When he was taken at the Blue Licks, with his associates, who had returned, while he was left behind in a long captivity, during which no more news of him transpired than as if he were actually among the dead, the people of the garrison naturally concluded that he had been killed.  His wife and family numbered him as among the dead; and often had they shuddered on the bare recurrence of some one to the probability of the tortures he had undergone.  Deeply attached to him, and inconsolable, they could no longer endure a residence which so painfully reminded them of their loss.  As soon as they had settled their minds to the conviction that their head would return to them no more, they resolved to leave these forests that had been so fatal to them, and return to the banks of the Yadkin, where were all their surviving connections.  A family so respectable and dear to the settlement would not be likely to leave without having to overcome many tender and pressing solicitations to remain, and many promises that if they would, their temporal wants should be provided for.

To all this Mrs. Boone could only object, that Kentucky had indeed been to her, as its name imported, a dark and Bloody Ground.  She had lost her eldest son by the savage fire before they had reached the country.  Her daughter had been made a captive, and had experienced a forbearance from the Indians to her inexplicable.  She would have been carried away to the savage towns, and there would have been forcibly married to some warrior, but for the perilous attempt, and improbable success of her father in recapturing her.  Now the father himself, her affectionate husband, and the heroic defender of the family, had fallen a sacrifice, probably in the endurance of tortures on which the imagination dared not to dwell.  Under the influence of griefs like these, next to the unfailing resource of religion, the heart naturally turns to the sympathy and society of those bound to it by the ties of nature and affinity.  They returned to their friends in North Carolina.

It was nearly five years since this now desolate family had started in company with the first emigrating party of families, in high hopes and spirits, for Kentucky.  We have narrated their disastrous rencounter with the Indians in Powell’s valley, and their desponding return to Clinch river.  We have seen their subsequent return to Boonesborough, on Kentucky river.  Tidings of the party thus far had reached the relatives of Mrs. Boone’s family in North Carolina; but no news from the country west of the Alleghanies had subsequently reached them.  All was uncertain conjecture, whether they still lived, or had perished by famine, wild beasts, or the Indians.