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

by Matthew Pearl

Overview

“A rousing tale of frontier daring and ingenuity, better than legend on every front.” — Pulitzer Prize–winning author Stacy Schiff

A Goodreads Most Anticipated Book

In his first work of narrative nonfiction, Matthew Pearl, bestselling author of acclaimed novel The Dante Club, explores the little-known true story of the kidnapping of legendary pioneer Daniel Boone’s daughter and the dramatic aftermath that rippled across the nation. 

On a quiet midsummer day in 1776, weeks after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, thirteen-year-old Jemima Boone and her friends Betsy and Fanny Callaway disappear near the Kentucky settlement of Boonesboro, the echoes of their faraway screams lingering on the air.

A Cherokee-Shawnee raiding party has taken the girls as the latest salvo in the blood feud between American Indians and the colonial settlers who have decimated native lands and resources. Hanging Maw, the raiders’ leader, recognizes one of the captives as Jemima Boone, daughter of Kentucky's most influential pioneers, and realizes she could be a valuable pawn in the battle to drive the colonists out of the contested Kentucky territory for good.

With Daniel Boone and his posse in pursuit, Hanging Maw devises a plan that could ultimately bring greater peace both to the tribes and the colonists. But after the girls find clever ways to create a trail of clues, the raiding party is ambushed by Boone and the rescuers in a battle with reverberations that nobody could predict. As Matthew Pearl reveals, the exciting story of Jemima Boone’s kidnapping vividly illuminates the early days of America’s westward expansion, and the violent and tragic clashes across cultural lines that ensue.

In this enthralling narrative in the tradition of Candice Millard and David Grann, Matthew Pearl unearths a forgotten and dramatic series of events from early in the Revolutionary War that opens a window into America’s transition from colony to nation, with the heavy moral costs incurred amid shocking new alliances and betrayals.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062937803
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/04/2022
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	383,251
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Matthew Pearl’s books have been international and New York Times bestsellers and have been translated into more than thirty languages. His nonfiction writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and Slate, and he edits Truly*Adventurous magazine. He has been chosen as Best Author in Boston magazine's Best of Boston issue and received the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction.

Table of Contents

Cast of Characters xi

Prologue 1

Book I The Taking

Chapter 1 Duck 7

Chapter 2 Bloody Ground 22

Chapter 3 The Plan 34

Chapter 4 Ends of the Earth 57

Book II Retaliation

Chapter 5 Fallout 79

Chapter 6 Rise of Blackfish 100

Chapter 7 Families 115

Book III The Reckoning

Chapter 8 Risen 157

Chapter 9 Before the Thunder 173

Chapter 10 The Last Siege 190

Chapter 11 Aftershocks 210

Author's Note 233

Acknowledgments 237

Notes 239

Index 261

Editorial Reviews

A deliciously intricate and utterly absorbing retelling of the Daniel Boone family saga–—and particularly the complex roles played by the Cherokee and Shawnee across Boone's southern Appalachian stamping grounds. The Taking of Jemima Boone adds an intriguing dimension to an issue of keen importance to modern society.”

New York Times bestselling author Simon Winchester

It seemed Jemima Boone’s fate to be taken hostage—if not by Kentucky Indians then by fiction and legend.  Even a cousin had a go at her story, in verse.  Sensitively and eloquently, writing his way around the silences, Matthew Pearl rescues her at last.  Fearlessness seemed to run in the family; Jemima could neither read nor write, yet had an uncanny ability to communicate with her father, conspiring with him from a distance, assisting with his rescue, under gunfire, at close hand.  A rousing tale of frontier daring and ingenuity, better than legend on every front.”

Pulitzer Prize–winning author Stacy Schiff

Not only did Matthew Pearl’s clear and vivid writing immediately sweep me up in a father’s fear, it pulled me into a larger and even more profound story, one that would change the course of three nations—one young, two ancient, all fighting for survival.”  

Candice Millard

★ 09/06/2021

Novelist Pearl (The Dante Club) makes his nonfiction debut with a riveting account of the July 1776 kidnapping of frontiersman Daniel Boone’s daughter and two friends by Cherokee and Shawnee Indians. Pearl vividly evokes life on the Kentucky frontier and details how Jemima Boone and sisters Betsy and Fanny Callaway dropped clues along the trail telling the rescue party how many captors there were, and where they were being taken. During the rescue, the son of Shawnee leader Blackfish was killed; in retaliation, raids on colonial settlements increased. Months after the girls’ rescue, the Shawnee captured Daniel Boone and 28 other men from the settlement of Boonesboro and adopted many of them into the tribe. Boone became the replacement for Blackfish’s murdered son and developed a strong rapport with the Shawnee chief that lasted even after Boone made his escape. Pearl illuminates shifting alliances and betrayals among Native tribes, British soldiers, and American colonists during the early years of the Revolutionary War, and notes that Blackfish advocated diplomacy over violence and tried to turn the frontier into an “integrated shared space.” Instead, the Kentucky settlements became “a testing ground” for manifest destiny, with catastrophic results for the tribes. This enthralling, meticulously researched tale sheds news light on Daniel Boone and early American culture. Agent: Susan Gluck, WME. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

A deliciously intricate and utterly absorbing retelling of the Daniel Boone family saga–—and particularly the complex roles played by the Cherokee and Shawnee across Boone's southern Appalachian stamping grounds. The Taking of Jemima Boone adds an intriguing dimension to an issue of keen importance to modern society.”
— New York Times bestselling author Simon Winchester

“Not only did Matthew Pearl’s clear and vivid writing immediately sweep me up in a father’s fear, it pulled me into a larger and even more profound story, one that would change the course of three nations—one young, two ancient, all fighting for survival.”   — Candice Millard, bestselling author of The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey

“It seemed Jemima Boone’s fate to be taken hostage—if not by Kentucky Indians then by fiction and legend.  Even a cousin had a go at her story, in verse.  Sensitively and eloquently, writing his way around the silences, Matthew Pearl rescues her at last.  Fearlessness seemed to run in the family; Jemima could neither read nor write, yet had an uncanny ability to communicate with her father, conspiring with him from a distance, assisting with his rescue, under gunfire, at close hand.  A rousing tale of frontier daring and ingenuity, better than legend on every front.”
— Pulitzer Prize–winning author Stacy Schiff

From the Publisher

If the past is indeed a foreign country, Matthew Pearl has your passport.

New York Daily News

08/27/2021

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. VERDICT This is a stimulating read which honors the complexity of the events described. History buffs will eat it up.—David Keymer, Cleveland

Library Journal

2021-07-14
Novelist Pearl turns to history in this study of Daniel Boone and the settlement of Kentucky.

The moment that fuels the narrative is largely a footnote in the larger history of the Revolutionary War: Shawnee and Cherokee warriors captured Boone’s daughter Jemima, along with two other girls, and took them to the British stronghold of Fort Detroit. Boone and a few hardy frontiersmen tracked them, rescued the girls, and killed a couple of their kidnappers. “The drive to protect and avenge family would not end with Jemima and Daniel Boone: An Indian killed in the rescue, reports suggested, was the son of War Chief Blackfish, one of the…most feared leaders and strategists,” writes Pearl, who zooms out to look at this well-known episode in the context of the ensuing war on the frontier. That context is as a peripheral theater of operations in which British forces, having driven the French from the western frontier, were busily engaged in recruiting Native peoples to go to war against settlers like Boone. As Pearl makes clear, in a sense it doesn’t matter which side the Natives cast their lot with. They would have lost political power and, in time, their lands to the voracious appetites of the Euro-Americans, even though one thoughtful Native commander concocted an interesting scheme by which captured settlers could be repurposed as citizens of those Indigenous nations, which would “turn the frontier into an integrated, shared space.” It would not come to pass. Though Bob Drury and Tom Clavin’s Blood and Treasure covers this ground better, Pearl spins an entertaining story. The capable, resourceful Jemima, occasionally forgotten in the narrative, turns up at just the right moments, plot points if this were a novel. Memorably, she was there to hold her father’s hand as he died at the improbably old age of 85.

A readable though ancillary work of frontier history.

Kirkus Reviews