Through a long war punctuated with grim sieges and lightning punitive expeditions, the Long Knives were sustained by their courage, audacity and individual initiative. They also had plenty of faults, including vainglory, rashness and impatience with prudent restraint. As an early historian put it, they were ‘fool-brave.’ At the Blue Licks the fool in them clearly got the upper hand and led them into folly.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Military History magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

For the tiny communities represented in the expedition, the loss of 77 men was a calamity. At the stations and in remote, scattered cabins there was bitter grief. Five days after the disaster Boone returned with a burial party. The group chased off glutting buzzards and interred the torn, scalped, bloated, blackened, stinking bodies in a mass grave. A monument was later erected to commemorate those who died.

Of all the places that figured in Boone’s lifelong wanderings, the Blue Licks was surely filled with the most poignant memories. In peaceful times, he had often hunted there. In 1774, during an interlude on his perilous mission to warn the Kentucky surveyors of the onset of Lord Dunmore’s war with the Shawnees, it was at the Licks that Boone had laughed at the antics of his fellow ranger Michael Stoner as Stoner tried to evade an enraged buffalo. Two years later, Boone had returned to the Blue Licks as a rescuer and had taken his daughter Jemima and the Callaway sisters from their Indian captors.

After that, it must surely have seemed to Boone that the Blue Licks had turned against him. In early 1778, the Licks witnessed his capture by the Shawnees, together with the capture of 26 fellow Long Knives. After his escape, while Boone and his brother Edward were returning from a hunt there in October 1780, Indians killed Edward. Now the site would forever hold Israel and Thomas Boone.

For Boone and the new Kentuckians fighting to hold onto their settlements, the Blue Licks had became a place of abiding painful and dark memories. During the 38 years that remained to him, mention of the fight at Blue Licks brought tears to Daniel Boone’s eyes.

As for Simon Girty, he alone of the Girty brothers eventually returned to civilized life, though he remained infamous. Like Boone, he has lent his name to numerous locations around the region, mostly for some form of treachery or violence. Near the Ohio River at Short Creek, there is a ridge known as Girty’s Point, from which he often launched scalping raids. The path there, first traveled by Indians centuries ago, is still used by the locals, most of whom are unaware they tread in the footsteps of villains and patriots, players in the saga of dark and bloody ground that was once Kentucky.

This article was written by James Graves and originally published in Military History Magazine in August 2002. For more great articles be sure to subscribe to Military History magazine today!

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to