entucky by chance and
returned to North Carolina to tell of it among his neighbors. Two years
afterwards, in 1769, when a man of forty, Boone came to see for himself
the things that he knew by hearsay, and he found that the half had not
been told. But among other surprises in store for him was falling into
the clutches of an Indian hunting party which ambushed him and the
friend who was with him. They both escaped, and soon afterwards Boone's
brother and a neighbor, who had followed him from North Carolina,
chanced upon their camp. Boone's friend was before long shot and
scalped by the Indians; the brother's neighbor was lost in the woods and
devoured by the wolves. Then the brother went home for ammunition, and
Boone was left a whole year alone in the wilderness. The charm of its
life was so great for him that after two years more he returned to North
Carolina, sold his farm, and came to Kentucky with his family. Other
families joined them, and the little settlement founded in the woods
where he had ranged solitary with no friend but his rifle and with foes
everywhere, was called Boonesborough.

The Revolutionary War broke out, and the Ohio Indians, who had hitherto
fought the pioneers as Englishmen, now fought them as Americans with
fresh fury, under the encouragement of the British commandant at
Detroit. In January, of 1778, Boone took thirty of his men, and went to
make salt at the Blue Licks, where, shortly after, while he was hunting
in the woods, he found himself in the midst of two hundred Indian
warriors, who were on their way to attack Boonesborough. He was then
fifty years old, and the young Indians soon overtook him when he tried
to escape by running, and made him their prisoner. His captors treated
him kindly, as their custom was with prisoners, until they decided
what should be done with them, and at the Licks his whole party gave
themselves up on promise of the same treatment. This was glory enough
for the present; the Indians, as they always did when they had won a
victory, went home to celebrate it, and left Boonesborough unmolested.

They took all their prisoners to the town of Old Chillicothe, on the
banks of the Little Miami in Greene County. What became of his men
we are not told; none of them kept a journal, as Smith did, but it is
certain that Boone was adopted into an Indian family as Smith was. The
Indians, in fact, all became fond of him, perhaps because he was so much
like themselves in tempe