Suspicious of treachery, they had posted twenty-five men in a bastion, with orders to fire upon the council, as soon as they should see any marks of treachery or violence.  The instant the negotiators were seized, the whole besieging force fired upon them, and the fire was as promptly returned by the men in the bastion.  The powerful savages who had grasped Boone and Smith, attempted to drag them off as prisoners.  The one who held Smith was compelled to release his grasp by being shot dead.  Colonel Boone was slightly wounded.  A second tomahawk, by which his skull would have been cleft asunder, he evaded, and it partially fell on Major Smith; but being in a measure spent, it did not inflict a dangerous wound.  The negotiators escaped to the fort without receiving any other injury.  The almost providential escape of Boone and Smith can only be accounted for by the confusion into which the Indians were thrown, as soon as these men were seized, and by the prompt fire of the men concealed in the bastion.  Added to this, the two Indians who seized them were both shot dead, by marksmen who knew how to kill the Indians, and at the same time spare the whites, in whose grasp they were held.

The firing on both sides now commenced in earnest, and was kept up without intermission from morning dawn until dark.  The garrison, at once exasperated and cheered by the meditated treachery of the negotiation and its result, derided the furious Indians, and thanked them for the stratagem of the negotiation, which had given them time to prepare the fort for their reception.  Goaded to desperation by these taunts, and by Duquesne, who harangued them to the onset, they often rushed up to the fort, as if they purposed to storm it.  Dropping dead under the cool and deliberate aim of the besieged, the remainder of the forlorn hope, raising a yell of fury and despair, fell back.  Other infuriated bands took their place; and these scenes were often repeated, invariably with the same success, until both parties were incapable of taking aim on account of the darkness.

They then procured a quantity of combustible matter, set fire to it, and approached under covert of the darkness, so near the palisades as to throw the burning materials into the fort.  But the inmates had availed themselves of the two days’ consultation, granted them by the treacherous foe, to procure an ample supply of water; and they had the means of extinguishing the burning faggots as they fell.

Finding their efforts to fire the fort ineffectual, they returned again to their arms, and continued to fire upon the station for some days.  Taught a lesson of prudence, however, by what had already befallen them, they kept at such a cautious distance, as that their fire took little effect.  A project to gain the place, more wisely conceived, and promising better success, was happily discovered by Colonel Boone.  The walls of the fort were distant sixty yards from the Kentucky river.  The bosom of the current was easily discernible by the people within.  Boone discovered in the morning that the stream near the shore was extremely turbid.  He immediately divined the cause.