258 The Winning of the West 



was caused by the successful advance of Boone's 

 troops, save what was due to Netherland when he 

 rallied the flying backwoodsmen at the ford. 



Of the seven white captives four were put to death 

 with torture; three eventually rejoined their people. 

 One of them owed his being spared to a singular 

 and amusing feat of strength and daring. When 

 forced to run the gantlet, he, by his activity, act- 

 ually succeeded in reaching the council-house un- 

 harmed; when almost to it, he turned, seized a 

 powerful Indian and hurled him violently to the 

 ground, and then, thrusting his head between the 

 legs of another pursuer, he tossed him clean over 

 his back, after which he sprang on a log, leaped 

 up and knocked his heels together, crowed in the 

 fashion of backwoods victors, and rallied the In- 

 dians as a pack of cowards. One of the old chiefs 

 immediately adopted him into the tribe as his son. 



All the little for ted villages north of the Ken- 

 tucky, and those lying near its southern bank, were 

 plunged into woe and mourning by the defeat. 22 



but not as much as the Americans exaggerated that of the 

 Indians, Boone in his narrative giving the wildest of all the 

 estimates. 



22 Arthur Campbell, in the letter already quoted, comments 

 with intense bitterness on the defeat, which, he says, was due 

 largely to McGarry's "vain and seditious expressions." He 

 adds that Todd and Trigg had capacity but no experience, 

 and Boone experience but no capacity, while Logan was "a 

 dull and narrow body," and Clark "a sot, if nothing worse." 

 Campbell was a Holston Virginian, an able but very jealous 

 man, who disliked the Kentucky leaders and indeed had no 

 love for Kentucky itself ; he had strenuously opposed its first 

 erection as a separate county. 



