At a time in our nation’s history when the lands to what then was referred to as the West were ablaze with conflict between Anglo and Indian, Simon Kenton—frontiersman, scout, military general—achieved fame as what one writer described as “the frontier equivalent of a modern-day super-hero.” His deeds and accomplishments rivaled those of his contemporary and close friend, Daniel Boone, whose life he once saved during an Indian attack. Fame, however, is fickle and often passes over the most deserving. While Boone became the subject of books, movies and a successful television series, little has been written about Kenton, and few, aside from a handful of descendants and period historians, are familiar with his name.
ON THE RUN
Kenton was born in Fauquier County, Virginia, in April 1755, on rented land known as the Carter Grant. As a youth, he had no formal education. The boy worked the family tobacco farm only sporadically, preferring to spend his time roaming the surrounding woods. By the time he reached his teenage years, he was, according to biographer and descendant Edna Kenton, “a tall, lithe, straight, auburn-haired, blue-eyed idler.”
The transition from aimless youth to noted frontiersman, soldier, scout, Indian fighter, explorer and adopted Shawnee brave began when Kenton was nearly 16—as the result of a mistake. Apparently, he had become smitten with a local belle, and when she became engaged to another, the jilted teen challenged his successful rival to a fight, which the headstrong Kenton lost. Several months later, he braced his foe for a second time. During this contest, Kenton, who had developed into a well-muscled 6-footer (an 1830 document describes him as a “giant of a man,” at a time when the average height for men was 5 feet, 8 inches), delivered a blow that left his opponent stretched unmoving on the ground.
Believing he had killed his adversary and fearing the gallows, Kenton immediately fled Virginia for the frontier West, taking nothing with him but the bloodstained clothes he wore. Haste was essential. Although the country itself was vast, the population was relatively small, and people generally knew, or knew of, one another. Kenton was keenly aware of the need to outrun the news of what he believed was a hanging offense.
Now on his own and on the run, the teenager lacked both a rifle and the wherewithal to purchase or trade for one. In exchange for food and lodging, he performed brief odd jobs for the settlers whose homesteads he encountered in his flight. He would adopt the family name of each of the various settlers whom he visited, claiming a distant kinship in order to endear himself.
After journeying some 100 miles on foot, Kenton arrived in the settlement of Warm Springs. There, he introduced himself as Simon Butler at the home of widower and affluent miller Jacob Butler.
Several decades later, Kenton’s son William related, “Butler was pleased with his newly found ‘relative,’ kept him some time, [and] employed him to work on his mill dam and farm.” For his part, Kenton grew increasingly devoted to his host and employer. When the youth eventually decided to continue on his fugitive path, the miller presented him with his personal long rifle as a parting gift. It was a fine weapon—one that Kenton christened “Jacob” in honor of the older man. Kenton kept the surname of his friend, and for the next several years, he would be widely known to both Indians and Whites on the frontier as Simon Butler, until an ironic turn of events allowed him to reclaim his family name.
The youth eventually arrived at a settlement near the recently built Fort Pitt at the source of the Ohio River. There, he fell in with two hunters who were planning to follow the Ohio to the wilderness variously known as Cantuckey, Kaintuck and Kan-tuk-ee. It also was referred to as the Middle Ground, and—more ominously—the Dark and Bloody Ground.
As biographer Edna Kenton noted, Kentucky was a “breeding spot for legend and myth”; and legends flourished about the region’s so-called “Canelands.” These Canelands reputedly stretched for untold miles and contained seemingly endless tracts of fertile land, rich with game. As it turned out, fields of river cane—a species of bamboo—were, in fact, common in Kentucky.
The older of Kenton’s two companions, Jacob Yaeger, had been a captive of the Indians for years as a child, spoke several native languages, and had traveled with his captors into Kentucky. Yaeger, who went by the sobriquet “The Long Dutchman,” described the numberless herds of buffalo, elk and deer of the region. It was, he averred, teeming with game and rich in arable land for those who were bold enough to claim it. In company with the two hunters, with rifle and traps in hand and a newly fashioned canoe packed with winter provisions, 16-year-old “Simon Butler” set off down the Ohio River, resolved to start life afresh in this wilderness Eden.
The new land, however, was not without its perils. In addition to its natural bounties, this wild country was home to the powerful Shawnee tribe, which was violently opposed to Anglo intrusion. For decades since the late 1600s, westering settlers had driven this tribe of the Algonquin nation from place to place, from their homeland in the Southern Great Lakes region to Pennsylvania and, finally, into Kentucky and Ohio. Here, along with other tribes, they dug in, resolved not to be moved again.
INTO THE WILDERNESS
Kenton and his two companions paddled for weeks, driving ever deeper into the new country. They did not find the fabled Canelands, which would elude Kenton for the next few years, but Kentucky itself more than met Yaeger’s description. The three adventurers built a snug, three-sided shelter against a huge fallen tree at a salt lick near the mouth of the Elk River, and they spent the next two years there. They hunted and trapped and at the end of each season bartered their furs with a trader on the Ohio River for food, clothing, lead and powder. Yaeger proved a good teacher in the ways of woods lore and survival, and Kenton was an apt and avid learner.
Interaction with the natives, however, was inevitable. To certain tribes, as biographer Thomas D. Clark observed, “Every trespasser was an enemy … Too well the Indians knew what the appearance of the white man … meant.”
On a cold, rainy day in March 1773, as the three nearly naked hunters sat about the fire waiting for their sodden clothing to dry, the camp was attacked by a party of Indians. Yaeger was either captured or killed—he was never heard from again—while Kenton and his companion escaped, with neither guns nor provisions and wearing only their shirts. After five days—cold, starving, exhausted, badly raked by thorns and briars, and with the skin of their bare feet in shreds—they came upon a lone cabin. The inhabitants, a man and his wife, fed and clothed the two and provided them shelter while they regained their strength.
Meanwhile, a growing number of adventurers, traders, land speculators and settlers made their way into Kentucky, where land was free for the taking, requiring only a series of personalized notches cut into tree trunks—“tomahawk improvements,” as they were called. At least for the moment, these were sufficient to mark a person’s property. Soon, cabins and seminal communities began to sprout up, and Kenton, whose prized rifle had been among his possessions lost in the attack, agreed to provide game for a small settlement on the Little Kanawha in exchange for provisions and a new weapon.
Once he was armed and re-supplied, the 18-year-old woodsman became a one-man welcoming committee for the increasing number of parties entering Kentucky. He would greet the keelboats, hunt and guide for the newly arrived, and help to protect them from Indian attacks. One writer has posited that it was Kenton’s way of making amends for the supposed murder of his rival back in Virginia.
Although young, Kenton possessed more first-hand experience and knowledge of the region than most, and his kindness toward newcomers did not go unremarked. Soon, the name Simon Butler became well known among the immigrants, who called him their “savior” and sought him out for guidance and protection.
The Shawnees, however, who pronounced his adopted name “Bahdler,” came to refer to him as “Man Whose Gun Is Never Empty.” Considering that the firearms of the day were all single-shot weapons, with several steps involved in the loading process, this was a grudging acknowledgment of Kenton’s uncanny ability to swiftly reload his rifle, whether standing or on the run.
THE DARK AND BLOODY GROUND
Every settler or land agent who carved out a piece of the wilderness for a home or for gain inevitably pushed the native population ever farther to the south and west. Further exacerbating the situation, unscrupulous groups of Whites staged several unprovoked, murderous attacks against peaceful tribes, culminating in the April 30, 1774, descent upon the defenseless Mingo village of Chief Logan, who always had been friendly toward the Whites. The chief’s entire family was slaughtered in what is known as the Yellow Creek Massacre.
Not surprisingly, the Indians responded in kind; scalps were taken by both sides, and Logan himself became an implacable foe of the interlopers, killing a number of colonists. “There runs not a drop of my blood,” he later said, “in the veins of any living creature. This called on me for revenge. I have sought it. I have killed many.”
By the following month, hostilities had reached a fever pitch. John Murray, Lord Dunmore—Virginia’s colonial governor—took advantage of the situation. He mustered two “militias” of frontiersmen at Fort Pitt—one under Col. Andrew Lewis and the other under himself—and declared open war against the Shawnees, Mingoes and various other tribes. Dunmore’s motive was plain: to remove all native obstacles to Anglo expansion into the West. As Edna Kenton writes, “Doubtless an Indian war was inevitable, but if ever an Indian war was provoked by the whites, Lord Dunmore’s was.”
Tribes throughout the region rose to meet the new threat. Entire settlements emptied as the residents left their cabins and crops to seek the relative safety of Fort Pitt. Kenton made his way to the fort as well, where he met the two men who would remain his most steadfast lifelong friends. There were not two more disparate characters on the frontier. Six-foot, redheaded George Rogers Clark soon would become a legendary military leader during the looming American Revolution, while the short, swarthy Simon Girty would become known across the frontier as a bloodthirsty renegade and traitor. Writes Edna Kenton of her ancestor, “His range of affection was wide to have included in it the greatest general and the most famous renegade of the West.” Both men were destined to play vital roles in saving Kenton’s life.
Kenton’s reputation as an expert woodsman had preceded him to Fort Pitt. After swearing an oath of loyalty to King George prior to receiving an assignment, as he later recalled, “[Fellow frontiersman] Jacob Drennan and I were asked to raise a company. We did so, but afterwards acted as spies.” At the time, the term “spy” referred to a man who served as a military scout, guide and messenger. It was a role that suited Kenton well.
As “spies,” the two placed themselves in imminent danger from both sides. While silently making their way through hostile territory, as author Clark points out, “the snapping of a single twig would bring a hail of bullets … [And] as they got nearer [their own lines,] there was danger that they would be mistaken for Indians by the quickshooting pickets.”
Kenton and Drennan were directed to scout for Col. Angus McDonald, whose mission was to destroy the Shawnee village of Wapatomica as well as the other Indian villages along Ohio’s Muskingum River. The 400-man force first traveled by boat on the Ohio River and then marched some 90 miles through uncharted forest, led by the two scouts. Each man was an experienced woodsman and carried a rifle, knife and tomahawk as well as seven days’ provisions in his knapsack.
When the party came within a few miles of their first objective, they were ambushed by around 50 Shawnee warriors, suffering one man killed and another wounded. Shortly thereafter, the Indians sent emissaries professing to seek a peace negotiation—a ruse that Kenton immediately saw through. He and Drennan convinced McDonald that the Indians were laying a trap. They scouted the now-deserted village and found where the Indians had crossed a nearby stream and lay in wait. They relayed the intelligence back to the frontiersmen and participated in a rout of the Indians and the destruction of Wapatomica. They then went on to burn four more villages along the river before turning for home.
Kenton continued “spying,” and when Lord Dunmore mandated that the 1,100-man militia under Lewis meet him, combine their forces, and attack the Shawnee towns on the Scioto River, he chose Kenton and two others to deliver the vital orders to Lewis. After an Indian attack separated the three messengers, two turned back, while Kenton went on alone to deliver the orders.
On Oct. 10, before Lewis could join up with Lord Dunmore, Shawnee Chief Cornstalk and a combined Shawnee/Mingo force of some 1,000 warriors attacked him at Point Pleasant, Virginia (now West Virginia). The bloody battle that followed, which raged throughout the day, was largely fought hand to hand, ending in a decisive victory for the colonists, with the Indians driven north of the Ohio River. Lord Dunmore followed them with his own force, and while he sat in the midst of peace negotiations with Cornstalk, Lewis and a militia detachment destroyed several Shawnee villages in the area. The stunned Shawnees capitulated, agreeing to abandon all their land south and east of the Ohio River and to no longer attack settlers traveling on the river. Lord Dunmore’s War was over.
COMING IN PART TWO:
Kenton is discharged from military service in 1775 and returns to Kentucky, still believing that a murder charge awaits him back in Virginia. He finally finds the rich, elusive Canelands, where he claims and clears a small parcel of land for himself. Native resistance continues for years throughout the Middle Ground, and Kenton’s reputation as an Indian fighter grows. As chief scout and hunter for Boonesborough, Daniel Boone’s forted settlement, Kenton helps to fight off an Indian attack, in the course of which he dramatically saves Boone’s life. On one occasion, Kenton is captured, finding himself facing torture and a terrible death at the hands of the Shawnees. With the American Revolution in full swing, and despite his earlier oath of allegiance to King George, Kenton must choose a side. And back in Fauquier County, Virginia, a life-changing surprise awaits him.