and affections of the
inmates, might have procured a capitulation of the fort. Following up
this plan in progression, the weaker station would have followed the
example of Boonesborough; since it is hardly supposable, that the
united influence of fear, example, and the menace of the massacre of so
many prisoners would not have procured the surrender of all the rest.
But, though on various occasions they manifested the keenest
observation, and the acutest quickness of instinctive cunning--though
their plans were generally predicated on the soundest reason, they
showed in this, and in all cases, a want of the combination of thought,
and the abstract and extended views of the whites on such occasions. For
a single effort, nothing could be imagined wiser than their views. For a
combination made up of a number of elements of calculation, they had no
reasoning powers at all.

Owing to this want of capacity for combined operations of thought, and
their, habitual intoxication of excitement, on the issue of carrying
some important enterprise without loss, they hurried home with their
prisoners, leaving the voice of lamentation and the sentiment of extreme
dejection among the bereaved inmates of Boonesborough.

Throwing all the recorded incidents and circumstances of the life of
Boone, during his captivity among them, together, we shall reserve them
for another place, and proceed here to record what befell him among the
whites.

He resided as a captive among the Indians until the following March. At
that time, he, and ten of the persons who were taken with him at the
Blue Licks, were conducted by forty Indians to Detroit, where the party
arrived on the thirteenth of the month. The ten men were put into the
hands of Governor Hamilton, who, to his infinite credit, treated them
with kindness. For each of these they received a moderate ransom. Such
was their respect, and even affection for the hunter of Kentucky, and
such, perhaps, their estimate of his capability of annoying them, that
although Governor Hamilton offered them the large sum of a hundred
pounds sterling for his ransom, they utterly refused to part with him.
It may easily be imagined, in what a vexatious predicament this
circumstance placed him; a circumstance so much the more embarrassing,
as he could not express his solicitude for deliverance, without alarming
the jealousy and ill feeling of the Indians. Struck with his appearance
and development of character, seve