Murder & Vengeance On The Appalachian Frontier

Daniel & Rebecca Boone paid a heartbreakingly heavy price for Daniel’s dream of finding home and fortune in the fabled land of Kain-tu-kee. The couple’s son James was murdered by native banditti in 1773, and son Israel died in battle at Blue Licks in 1782. Daniel’s brother Ned Boone fell in an ambush in Kentucky in 1780.

In 1773, Boone, just a couple of years back from his epic long hunt into Kain-tu-kee, sold his farm in the Yadkin Valley, North Carolina, and led a party consisting mostly of his Bryan family relations to rendezvous with another party under the leadership of Captain William Russell to push through the Cumberland Gap and settle in the new Promised Land.

Boone sent 16-year-old James and two other youths to pick up seed, flour and farm implements at Russell’s settlement. Boone planned to rest his party and allow James to catch up. Henry Russell, the captain’s son, a 16-year-old woodsman named Isaac Crabtree, and two slaves, Adam and Charles, joined James on the trail. They were about three miles short of their rendezvous when darkness overtook them and they made camp on the night of October 9.

At dawn on October 10, a mixed party of Cherokee, Shawnee and Delaware Indians attacked them in their bedrolls. Crabtree was wounded by an arrow but was able to roll out and get into the trees and make an escape. Another teen also escaped into the trees, but he was mortally wounded, and his remains would be found months later. Adam also fled and hid in a pile of downed timber, where he could hear what went down in the camp.

Henry Russell and James Boone were both shot through the hips and immobilized. The native raiders tortured them with knives, ripping out fingernails and toenails. One bashed in Henry’s head with a war club. James apparently recognized a Cherokee raider as a man named Big Jim, who had visited his father on the Yadkin. Adam heard James plead for his life. Then he heard him beg for death.

Negro Charles was taken prisoner by the raiders, but they would quarrel over his ownership and one of the raiders tomahawked him.

Adam eventually made it to Daniel Boone’s column, and Crabtree made his way to a settlement. Rebecca Boone gave her husband a clean linen sheet for a shroud, and Daniel buried his son along the trail. The mission to settle Kain-tu-kee was abandoned… for now.

Isaac Crabtree escaped the horror — and he wanted payback. The teenaged Frontier Partisan attended a horse race in the Watauga settlements on the border of North Carolina, Virginia and what would become Tennessee, where he recognized one of the raiders, a man called Cherokee Billy. Crabtree shot the Indian dead. Some accounts indicate that he tried to kill a couple of Billy’s companions, too, but was restrained.

This was big trouble. Cherokee Billy was the nephew of a prominent Cherokee chief, and the settlers feared that the killing would spark a war. A reward was offered for Crabtree’s arrest, and it appears that he may have been tried for it, but he was not convicted. The backcountry settlers may not have been too happy with Crabtree for the danger his actions caused, but they would have been entirely sympathetic to his rage and hatred after what had happened to him and his comrades. Thus was the cycle of frontier atrocity and reprisal perpetuated across three generations.

When war broke out with the Cherokee in 1776, Crabtree would join an expedition that burned several Cherokee towns. As the Revolutionary War on the frontier heated up, he served multiple tours as a Ranger around forts on Virginia’s western borders. He was a skilled woodsman, and it appears that he preferred operating solo or with a single companion.

His Revolutionary War pension application reports on a larger patrol — and offers insight into how chaotic a forest firefight could be. (Note: this thing is one enormous run-on sentence. I’ve added punctuation and paragraph breaks to make it more readable).

[In] 1778 he again turned out a volunteer Ranger he thinks about the last of may and went to the Elk garden Fort [in present Russell County] and Joined Captain John Kincaid and ranged about that Fort the States that Colonel Daniel Smith came to the fort and took him and several other men making ten and went down Clinch and as they came to glade hollow fort [on Cedar Creek near Lebanon in Russell County] they met with about the same number of Indians[.]

[H]e and Burton Litten and William Priest were some distance in front of the others when they met the Indians. The Indians were laying in ambush in two sink holes and on each side of the trace and when they arose and placed themselves in a fighting attitude and fired on him when the firing commenced[.]

Colonel Smith and the balance with him wheeled and ran he and his Company kept their ground waiting for them to come up until the Indians or some of them were within Thirty or Forty yards of affiant and the balls flying round him like hail stones from a thunder storm he began to think it was time to take care of himself[.]

[S]eeing by this time the whole of his company had taken to flight and left him[,] he retreated a short distance and was closely pursued by the enemy and wheeled to see how near they were to him and saw one within thirty yards[. ] He immediately raised his gun and taking sight at his breast fired and the Indian fell back and uttered some coarse loud noise[.]

He then wheeled and took to flight himself and the Indians after him still firing upon him until he overtook some of his company and tried to rally them but without effect they continued their retreat and two of them were killed while they were running before him he then began to mend his gate [gait] and soon overtook the foremost man and went by his Colonel Smith but was unable to rally them[.]

The two men killed were the two who went in advance with himself Burton Litten and William Preest[.]

He states that they remained ranging about through the country until in September[;] the conclusion was then that the Indians had left that part of the Country and the men all dispersed about the last of September[.] He thinks he was out this trip about four months making about sixteen months[;] these were the principal tours he served in the revolution[.]

He states that he was afterwards frequently engaged in scouting parties guarding the frontiers and keeping back the Indians but was not under any particular officer.

Crabtree would eventually settle in Kentucky after the war. He was one among an unsung cadre of Frontier Partisans who operated in the backcountry in a brutal conflict that decided the fate of the whole continent.

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The torture and murder of the James Boone party was part of an escalation of tensions in the Appalachians and along the Upper Ohio River, where opportunistic and murderous banditti, both white and red, destroyed a fragile peace and precipitated Lord Dunmore’s War. The horrific murder of James Boone has haunted me since I first read of it as a child. That his torturer was known to him, that he had broken bread at the Boone farmstead, adds to the horror, and reflects how small the frontier world was, despite the vastness of the landscape. Violence was not impersonal on the Ohio Valley frontier. It was personal, soul-searing, and spread across generations.