Everyone who has studied American history knows the name of Daniel Boone, a pioneer who led settlers into Kentucky and encouraged the Westward expansion of the original thirteen colonies. His daughter, Jemima, is less well known, but she had an important role in expanding American territory. 

Jemima’s great adventure started on July 14, 1776, when she was 13 years old and living with her family at Boonesborough, the settlement her father had organized. She and two other teenaged girls took a canoe out on the Kentucky River, which flowed close to the settlement. Seeing flowers on the opposite shore, the girls decided to paddle over and pick some. No sooner had they drawn close to the shore when a group of Shawnee and Cherokee Indians appeared, seized the canoe, grabbed the girls, bound their hands, and marched them away from the river.

Fortunately, Jemima and her friends were familiar with the difficulties of tracking people through a heavily wooded area and did their best to leave traces of where they had gone. The girls were wearing long dresses, which made it difficult for them to walk through the dense woods, so the Indians cut several inches off the bottoms of the skirts. The Indians buried the fabric so that it would not be found, but the girls were able to tear pieces from the ragged skirts and attach them to bushes along the path. When the Indians noticed what they were doing, they ordered them to stop, but some pieces of fabric were left.

It wasn’t long before the settlers in Boonesborough heard cries and realized something was happening. They ran to the river where they found the empty canoe floating in the water. The girls had disappeared and the men realized they had been captured. Daniel Boone quickly organized a few men as a search party. Although both Shawnee and Cherokee Indians travelled often through the area, their trails were well hidden and Boone and his party didn’t know which direction they would choose.

Jemima was wearing a bonnet and she realized the bonnet strings could give information. She tied knots in the string to indicate the number of Indian braves who had taken them—five in all. Because the girls were clever enough to leave clues, and because Daniel Boone and his party understood them, it took only a few days to rescue the girls. Despite worries among the settlers, the girls were not injured by their captors. In fact, the girls seem to have established congenial relations with several of the Indians and reported that they had been well treated.

Jemima and her friends, however, soon became only a background to the media blitz (by 19^th century standards) of their story. During the years after they had returned to Boonesborough, been reunited with their families, and married other settlers, their story was often retold. It served as the basis for a fictional retelling in Sir Waler Scott’s The Last of the Mohicans in 1826 and was the basis for both paintings and stories in popular media.

It seems sad that Jemima would never be able to read Scott’s novel because like most women among the colonial settlers she was never taught to read. She did live a long, adventurous, and presumably happy life, however, as a wife and mother until her death in 1834.

Jemima’s story and the effect it had on her father as well as other settlers on the Western frontier is the subject of a recent book by the novelist Matthew Pearl, The Taking of Jemima Boone: Colonial Settlers, Tribal Nations, and the Kidnap That Shaped America (2021). Pearl has done a lot of research and he sticks carefully to the known facts about the incident and its repercussions. The result is a fascinating picture of what life was like for both settlers and Indians during pioneer days on the western frontier. It was a lot more complicated and far more fascinating than most versions that have been available in books, movies and on TV.