone protested that Blackfish had promised not to make the men run the gauntlet. It was not for Boone’s men, who had surrendered under a stipulation, Blackfish said; it was for Boone, who had been taken without any such stipulation. Boone stripped to his breechclout, leggings, and moccasins to run between two lines of Shawnee warriors armed with sticks and clubs. A kick in Boone’s rear was the signal for the start of his run through the lines. “I set out full speed,” Boone later told one of his grandsons, “first running so near one line that they could not do me much damage, and when they give back, crossed over to the other side, and by that means was likely to pass through without any hurt.” Several of the warriors went easy on him. Others staggered him with blows, opening a cut on the top of his head that bled into his eyes. Toward the end of the run one “fellow broke the lines for the purpose of giving me a home lick. The only way I had to avoid his intention was to run over him by springing at him with my head bent forward , taking him full in the breast, and prostrating him flat on his back, passing over him unhurt.” The crowd cheered. Indians came up, Boone recounted , “giving me their hand saying ‘velly good sojer’” and calling the fellow sprawled on the ground “one damn squaw.”2 That same evening the Indians debated another issue: whether to slit the captives’ ears, Indian fashion. Many Shawnee men, as a form of body adornment , slit the rims of their ears two or more inches and hung silver bobs or other ornaments in the opening when the wound healed.3 A witness to one such ear slitting said the Indian performing the operation “laid his patient on his back, and placing a piece of wood under his ear, he cut, with his jack nife, which was rather dull, the rim of each ear, from top to bottom. . . . On the bow made of the rim, he fixed pieces of thin lead, to prevent adhesion and to stretch it.”4 An English traveler to Virginia in late 1774 described the effect, as he saw it in four Shawnee chiefs being sent to Williamsburg as hostages after Dunmore’s War: “Their ears are cut from the tips two thirds of the way round and the piece extended...

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