The Governor gave Boone a pony, with saddle and trappings, and other presents, including trinkets to be used in procuring his needs and possibly his liberty from the Shawanoes.
* So well did Boone play his part that he aroused suspicion even in those who knew him best. After his return to Boonesborough his old friend, Calloway, formally accused him of treachery on two counts: that Boone had betrayed the salt makers to the Indians and had planned to betray Boonesborough to the British. Boone was tried and acquitted. His simple explanation of his acts satisfied the court-martial and made him a greater hero than ever among the frontier folk.
Black Fish then took his son home to Chillicothe. Here Boone found Delawares and Mingos assembling with the main body of the Shawanoe warriors. The war belt was being carried through the Ohio country. Again Boonesborough and Harrodsburg were to be the first settlements attacked. To escape and give warning was now the one purpose that obsessed Boone. He redoubled his efforts to throw the Indians off their guard. He sang and whistled blithely about the camp at the mouth of the Scioto River, whither he had accompanied his Indian father to help in the salt boiling. In short, he seemed so very happy that one day Black Fish took his eye off him for a few moments to watch the passing of a flock of turkeys. Big Turtle passed with the flock, leaving no trace. To his lamenting parent it must have seemed as though he had vanished into the air. Daniel crossed the Ohio and ran the 160 miles to Boonesborough in four days, during which time he had only one meal, from a buffalo he shot at the Blue Licks. When he reached the fort after an absence of nearly five months, he found that his wife had given him up for dead and had returned to the Yadkin.
Boone now began with all speed to direct preparations to withstand a siege. Owing to the Indian's leisurely system of councils and ceremonies before taking the warpath, it was not until the first week in September that Black Fish's painted warriors, with some Frenchmen under Dequindre, appeared before Boonesborough. Nine days the siege lasted and was the longest in border history. Dequindre, seeing that the fort might not be taken, resorted to trickery. He requested Boone and a few of his men to come out for a parley, saying that his orders from Hamilton were to protect the lives of the Americans as far as possible. Boone's friend, Calloway, urged against acceptance of the apparently benign proposal which was made, so Dequindre averred, for "bienfaisance et humanite." But the words were the words of a white man, and Boone hearkened to them. With eight of the garrison he went out to the parley. After a long talk in which good will was expressed on both sides, it was suggested by Black Fish that they all shake hands and, as there were so many more Indians than white men, two Indians should, of course, shake hands with one white man, each grasping one of his hands. The moment that their hands gripped, the trick was clear, for the Indians exerted their strength to drag off the white men.
Desperate scuffling ensued in which the whites with difficulty freed themselves and ran for the fort. Calloway had prepared for emergencies. The pursuing Indians were met with a deadly fire.
After a defeated attempt to mine the fort the enemy withdrew.
The successful defense of Boonesborough was an achievement of national importance, for had Boonesborough fallen, Harrodsburg alone could not have stood. The Indians under the British would have overrun Kentucky; and George Rogers Clark--whose base for his Illinois operations was the Kentucky forts--could not have made the campaigns which wrested the Northwest from the control of Great Britain.
Again Virginia took official note of Captain Boone when in 1779 the Legislature established Boonesborough "a town for the reception of traders" and appointed Boone himself one of the trustees to attend to the sale and registration of lots. An odd office that was for Daniel, who never learned to attend to the registration of his own; he declined it. His name appears again, however, a little later when Virginia made the whole of Kentucky one of her counties with the following officers: Colonel David Robinson, County Lieutenant; George Rogers Clark, Anthony Bledsoe, and John Bowman, Majors; Daniel Boone, James Harrod, Benjamin Logan, and John Todd, Captains.
Boonesborough's successful resistance caused land speculators as well as prospective settlers to take heart of grace. Parties made their way to Boonesborough, Harrodsburg, and even to the Falls of the Ohio, where Clark's fort and blockhouses now stood. In the summer of 1779 Clark had erected on the Kentucky side of the river a large fort which became the nucleus of the town of Louisville. Here, while he was eating his heart out with impatience for money and men to enable him to march to the attack of Detroit, as he had planned, he amused himself by drawing up plans for a city. He laid out private sections and public parks and contemplated the bringing in of families only to inhabit his city, for, oddly enough, he who never married was going to make short shift of mere bachelors in his City Beautiful. Between pen scratches, no doubt, he looked out frequently upon the river to descry if possible a boatload of ammunition or the banners of the troops he had been promised.
