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At dawn, a mixed party of Shawnee and Cherokee Indians attacked, and shot James Boone and Henry Russell through the hips so that they could not escape. They were tortured with knives. Boone recognized his torturer as Big Jim, a Shawnee who had been a guest at Daniel’s home in the Yadkin.
- Henry Hamilton's Journal
Indians had rendered it useless, and they subsisted by the...
- Benjamin Sharp
when the Indians disappeared, as if by magic, leaving the...
- Henry Hamilton's Journal
In this valley, on 10 Oct. 1773, Delaware, Shawnee, and Cherokee Indians killed Daniel Boone's eldest son, James, and five others in their group of eight settlers en route to Kentucky.
The girls marked their trail with bits of cloth and used every ruse to slow their captors until finally, on the evening of July 16, Boone’s men rushed the camp. Three Indians were killed, including the son of Shawnee war chief Blackfish, and the girls were rescued unharmed.
This passage from Source:Thwaites, 1902 :100-103, describes the events surrounding the death of James Boone, son of Daniel, on 10 October 1773. The following year Southwest Virginia would be immersed in the portion of the period of Indian Hostilities known as Dunmore's War.
Boone and his men ambushed the Indians, rescuing the girls and driving off their captors. The incident became the most celebrated event of Boone's life. James Fenimore Cooper created a version of this episode in his classic novel The Last of the Mohicans (1826).
James Boone was already bleeding out from a gunshot wound. Now, prostrate on the frozen scree beneath the Cumberland Mountain’s shadow line, he begged the Shawnee with the high cheekbones and misshapen chin to just kill him.
James Boone received the same treatment: a shot through the hips and a slow agonizing death. The Indians made his pain more unbearable by pulling out his toe nails and finger nails. One Indian, Big Jim, he recognized and he begged him for his life -- finally he begged him for his death. Both the Mendenhall boys and the Drake youth were killed ...
