Crisis in the Wilderness: The Capture and Rescue of the Boone and Callaway Girls, 1776 - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

The capture of Daniel Boone’s daughter and two of Richard Callaway’s by a party of Shawnee and Cherokee Indians is one of the most thrilling and memorable events of frontier Kentucky. Boone’s role in recovering his daughter Jemima and Betsy and Fanny Callaway contributed to his becoming the most celebrated Kentuckian of the 18th century. His part in the capture and rescue was the subject of endless telling and retelling of the events. The fact that the story was told and retold so frequently has resulted in numerous variations. Over time, additional details became incorporated into the basic narrative. Many of the details in the different versions are contradictory. Our objective in Part I, “A True Story,” was to tell the captivity story as accurately as possible. Thus, we had to pick and choose which details to include and which to leave out. Like everyone who has written about Daniel Boone since the late 1800s, we have relied on the body of work amassed by Lyman Copeland Draper (1815-1891), who served as secretary for the State Historical Society of Wisconsin at Madison, Wisconsin. One of Draper’s particular fascinations was the capture of the Boone and Callaway daughters. For the captivity and rescue, his compilation of interviews, letters, articles and documents has provided essentially the entire body of source material on the subject. We located and transcribed 88 narratives from Draper’s informants about this signature event. These are published here for the first time in Part II, “The Captivity Narratives.” Readers of popular Boone biographies may be surprised to find some of the familiar “well known facts” are missing. This was most often the result of conflicting reports and the lack of evidence to identify the correct version. Many of the omitted details and the reasoning behind our decisions are discussed in Part III, “Analysis of the Captivity Narratives.”

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.