"Boone led an attempt to settle Kentucky in 1773. At the time, however, the movement was not identified with Boone as much as it was with William Russell, a well-known Indian trader, tobacco farmer, landowner, captain of militia, and justice of the peace in southwest Virginia. On Boone's way back to the Yadkin in the spring of 1773, he followed the trace up Clinch River to Russell's settlement of Castle Woods. It is not known which of the two men originated the Kentucky emigration plan, but Captain Russell was to head the expedition while Boone was to serve as its logician and guide. Arthur Campbell, another of the big men of southwest Virginia, afterward wrote to the governor that "Captain William Russell with several families and upwards of 30 men set out with an intention to reconnoiter the country towards the Ohio and settle in the limits of the expected new government." Another Virginian wrote of joining "the company going with William Russell to Ohio." Boone's name was not mentioned in contemporary correspondence or reports concerning the migration. This is hardly surprising, since Boone was still an obscure woodsman from backwoods North Carolina, while Russell was a prominent Virginian. The son of a well-known lawyer from Culpepper County, he had attended the College of William and Mary and married a woman from a wealthy tidewater family; after her death he married the widowed sister of Patrick Henry. In the 1760s Russell made a name for himself as one of the first settlers in southwest Virginia, representing the area in the House of Burgesses. Governor Dunsmore, who met him in Williamsburg, described him as "a gentleman of some distinction." Born to command, Russell was perfectly situated to be a leader of the country about to be opened west of the mountains. Many historians have interpreted the westward migration of this period as part of a struggle for freedom from the "tidewater aristocracy," but in his move to Kentucky, Boone joined himself to gentlemen of that class. It was still the age of patriarchs, and like others of his time, Capt. William Russell so aspired. His relationship with Boone may be summed up in a word or two. Daniel Boone, he wrote, was one of the "best Hands" he knew. Boone reached the upper Yadkin, where his family was again living, in late April, just a few weeks before Rebecca delivered her eighth child, Jesse Bryan, on May 23, 2773. James, sixteen, was now as tall as his father, and with his brother Israel, fourteen, shouldered much of the field work, around the farm; Susannah and Jemima, twelve and ten, were a help to their mother; and then there were the little ones - Levina, seven, Rebecca, five, Daniel Morgan, three, and the baby. ................................................................................................ Jesse and Jonathan, the nephews raised by the Boone household, now young men, chose to remain in North Carolina. ............................................. But in their move, the Boones were joined by brother Squire, his wife, Jane, and their three young sons, as well as Benjamin Cutbeard and his wife, Boone's niece, and several other families as well as a number of single men, hunting companions of Boone. The Boones themselves seem to have left the Upper Yadkin sometime in the early summer for an extended visit with their kin at the Forks, where Boone's talk of Kentucky persuaded a number of the Bryan families to join the emigration. The Bryan men would remain until the harvest was in; they would pack winter supplies and join the Boone's in Powell Valley; returning for their families once they had established a base in Kentucky. Meanwhile, the Boone's and the others from the Upper Yadkin would travel to Castle's Wood to link up with Russell's people. .............................................................................. .................................................. ................................... By mid-August the Boone's were with Russell at Castle's Wood, where the McAfee brothers, returning from the exploration of Kentucky, saw them making preparations for the journey. There were no wagons to pack, for the trail to Kentucky was little more than a rough trace over mountains and through forests, wide enough only for the horses to be ridden in single file. Their supplies, clothes, tools, and precious possessions were packed on horses. "They had prepared baskets made of fine hickory withe or splinters," wrote and old resident of the Clinch River area, " and fastening two of them together with ropes they put a child in each basket and put it across a pack saddle. They had poultry with them which they carried the same way." Cattle and hogs were driven along. With the crying of the children, the lowing of the cattle, and the bells on all the livestock, "they made a terrible racket." In addition to the Russell family, including the slaves, were a number of young men who would become friends and associates of Boone's during the Kentucky years, including William Bush and Michael Stoner, said to be the two best shots in southwest Virginia. The group, totaling forty or fifty people, set out on September 25, 1773. .............................................................................. .............................................................................. .. The movement of families by pack train was laborious work. The group soon strung out in a long line of march, and it took nearly two weeks to travel the hundred-odd miles down and across the Clinch River, over Horton's Summit to Little Flat Lick, and over Powell's Mountain at Kane's Gap into the valley, where they met the Bryan men at the Forks. Believing that the slow trip would require greater supply of provisions than he originally had anticipated, early in the journey Boone sent back his oldest son, James, accompanied by John and Richard Mendinall from North Carolina, to arrange for additional supplies at Castle's Wood, where Captain Russell had remained to wrap up some last-minute business. Russell ordered additional horses, packs, and cattle and sent those forward with his own goods, reinforcing the party with two slaves and a hired man under the guidance of an experienced woodsman, Isaac Crabtree. On the evening of October 9, 1773, James Boone and the others of the supply party camped for the night on the west bank of Wallen's Creek, near its junction with the river at the eastern edge of Powell's Valley. They were just three miles behind Boone's main column and several miles ahead of Russell, who brought up the rear of the march with several other men. That night, around their campfire, they heard wolves howling. The Mendinalls were little more than boys, this was their first adventure into the wilderness, and they admitted to being frightened by the plaintive sound. But Crabtree laughed at their fears, joking that in Kentucky they would hear not only wolves howling, but buffalo bellowing from the treetops. His backwoods humor had the effect of calming the boys, and soon all were asleep. There seems to have been no fear of an Indian attack. .............................................................................. .......................................................................... ......at about dawn the Indians fired down into the sleeping groups. The Mendinall brothers died in the first fire. Crabtree and the hired man suffered wounds but fled into the woods. The slave named Charles stood petrified with fear, but his companion, Adam, scurried undetected under some nearby driftwood and became the sole living witness to what followed. James Boone and Henry Russell had taken bullets through their hips and lay conscious but immobilized. Running into the camp, most of the Indians turned to gather the horses and making preparations to abscond with their loot, but one or two pounced onto the wounded boys and began to slash at them with their knives. Attempting to turn the blades with their arms and hands, the boys were horribly mangle. From his hiding place Adam heard James pleading for his life .............................................................................. ........................................... With the other Indians impatient to be going, the tortures finally ended the torment with heavy blows to the boys heads, leaving their bodies shot through with arrows before fleeing into the dawn, forcing the slave Charles along. The massacre was first discovered by a young thief from Boone's camp who had been severely rebuked the day before by the men of the party for stealing some trifle, and in his shame he resolved to steal something of real value and return home. Arising before dawn and taking a pack of deer skins from Boone's cache, he was riding back up the hills when suddenly he came upon the killing ground. Without stopping to examine the bodies, he galloped back to camp to spread the alarm. The people were just stirring and the man's calls threw them into panic. Not knowing the extent of the disaster, and compelled by the necessity of preparing a defense in case of a second attack, Boone sent Squire and a small groups back to the ridge. Fearing the worst, Rebecca dug into her pack, pulled out two linen sheets, and gave them to Squire..................................... As Squire and the others rode up they saw Captain Russell and his men bending over the bodies. They had risen early that morning in the hopes of overtaking the boys and had ridden unsuspecting upon the dismal spectacle. While some of the men began to round up the scattered cattle, Squire and Russell wrapped the Mendinnall brothers together in one sheet, James and Henry Russell in the other, and buried them in a common grave. A few days later Crabtree, whose wound proved not to be serious, arrived back at Castle's Wood. Adam, the eyewitness, wandered through the forest in shock after the Indians left and did not find his way home for eleven days. The body of the slave Charles, his head cleaved open with a hatchet, was found later, about forty miles away. The sixth victim, Drake, remained unaccounted for until, twenty years later, bones thought to be his were found wedged between two high ledges of rock about an eighth of a mile from the creek. .............................................................................. ................. The first published account of the massacre, in a North Carolina newspaper printed in early December, reported that a group of emigrants from the Yadkin, on their way over the mountains, had been attacked by Indians, killing six men, including the son of Daniel Boone. It was the first time that Daniel Boone's name appeared in print. ..................." pgs. 90 - 95 - Daniel Boone The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer, John Mack Faragher, 1992 - Henry Holt and Company, New York Sources given: "Captain William Russell: Arthur Campell to Lord's Dunsmore, December 14, 1773, quoted in James William Hagy, The First Attempt to Settle Kentucky: Boone in Virginia - Filson Club Historical Quarterly 44 (1970) p. 228. "Murder of Russell" Campell to Preston, June 20, 1774, Documentary History of Dunsmore's War, 1774 (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1905) p. 38 -39