Review: "The Taking of Jemima Boone," Matthew Pearl

By Paul Carrier

In the summer of 1776, mere days after the adoption of the Declaration of Independence, 13-year-old Jemima Boone and two of her friends, sisters Betsy and Fanny Callaway, were abducted near their Kentucky home by Shawnee and Cherokee Indians.

If one of those names sounds familiar, it’s because it is. Jemima Boone was the daughter of Daniel Boone, founder of the frontier settlement of Boonesboro, where the Boone family lived at that time with a small group of fellow settlers.

Matthew Pearl, a celebrated author of historical fiction, documents the kidnappings and their aftermath in The Taking of Jemima Boone, a nonfiction look at the turmoil that engulfed Engish-speaking settlements west of the Appalachian Mountains in a contentious era.

We tend to think of westward expansion as the 19th century clash between Americans and Indigenous tribes "out west." But in the 1770s, Kentucky was the frontier, making it a flash point between Indians and settlers. Violent clashes were a fact of life there in 1776, and in the years that followed.

Pearl describes the abductions, the forced march toward Shawnee lands and the pursuit by Daniel Boone and his men with a dramatic flair and an eye for telling anecdotes. But most of the book focuses on subsequent events, as our attention shifts from the kidnappings to later conflicts between settlers and Indigenous people.

While the Declaration of Independence pitted British and American forces against one another as the Revolutionary War intensified, Indigenous leaders in Kentucky had other priorities. They struggled to retain or reclaim ancestral homelands threatened by American settlements. Some Natives allied with the British, who encouraged Indigenous warfare against pro-independence settlers.

Indians and settlers had widely varying relationships in that era, sometimes acting as sworn enemies but also, in other cases, as allies and even marriage partners. With the passage of time, however, Indigenous opposition to American settlements in Kentucky grew. There were so many Indian attacks in 1777, Pearl writes, that it came to be known as “the year of the bloody sevens.”

It didn't help that Americans could be sickeningly cruel in their dealings with Indians. Vicious murders of blameless Indians were not unheard of. In one notorious case, Cornstalk, a Shawnee chief known for his tolerant attitude toward settlers, was murdered together with his son and another Indian while on a diplomatic mission to an American fort in 1777. Cornstalk’s murder lifted the restraints that had constrained more aggressive Shawnee, including a war chief named Blackfish.

With British support, Blackfish assembled an army of some 400 men in 1778, to convince the grossly outnumbered Boonesboro settlers to surrender or face annihilation. The two sides negotiated a peace treaty under which the Indians agreed to withdraw and the Americans promised to abandon the fort and turn themselves in to the British at Fort Detroit.

But for reasons that remain unclear, one side or the other — or perhaps both at once — opened fire and, as Pearl writes, “everything fell apart.” The siege of Boonesboro had begun. It dragged on for days, as Pearl chronicles in riveting detail.

Boone and his small settlement survived the ordeal, but he could not rest on his laurels. A resentful adversary quickly accused him of treason, forcing Boone to endure a court-martial at a nearby fort. A militia captain at the time, Boone was acquitted and promoted to major, further burnishing his legacy.

Jemima Boone resurfaces throughout the book that bears her name, a devoted daughter who returned to Boonesboro and eventually participated with her father in defending the fort during the 1778 siege.

Pearl’s subtitle may overstate Jemima’s importance by describing the girls' abductions as "the kidnap that shaped America." Still, that does not detract from this compelling examination of what is now a little-remembered but mesmerizing slice of 18th-century life. And to Pearl’s credit, there is nary a mention of a coonskin cap anywhere in The Taking of Jemima Boone.