The Taking of Jemima Boone: Colonial Settlers, Tribal Nations, and the Kidnap That Shaped a Nation

In this, his first nonfiction book, novelist Pearl (The Dante Club) takes on a dramatic but minor incident in U.S. history and uses it to illuminate the complicated back and forth of relations between colonial-era settlers and Indigenous peoples. The incident is the July 14, 1776, abduction of three white teenage girls (one of them was Jemima Boone, daughter of frontiersman Daniel Boone) by five Shawnee and Cherokee men outside the colonial town of Boonesboro, along the Kentucky River. The abduction was part of a 20-year history of Cherokee and Shawnee resistance to being displaced by colonizers from their ancestral lands along the river. Daniel Boone led a rescue party of other colonial men to recover the girls; despairing of following the raiders’ trail, Boone leapfrogged his rescue party to where he thought the girls and their captors would resurface. In the ensuing violence, the colonial girls were rescued while the son of Blackfish (war chief of the Chillicothe division of the Shawnee tribe) was killed. A century later, Theodore Roosevelt wrote that the incident was the stuff of a James Fenimore Cooper novel; in fact, Pearl writes here, the event had indeed inspired an episode in Cooper’s 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans. The foray was only one incident in an escalating war that involved colonists, British troops, and Indigenous peoples, most prominently the Shawnee nation. More raids followed, including one in which Daniel Boone was captured, and a siege of Boonesboro led by Blackfish.