RECAP OF PARTS ONE AND TWO:
Simon Kenton’s progression from an indolent boy on a hardscrabble Virginia farm to a legend of the American frontier began when he was 16. Believing he had killed a man in a fight, he fled to the untamed region known as Kain-tuck-ee. There, under the assumed name Simon Butler, he excelled at hunting, trapping and—when the occasion called for it—fighting Native Americans. Standing a broad-shouldered 6 feet, 3 inches tall, he soon earned a widespread reputation as a guide and hunter for and protector of the newcomers to the land. In one brief but bloody encounter with a large party of Shawnee outside the forted settlement of Boonesborough, Kenton saved the life of fellow frontiersman Daniel Boone, killing two natives who were poised to slay his friend.
When the Shawnee captured their mortal enemy, they tortured Kenton mercilessly and condemned him to be burned at the stake. Rescued from a horrific death, he was taken as a prisoner to the British stronghold at Detroit. After spending months in captivity, he managed to escape both the British and their Shawnee confederates. Making his way back to Kentucky in the summer of 1779, the 24-year-old woodsman discovered from westering Virginians that the man he thought he had killed years earlier was, in fact, alive. Kenton immediately reclaimed his birth name and for the rest of his life would remain Simon Kenton.
IN THE SERVICE OF THE PATRIOTS
During the months when Kenton was a prisoner of the Shawnee and the British, the influx of new settlers into Kentucky continued unabated. Forted settlements—“stations,” as they were called—were built virtually overnight. By now, the American Revolution was well into its fourth year; nonetheless, many Kentuckians were reluctant to take part in the fighting, feeling that the war did not touch them.
They were disabused of such notions in June 1780, when Capt. Henry Bird—at the head of around 1,000 American Indian warriors, 150 handpicked British soldiers, and two cannons—left Fort Detroit and marched toward Kentucky. They quickly overran three stations, killing some 20 settlers and hauling hundreds of men, women and children back to Detroit as prisoners.
Kenton recalled that, when he received word of the disaster, “Charles Gatliffe and myself went to Riddle’s and Martin’s Stations and found them both taken, and a number of people lying about killed and scalped …” Kenton and Gatliffe followed Bird’s trail, at one point reportedly capturing one of the British officer’s brass cannons.
George Rogers Clark, now in command of the Kentucky militia, immediately mounted a counteroffensive and named his old friend, Kenton, scout and captain of a company. The native villages that Clark targeted for reprisal were the sites of some of Kenton’s most painful experiences as a Shawnee captive. Writes Kenton biographer Thomas D. Clark, “For Simon, the expedition against Chillicothe and Piqua was sweet revenge.”
The natives were warned of Clark’s approach by a deserter in the Kentuckians’ ranks, thereby depriving Clark of the element of surprise. The inhabitants of Chillicothe had burned their village and fled. Kenton later recalled, “[W]e pursued on to a place called Pickaway Town, and there the Indians embodied and fought us all day, and we whipped them, and for two days, we were busily employed in cutting down their corn.”
The Kentuckians burned the remaining native villages and destroyed hundreds of acres of each community’s corn—the natives’ main sustenance. Stated Clark, “For the next two years, the Indians were too busy finding food and building new villages to make a serious attack on Kentucky.”
At around this time, Kenton began to acquire large tracts of land in Kentucky and Ohio, identifying his claims by notching the letter “K” into the bordering trees. These “tomahawk improvements” sufficed for the moment, but, as Kenton would learn, they were no safeguard against land grabbers and other claimants in a court of law.
THE INDIAN WAR OF 1782
Other events soon darkened the horizon. According to Kenton descendant and biographer Edna Kenton, “Kentucky only seven years before had been an uninhabited wilderness—now its people numbered close to twenty thousand.” Within just a few years, that number would quadruple. Realizing that the settler population would soon grow too powerful to resist, several tribes in the region—Chippewa, Ottawa, Delaware, Wyandot, Munsee, Cherokee and Shawnee—went to war against northwestern Virginia and Kentucky.
Some of the natives were the Shawnee who had been driven from their villages earlier by Gen. Clark and his men, including Kenton. Again, Clark commanded the local forces, and, as Kenton later stated, “We turned out with him … against the same Indians, who had re-embodied, and we whipped them again.”
As the 27-year-old Kenton, once again acting as scout and officer, marched at the head of his company, a young boy named Joel Collins, who watched the column as it passed through Lexington, later provided a comprehensive description of him, as chronicled by Edna Kenton:
“Mr. Collins said he well remembered how his youthful fancy was attracted by the appearance of the captain who marched at the head of the first company. He was tall and well proportioned, a countenance pleasing but dignified … [H]is hunting shirt hung carelessly but gracefully on his shoulder; his other apparel was in common backwoods style. On inquiry he was told that it was Captain Simon Butler, so well-known afterwards under his true name, Simon Kenton.”
The war ended the same year it had begun—in the settlers’ favor. After the army disbanded, Kenton set out to build his own settlement. He gathered a few families to property he had acquired near Danville, and by the spring of 1783, they had erected cabins, cleared several acres, and planted flax and corn. Within two years, Kenton’s Station would grow from a rough-hewn four-cabin outpost to a well-laid-out 20-family community with a fully functioning grist mill.
HOME TO VIRGINIA … AND BACK TO KENTUCKY
Now a property owner and scion of his own station, Kenton decided it was time to visit his father’s home in Fauquier County, Virginia. He had not seen his family since fleeing at the age of 16, and he now sought a reunion. It went extremely well: Kenton offered family members and acquaintances parcels of land in Kentucky, and nearly all accepted—including William Leachman, the man Kenton had thought he had murdered so many years before. Begun in September 1783, the Kenton migration consisted of 41 people, along with at least five slaves and several head of cattle. Once they arrived, Kenton helped build a “colony” for his family on the Salt River.
When he had his family settled, Kenton returned to surveying for himself and others. Danger still loomed, however. Although the various tribes had been defeated, they had not been subdued. War parties still preyed upon settlers and surveyors in northern Kentucky, inspiring Kenton to construct a blockhouse as a stronghold on Limestone Creek. He also raised and trained his own company of minutemen, known informally as “Kenton’s Boys,” in response to the continued threat. It was, writes Edna Kenton, “Kenton’s own unique contribution to Kentucky’s defense … [When word was sent Kenton of horses or people taken, he and his ‘boys’ tucked some parched corn and jerk[y] into their hunting shirts, laid hold of their guns, mounted their horses, and picked up the trail.”
First and foremost, Kenton was now dealing in property. Among other transactions, he sold the land on which was built the town of Washington, Kentucky, just south of Maysville. However, Kenton never gave up his role as guide for, and protector of, his fellow Kentuckians. His son James later wrote of him: “He was truly the master spirit of the time in that region of the country. He was looked upon by all as the great defender of the inhabitants … ready to fly at a moment’s warning to the place of danger.”
It must have seemed to the settlers as though the Indian Wars would never cease. The same pattern repeated itself over the next several years: The settlers would assemble in force and win a significant victory over the tribes of the region, forcing them into accepting yet another treaty that further limited their homelands, whereupon the natives would continue to visit vengeance upon the victors, prompting yet another major campaign. This was the case in 1786, when Kenton joined what would prove to be a long, on-and-off war against a number of the Kentucky and Ohio tribes. Once again, he served as a scout and guide, this time for Gen. Benjamin Logan. As in the past, it was a bloody affair, with many dead on both sides.
Interestingly, despite the no-quarter approach to warfare between the settlers and natives at the time—and even after his harrowing near-death experience as a captive of the Shawnee—Kenton was restrained in the killing of his enemies. At one juncture, Moluntha, a prominent Shawnee chief, was captured and bound inside a tent. “I knew Moluntha as soon as I saw him,” Kenton recalled, “for I had been prisoner with him in ’78.” Orders were given that the chief was not to be harmed, but a fellow officer entered the tent and slew the defenseless chief. “If I had been there when he struck Moluntha I would have struck him … I never could forgive such cruelty.”
On another occasion, Kenton overpowered a Shawnee warrior who had been lying in ambush, and, wielding his tomahawk, “I sprang on him and … I killed him,” Kenton remembered. “This weighs heavy on me at times and is the only thing in my campaign I much regret[,] for he was in my power and I need not have done it.”
Despite the advent of new hostilities, the year 1786 had its bright side: It marked Kenton’s first marriage, at Kenton’s Station. Curiously, little is known about this union. His family Bible records only this: “Simon Kenton and Martha Dowden were married February 15, 1787,” and mentions her death less than a decade later. We do know that Simon had guided Martha, her three siblings, and her widowed mother to his station three years earlier, when she was around 14. After their marriage, he built what was described at the time as a “fine brick house”—the first of its kind in Mason County—on a 1,000-acre farm, where all of their four children were born.
By now, Kenton, who was well on his way to acquiring thousands of acres in Kentucky, had what might have been his first encounter with a land grabber. A resident of Kenton’s Station recorded what his wife witnessed in Lexington:
“[T]here was a ‘great man’ came into the neighborhood with a mighty land warrant and was for laying it in a great scope of country including Kenton’s Domain—which raised [Kenton’s] ire, he took hold of the great man and no one ever got such a caning.”
Kenton would not find it so easy to rid himself of land thieves in the future. The illiterate frontiersman soon would fall prey to companies and individuals intent upon reversing his claims and stealing his land. Writes Edna Kenton, “When his battles with the Indians ended, his battles in the courts of the white men began: he understood Indian warfare better and fared better in it.” As Kenton himself acknowledged in the years before he died, “I had a lot of property, and maybe they saw my weak parts enough … to know how to use me.”
Kenton’s skills as a scout, fighting man and military leader still were much in demand. He served as a major in the militia under Gen. Anthony Wayne—“Mad Anthony” to his troops—during another war with the natives. Kenton returned home in 1793, but he would be called upon in the future to fight both the natives and the British.
STARTING ANEW
On Dec. 13, 1796, only 10 years after the Kentons’ wedding, tragedy struck. Their house caught fire, and 28-year-old Martha and the child she was carrying—the family’s fifth—perished. In those unsettled and often perilous times, death—while dreaded—was accepted as an unsurprising part of life. As Edna Kenton writes, “Grief over death was tempered in those days by other misfortunes almost as great; love was not the only measurer of values … Death and life were strung on a string together, and there was little time to grieve.” When one settler was killed, his wife commented, “I would rather lose a cow than my old John.” And when the natives slew another farmer, the farmer’s son observed matter-of-factly, “By Christ, father’s killt, and the corn ain’t been hoed.”
Kenton still had children to provide for and other responsibilities that often took him far from home. When traveling, he left the children in the care of the family of Stephen Jarboe, a French immigrant who had settled in Mason County. Two years after Martha’s tragic death, Simon—now in his 40s—won the hand of Jarboe’s 19-year-old daughter Elizabeth. “Betsey,” as he called her, would bear him five more children, and the union was, according to all who knew them, a warm and affectionate one.
When Kenton was a captive of the Shawnee, he had been taken from Kentucky to their villages beyond the Ohio River, and the region had appealed to him. Shortly after his second marriage, Kenton, who sensed opportunities for land investments, moved his family to Ohio, near present-day Springfield.
For a time, Kenton prospered. He was, as biographer Edna Kenton writes, “head of his clan,” presiding over a large estate that included tenant farmers, fine horses and slaves. He developed a reputation for sharing his good fortune with his neighbors. As one chronicler writes, “He kept open house and spread a bountiful table. He owned more acres than he or any man could count.” His “open house” encompassed natives as well as settlers and would come to include a much-pacified Bo-Nah, the Shawnee warrior who had captured and tormented the young Kenton.
Kenton provided for two Native American encampments on his property, and on one occasion, a mob of local settlers determined to wipe them out. Edna Kenton writes that Kenton merely took his rifle from the wall and made it clear that the intended massacre “would take place after his own death and would certainly be preceded by the sure taking off of a few white men present.” The mob dispersed without further threat.
A LONG SLIDE
Two years after his move to Ohio, Kenton faced the first of the setbacks that would threaten his land holdings. He had acquired around 250,000 acres from a man who had bought some 2 million acres from the government on a payment plan. When the man failed to meet the payments, the government canceled the deal, and Kenton’s purchases along with it. Writes Edna Kenton, “Kenton’s land went like mist.”
In 1803, still dreaming of a land empire, Kenton made his own treaty with Shawnee chief Tecumseh that would grant him “near half of Ohio and some of Indiana” in exchange for “considerable goods and provisions … and promise to pay more money or goods as long as grass grows and water runs.” There was nothing unusual about the agreement; it was precisely the type that had been framed between the tribes and various private companies and individuals—as well as colonial legislatures—for years.
Ohio, however, had just entered the Union, and its government moved to ensure that no individual would own half the state, especially when it was promised by a tribe of natives. Once again, Kenton’s plans for a wilderness empire came to naught. Ironically, the state legislature had recently elected him to the rank of brigadier general in the Ohio Militia, an office that he resigned some six months later. Nonetheless, he would be referred to as “General Kenton” for the rest of his life.
At this time, Kenton began to experience the legal oppression that would dog him for years to come. Before leaving Kentucky some years earlier, he had paid the bail—a large sum—for a man named Robertson, who subsequently disappeared, leaving Kenton in debt to the court. Kenton briefly was placed in debtor’s prison. Years later—in 1806, according to his son, William—Kenton discovered that Robertson had escaped to the South, whereupon he saddled his horse and rode “clear to Florida.” “[H]e wanted satisfaction and [I] suppose he got it,” William laconically reported. After being absent from his family from the summer of 1806 to the spring of the following year, Kenton finally returned home, sporting a partially healed broken leg and “a bundle of North Carolina pear trees, which he planted.” Typically, he revealed no details of his absence.
Four years later, a Kentuckian claimed that Kenton owed him money, a claim that Kenton disputed. Under the law at the time, as the accused, Kenton was to be confined until the matter was resolved. By now, he had moved his family from Springfield to Urbana, Ohio, which was largely peopled by old friends and settlers whom he had aided in the past. They immediately held an election and named Kenton to be his own jailer, whereupon he moved his family into the five rooms above the jail.
As a courtesy, Kenton was given the run of the town, but when his 9-year-old daughter Elizabeth died, he could only stand at the edge of town and watch the funeral procession proceed to the cemetery. Finally, after a year of his semi-confinement, Kenton was released.
Bad luck continued to follow Kenton, some of it of his own making. Unsurpassed though he was in the woods, he was hopelessly naïve in the world of commerce. He constantly placed his faith in the wrong people and was lax when it came to taxes and other financial matters. People whom he had trusted with his investments regularly stole from him or squandered his stores of goods.
When the massive New Madrid earthquake of 1811 struck, it put large tracts of his Missouri property under water, rendering the land worthless. Shortly thereafter, the 57-year-old Kenton again was imprisoned in Ohio on the same old Kentucky debt charge, the validity of which he continued to dispute. Rather than pay a debt that he considered bogus, he chose to remain in custody. Another year passed before he was released.
By now, the War of 1812 had broken out, and Kenton entered the conflict as a sergeant. Once more in his element, he formed scouting companies, and, as in previous conflicts, was “on his own hook,” officially allowed to travel, fight and report as he saw fit.
At the 1813 Battle of the Thames, Kenton found himself in the forces opposing his old friend, Tecumseh. When the Shawnee chief and tribal leader was killed, Kenton was called upon to identify his body. Realizing that “souvenir” hunters were standing by to take the chief’s scalp and other body parts as trophies, Kenton reportedly pointed to another fallen native as the chief, thereby allowing the tribe to appropriately bury and honor their fallen leader.
Following the war, Kenton returned to his cabin, his days as a fighting man finally over. He now looked to a peaceful retirement, confident that he still owned vast properties in Ohio, Kentucky, Missouri and the Northwest Territory. A series of land disputes, as well as revisions in the laws by which Kenton had filed, soon overturned nearly all his claims, rendering him virtually landless and impoverished.
Kenton also had invested in grain mills and built two stores in Missouri. They failed as well, mainly due to the mismanagement of people whom he had trusted. The Kenton family once lived in a fine brick mansion; the family home now was described by an observer as “a log house of the most primitive style, with a dirt floor and a stump left standing in the center.” Writes Edna Kenton, “Of the hundreds of thousands of dollars and the hundreds of thousands of acres that had passed through his hands he had few left of either … His first child was born to riches; his last, to the plainest of pioneer living.”
In 1818, Kentucky court officials, still smarting over the old debt charge, tricked Kenton back to the state. The officials wrote asking him to testify in a land case, and as soon as he arrived, they jailed him—ironically, in Mason County, which Kenton himself had originally settled. He again refused to pay the claim, still maintaining that the charge was false.
Furious at his confinement, Kenton’s friends worked diligently to secure his release, while Betsey periodically rode her horse from their Ohio cabin to bring him food and comfort. Finally, friends in the Kentucky legislature put forth Kenton’s case as a means of abolishing the archaic Debtor’s Law under which he had been jailed, and he ultimately was freed.
ENDINGS
The man who had played such a major part in opening Kentucky to White settlement, guiding and protecting its early settlers often at the risk of his own life, was now reduced to living with Betsey in a small cabin on his daughter’s property on a $20-per-month government pension. Would-be biographers, chronicling the history of what was then considered the Western frontier, made plans to interview Kenton for his life story; none of their plans materialized. Perhaps the most intriguing of the would-be biographers’ efforts was that of Judge John H. James of Urbana. He sat with the aged and illiterate Kenton in early 1833 avidly recording Kenton’s comments in preparation for a book that, sadly, was never written. Nonetheless, James’ notes give the reader a fascinating glimpse into Kenton’s peculiar turns of phrase in addition to his comments on certain events in his life.
Three years later, Simon Kenton—frontiersman, explorer, scout, soldier and adventurer—died in Logan County, Ohio, at 81. His last words were to Betsey: “I have fought my last battle, and it has been the hardest of them all.” He was buried near his cabin in a spot he himself had chosen. Fewer than 30 people attended his funeral.
Soon after Kenton’s death, both Kentucky and Ohio began naming towns and counties after him. For years, the two states engaged in a fierce competition—uninterrupted by the Civil War—for Kenton’s remains. In 1865, reportedly upon learning that Kentucky had made provision for moving his bones to Frankfort, the Ohio legislature allocated funds for a monument to be built over his grave in Urbana. He had been buried elsewhere, so the state had his remains disinterred and moved to the Urbana Oak Dale Cemetery.
It was not until 1884 that the State of Ohio constructed a large granite block over Kenton’s grave to serve as the base for a life-size bronze statue. The statue itself was not completed until 1979. As one chronicler poignantly observed, “The grave of the great frontiersman and mountain man Simon Kenton is marked by a huge memorial, ironically given to honor him by the government that did not give him any respect when he stood before them in old age.”
Across the Ohio River, a larger-than-life stone monument to Kenton was erected in Maysville, Kentucky, in 2019. It shares a place of prominence with a bronze bust of Kenton’s old friend and sometime enemy, Tecumseh.
Today, artifacts of Simon Kenton’s life—such as his flintlock rifle and pieces from his original coffin—can be found in museums and historical societies throughout Ohio and Kentucky. One of the best collections is in Maysville at the Kentucky Gateway Museum Center. Over the last several years, both states have dedicated schools, highways and bridges to his memory. Constructed in the 1930s, the Simon Kenton Memorial Bridge, spanning the river that factored so significantly in his life, joins Aberdeen, Ohio, to Maysville. In 1998, the Ohio legislature named U.S. 68 from the Ohio River to the town of Kenton the Simon Kenton Memorial Highway. And every September for decades, the city of Maysville has hosted the weekend-long Simon Kenton Festival near the location where Kenton first settled in Kentucky and where he once built a blockhouse for the protection of its settlers.
In retrospect, Simon Kenton was very much a product of his time—and when that time ended to make way for a new wave of settlers, developers, businessmen and opportunists, he was brushed aside. Nor was he alone: His old friend Daniel Boone suffered the same fate, losing his vast land claims to the courts and living out his final days in a small cabin.
Perhaps the best summary of Kenton’s life is that which ends Edna Kenton’s biography:
“[T]he clear bright sense of danger inspired him; at ease[,] he was at a loss … He was a man ‘on his own hook,’ framed to swim in his own sea; when it drained away he was left without the right lungs to breathe the new air. But in his own waters—in his own time—he was leviathan.”
RECOMMENDED READING
After Simon Kenton’s death, various cheap novels, such as Simon Kenton, Or, The Scout’s Revenge, gained popularity. Few bore any resemblance to fact. In this author’s opinion, of the small handful of nonfiction books on the life of Kenton, the one that approaches the highest level of historical accuracy is Simon Kenton: His Life and Period 1755-1836, by Edna Kenton. Originally published in 1930 and currently available in paperback, it is a balanced and highly readable account of her ancestor’s life, neither idealizing nor vilifying him.
Ohio author Ray Crain has written a series of books on Kenton and his times. In 1970, Allan W. Eckert wrote a historical novel, Simon Kenton, The Frontiersmen: A Narrative, which, while entertaining, is, after all, a work of fiction. For seekers of first-hand sources, the pages of Judge John H. James’ interviews as well as other documents relating to Kenton’s life are available through the Champaign County Historical Museum of Urbana, Ohio. Two years after Kenton died, historian and archivist Lyman C. Draper began a years-long effort to interview Kenton’s friends and relatives, and although the book he had planned was never written, the material he gathered is invaluable. The Draper Collection currently is housed in the Wisconsin Historical Society. And in 2000, Kentucky Educational Television broadcast a documentary on Kenton’s early career narrated by actor and Ohio native Clancy Brown. The documentary, A Walk with Simon Kenton, is available online. — Ron Soodalter