fice; but too often unable to resist the many appeals, emigrants
became victims to the finest feelings of our nature.

Thus in March, 1790, a boat descending the river was decoyed ashore, and
no sooner had it reached the bank than it was captured by fifty Indians,
who killed a man and a woman, and made the rest prisoners. An expedition
was made against the Indians on the Sciota by General Harmer, of the
United States army, and General Scott, of the Kentucky militia, but
nothing of consequence was achieved. In May a number of people
returning from Divine service, on Bear Grass Creek, were attacked, and
one man killed, and a woman made prisoner, who was afterward tomahawked.
Three days after, a boat containing six men and several families was
captured by sixteen Indians without loss. The whites were all carried
off by the Indians, who intended, it is said, to make them slaves; one
of the men escaped and brought the news to the settlements.

In the fall Harmer made a second expedition, which was attended with
great disasters. Several marauding attacks of the Indians ensued; nor
was peace finally restored until after the treaty of Greenville, which
followed the subjugation of the Indians by General Wayne in 1794.

[Footnote 53: McClung.]

[Footnote 54: "Western Annals."]

CHAPTER XXI.

Colonel Boone meets with the loss of all his land in Kentucky,
and emigrates to Virginia--Resides on the Kenhawas, near Point
Pleasant--Hears of the fertility of Missouri, and the abundance of
game there--Emigrates to Missouri--Is appointed commandant of a
district under the Spanish Government--Mr. Audubon's narrative of
a night passed with Boone, and the narratives made by him during
the night--Extraordinary power of his memory.

A period of severe adversity for Colonel Boone now ensued. His aversion
to legal technicalities and his ignorance of legal forms were partly
the cause of defects in the titles to the lands which he had long ago
acquired, improved, and nobly defended. But the whole system of land
titles in Kentucky at that early period was so utterly defective, that
hundreds of others who were better informed and more careful than the
old pioneer, lost their lands by litigation and the arts and rogueries
of land speculators, who made it their business to hunt up defects in
land titles.

The Colonel lost all his land--even his beautiful farm near
Boonesborough, which ought to have be