第35章 Chapter VII. The Dark And Bloody Ground(6)

When neither appeared, he gave up the idea of Detroit and set about erecting defenses on the southern border, for the Choctaws and Cherokees, united under a white leader named Colbert, were threatening Kentucky by way of the Mississippi. He built in 1780 Fort Jefferson in what is now Ballard County, and had barely completed the new post and garrisoned it with about thirty men when it was besieged by Colbert and his savages. The Indians, assaulting by night, were lured into a position directly before a cannon which poured lead into a mass of them. The remainder fled in terror from the vicinity of the fort; but Colbert succeeded in rallying them and was returning to the attack when he suddenly encountered Clark with a company of men and was forced to abandon his enterprise.

Clark knew that the Ohio Indians would come down on the settlements again during the summer and that to meet their onslaughts every man in Kentucky would be required. He learned that there was a new influx of land seekers over the Wilderness Road and that speculators were doing a thriving business in Harrodsburg; so, leaving his company to protect Fort Jefferson, he took two men with him and started across the wilds on foot for Harrodsburg. To evade the notice of the Indian bands which were moving about the country the three stripped and painted themselves as warriors and donned the feathered headdress. So successful was their disguise that they were fired on by a party of surveyors near the outskirts of Harrodsburg.

The records do not state what were the sensations of certain speculators in a land office in Harrodsburg when a blue-eyed savage in a war bonnet sprang through the doorway and, with uplifted weapon, declared the office closed; but we get a hint of the power of Clark's personality and of his genius for dominating men from the terse report that he "enrolled" the speculators. He was informed that another party of men, more nervous than these, was now on its way out of Kentucky. In haste he dispatched a dozen frontiersmen to cut the party off at Crab Orchard and take away the gun of every man who refused to turn back and do his bit for Kentucky. To Clark a man was a gun, and he meant that every gun should do its duty.

The leaders and pioneers of the Dark and Bloody Ground were now warriors, all under Clark's command, while for two years longer the Red Terror ranged Kentucky, falling with savage force now here, now there. In the first battle of 1780, at the Blue Licks, Daniel's brother, Edward Boone, was killed and scalped. Later on in the war his second son, Israel, suffered a like fate. The toll of life among the settlers was heavy. Many of the best-known border leaders were slain. Food and powder often ran short. Corn might be planted, but whether it would be harvested or not the planters never knew; and the hunter's rifle shot, necessary though it was, proved only too often an invitation to the lurking foe. But sometimes, through all the dangers of forest and trail, Daniel Boone slipped away silently to Harrodsburg to confer with Clark; or Clark himself, in the Indian guise that suited the wild man in him not ill, made his way to and from the garrisons which looked to him for everything.

Twice Clark gathered together the "guns" of Kentucky and, marching north into the enemy's country, swept down upon the Indian towns of Piqua and Chillicothe and razed them. In 1782, in the second of these enterprises, his cousin, Joseph Rogers, who had been taken prisoner and adopted by the Indians and then wore Indian garb, was shot down by one of Clark's men. On this expedition Boone and Harrod are said to have accompanied Clark.