Captivating Tales of Caintuck

  • 1779/1780

    While sitting in my office, looking out the window at the snow covering my Kentucky landscape and feeling the below 15-degree temperature even through double panes of glass, I realize we are now on day 10 of this very un-Kentucky-like winter weather. Our snow usually comes and goes within three to four days.  For the last few years, we have had little snow. This year is so different that it brought to my mind the winter of 1779/1780.

    That year’s snow came early to Kentucky, and with it the extreme cold. The Louisa froze solid at Boonesborough and on Christmas Day in the year of our Lord 1778, we crossed the river and moved to our new homes on that land we now called Boone’s Station. All the Boone brothers and sisters joined us, including Squire. The heavy snows that winter made our existence miserable. We built and lived in a cluster of half-faced cabins. I shiver with a chill just remembering those three-walled cabins. We kept a fire burning at the front and used hides and such to keep out the snow and cold. Thinking back, we always called that season the Hard Winter. Cattle froze to death in the fields. Wild turkeys froze in the trees and fell to the ground. We could hardly move about the snow was so deep. Too deep to hunt, too deep to trap. Food, once again, became scarce. Many suffered from frostbite and illness. Yet, we survived. . . .

    As the Revolutionary War continued that winter, Washington billeted his troops at Morristown. With over six feet of snow on the ground from over 25 snowstorms that hit the colonies that year, his troops suffered as much as they had at Valley Forge. From various historic documents, stories of starvation, freezing temperatures, and death have been read  by historians, students, and lovers of our history.

    Now, I’m not freezing. My cabin has all four walls, central heating, and a fireplace. I have only been outside once for any period since the first snow. I can say that walking on the ice-covered ground was treacherous. Walking on the crunchy snow (it’s frozen) supports the weight of my large dogs and barely shows where adults have tread is weird. I can imagine the hardships of 1779/80, but I am not suffering as Jemima, those soldiers, and most of the colonists did in 1780.  

    I can only tell their stories.

  • Who Was Flanders Callaway?
    George Caleb Bingham's Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through Cumberland Gap
    George Caleb “Bingham’s Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through Cumberland Gap”
    Bingham erroneously showed Flanders Callaway to Boone’s right as an old man. Flanders was only 22 years of age when he entered Kentucky.

    At a recent fall festival, I spoke with a man about Jemima Boone when he showed an interest in my book Caintuck Lies Within My Soul. He said, “I cannot figure out why Daniel let Jemima marry Flanders Callaway since his father and Daniel hated each other.”  Isn’t it strange how history sometimes confuses players in events, giving them relationships that carry forth into books and documents for years and years?

    Being a historian and author, I had to explain his misconception, for Flanders was not Richard Callaway’s son. In Caintuck, the reader learns a more accurate lineage for this young man at his introduction into my story.

    Flanders Isham Callaway, Richard’s twenty-two-year-old nephew and his younger brothers, James and Micajah, had traveled to Caintuck with our party despite their families’ strong objections. Their father, James, had passed many years earlier, and their mother, Sarah, only two years earlier.

    Flanders’ father James had died in 1767 and his mother Sarah, nee Bramlett, had passed sometime after November of 1773. Flanders had at least five brothers and three sisters, all born in Virginia. His brothers, James and Micajah, would be among those captured at the salt lick (Blue or Big Bone?—an argument for another post) in February of 1778. Each was held captive for several years.

    Flanders was not captured as he had been tasked with furnishing meat for the party of salt boilers and was not in camp when the Shawnee took the men. He and his hunting companion arrived to find the camp in disarray.

    Jemima and Flanders married and had ten children, six girls and four boys. Flanders died in Missouri on 22 Feb 1829. He was 76 years old.

  • A Boone Son – James
    The Cumberland Gap

    Early September 1773, sixteen-year-old James Boone stood ready to follow his well-known father on yet another adventure. This time, he would go along—be part of an expedition into the wilderness they called Caintuck. Some forty individuals planned to make the trip including his immediate family, his father, Daniel, age 39, his 34-year-old mother, Rebecca, and seven younger siblings: Israel, age 14, Susannah, age 12, Jemima, age 10, Levina, age 7, Rebecca, age 5, Daniel Morgan, age 3, and baby Jesse, only three months old.

    They would cross three mountain ranges between their current home near Moore’s Fort on Virginia’s Clinch River. There were rivers to ford, unforeseen dangers, and the trials of frontier travel. Not long after the journey began, Daniel sent James back to Captain William Russell’s home—a man who planned to join the expedition and later to send for his family—for more supplies, including flour and additional farming tools. The Mendinall (or Mendenhall) brothers, John and Richard, who traveled without their families, accompanied James on his errand. On his return with the supplies, Henry Russell, William’s seventeen-year-old son, Isaac Crabtree, a man named Drake, and two of the Russell family slaves, Adam and Charles, came along.

    On 10 October 1773, disaster befell their small party, while camped only three miles from the Boone expedition. The Mendinall brothers died first. One slave escaped and hid nearby. He watched as James and Henry were first shot through the hips so they could not flee and then tortured for hours by Shawnee and Cherokee warriors. Isaac Crabtree was wounded, but escaped. Drake was wounded. His body was found years later. The other slave, Charles, escaped or was taken prisoner, according to which version you wish to believe.

    The Boone expedition turned back. Captain Russell never again attempted to move to Kentucky. Newspapers across the region told the story in all its gory details. The story mentioned only Henry Russell by name, for his father was well known. 

  • Lt. Colonel Nathan Boone’s remarkable remembrances

    Nathan Boone, Daniel and Rebecca’s youngest son, was born 3 March 1781, at Boone’s Station, Kentucky. Nathan came along almost six years after the loss of William, born in Virginia only days before the family made their fateful move to Kentucky in 1775. (William died days after his birth and his grave lies lost and forgotten.) Rebecca was forty-two at Nathan’s birth. Her two oldest daughters had children of their own. Susannah had her third that same year, and Jemima, her first in 1779.

    Nathan is most likely the only one of all the Boone children to learn to read and write. Late in his life, Nathan gave Kentuckians and historians, personal, factual memories of his father through interviews with Lyman Draper in 1851. Draper made over 300 pages of handwritten notes, after Nathan had answered seventeen questions sent prior to Draper’s visit. Available in “My Father, Daniel Boone: The Draper Interviews with Nathan Boone”* Nathan’s words provide historians and Boone admirers with a firsthand account of a remarkable man.

    Nathan himself was no slouch! He served in the War of 1812, joined the 1st United Sates Regiment of Dragoons as a captain on 2 March 1833 and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. Nathan and Olive Van Bibber had fourteen children. A tale for another day just might be one of their marriage and unusual honeymoon!


    *Edited by Neal O. Hammon

    Illustration: Nathan Boone’s home in Defiance, Missouri

  • Susannah Boone Hays – second white woman in Kentucky?

    In Caintuck Lies Within My Soul, I wrote a scene where Jemima cares for her older, pregnant sister, Suzy, after her husband beat her. Like most every incident in the book, this one is based upon fact. Susannah Boone, born 2 November 1760, suffered abuse at the hands of her husband William Hays throughout their marriage.

    William Hays (1754-1804), an educated Irishman, trained as a weaver, first encountered the attractive, flirtatious, oldest Boone daughter at Moore’s Fort during Lord Dunmore’s war, in the autumn of 1774. Tasked with helping Daniel with his accounts and reports as he served as a lieutenant in the Virginia Militia, Will became a frequent visitor to the Boone’s small cabin. In early spring 1775, Suzy and Will married.

    At the time of their wedding, Daniel was recruiting men for the building of Boone’s Trace, the road into Caintuck. Will Hays signed up, no doubt for the ten pounds offered for his labor. Susannah convinced her new husband and father to take her along to cook and care for the company of men. Suzy and one female slave made the arduous trip into the new lands. They skinned and cleaned game, cooked, and took care of all the “women’s work for some 25 to 30 men. Additionally, they walked into this new territory. Suzy, when told her father had named Rebecca and Jemima as the first white women in Caintuck responded, “Every Kentuckian ought to try my gait, since I was the first white women in Kentucky.” (Actually, all three had been preceded by Mary Draper Ingles, who escaped her Shawnee captors in 1755 at Big Bone Lick, Kentucky. That is a story for another day.)

    Suzy bore ten children, five boys and five girls, including Elizabeth, born at Boonesborough in1776, who may have been the first white female child born in Kentucky. Suzy suffered throughout their marriage until her death on 19 October 1800, shortly after the family’s arrival in Femme Osage, Missouri. Will followed her in death only four years later, shot to death while in a drunken rage by his own son-in-law.

    Illustration – 1774 The Wilderness Road by Carl Rakeman, courtesy of the Federal Highway Administration – incorrectly dated.

C. M. Huddleston:
Historian, author, professional archeologist, educator, Kentucky native

Archives

C.M. Huddleston is the author or co-author of sixteen books. All deal with some aspect of American history. Five focus on President Theodore Roosevelt’s maternal ancestors. Four are award-winning middle-grade time-travel novels featuring Greg and Rose, who investigate and explore our country’s history, while having adventures of their own.

You can find more information on her books at
www.cmhuddleston.com. 

To read more tales from Kentucky’s past,
please visit my POSTS page.