A Father’s Fight to Save His Daughter: The Rescue That Inspired The Last of the Mohicans
By Amber Ping
When Jemima Boone’s piercing screams from the Kentucky River banks alerted Daniel Boone that Hanging Maw’s Cherokee and Shawnee warriors had kidnapped his daughter in 1776, a father’s relentless courage sparked a rescue that inspired The Last of the Mohicans and echoed through centuries.
It was a sweltering Sunday afternoon in Boonesborough, Kentucky, with humidity clinging to the air like syrup in a Mason jar, when thirteen-year-old Jemima Boone and her friends, Betsy and Fanny Callaway, ventured out of the fort to the nearby Kentucky River, a place Daniel Boone called “a second paradise”.1 Escaping teenage boredom, the girls grabbed a canoe and paddled downstream, unaware that danger lurked across the water. Cherokee chief Hanging Maw, and his mixed band of Cherokee and Shawnee warriors, had been scouting Boonesborough for a potential attack when they spotted the girls from the woods, their eyes locked on the vulnerable trio.
Half a mile from the fort, while Jemima soaked her sore foot, the current pulled their canoe toward the forbidden opposite bank—a place Jemima’s father had warned her to avoid. The warriors crept through thickets, closing in. Suddenly, a cane snapped, the water rippled, and the girls panicked, clutching their paddles. One warrior rushed into the river, seizing the canoe’s rope. As John Bakeless notes, “Little Fanny Callaway, the smallest of the three, whacked him over the head with the paddle until it broke. Betsy, too, struck out with her paddle as hard as she could..."2 Gut-wrenching, blood-curdling screams echoed off the limestone cliffs, Jemima crying, “Daddy, help!”—a desperate plea only a father could know meant mortal peril. Her cries skipped across the river, landing like a stone in Boonesborough, where news swept like a shockwave among the settlers.
Boone, still barefoot from napping, grabbed his rifle and raced to the riverbank, where an empty canoe confirmed his worst fears: his daughter was taken. Three years earlier, Shawnee raiders had killed his son James in a brutal ambush, shattering his family. He’d be damned if they took another child. Boone rallied eight strong frontiersmen, including Colonel Richard Callaway, the Callaway girls’ father, and Samuel Henderson, Betsy’s fiancé.
The warriors marched the girls north, and the hourglass tipped, each grain signaling another desperate hour, tomahawks gleaming at their belts. Using survival skills taught by their fathers, the girls marked their trail with snapped twigs, torn dress fabric, and dragged heel prints. Describing the kidnapping, Bakeless writes, “When the Indians reached the hilltop, Jemima Boone, who was not Daniel Boone's daughter for nothing, announced that she would not go another step. They could kill her if they wanted to, but her bare and wounded foot was a good deal worse than death.” 3 And when warriors forced Jemima onto a stolen horse to speed things up, she pinched and kicked it, throwing herself off to delay their march.
Boone, Callaway, and their men crossed the river in tireless pursuit, reading the girls’ signs like an old treasure map. “...nothing escaped the ever-watchful eyes of Daniel Boone. To him a twig, a leaf, a stone, the bark of a tree, or the lightest impression on the earth, told a story that none but a master of woodcraft might read.”4 Before dusk, Boone split the party, sending Callaway and some men on horseback to cut off the warriors, while he tracked on foot. As darkness fell, the trail faded, and Boone’s men camped, his heart heavy with fear that Jemima’s screams might be the last time he ever heard his daughter’s voice.
By day two, Boone grew concerned that his daughter’s captors were moving faster than them. The warriors, sensing they were being followed, created false trails to throw the men off, but Boone’s intuition guided him like a compass needle. Rather than follow the captor’s tracks, he made the decision to head to the spot he thought they’d cross. Nathan Reid, one of the young men from the fort recalled it his way, “Paying no further attention to the trail, [Boone] now took a strait course through the woods, with increased speed, followed by the men in perfect silence.”5 Soon, a fresh buffalo carcass signaled they were close.
At a stream near the Licking River, Boone divided his men again, fearing if they all went in at once, the captors might murder the girls. Waiting for Boone’s signal to fire, they moved into their positions, some taking a ridge, while others scouted below. Campfire smoke rose from the glen, where warriors, unbothered, gathered supplies and cooked—a grave miscalculation, underestimating a father’s resolve. While one of the captors stoked the fire, a sound in the brush drew his attention, but not enough to keep it, and he returned to his task. Jemima, while scanning the ridge, spotted her father, “creeping upon his breast like a snake.” Then, about a hundred yards away, “their eyes met, and with the implicit language of father and daughter, he signed her to keep still.” 6
In the excitement, a frontiersman’s shot rang out, and Jemima cried, “That’s Daddy!” Boone and his men stormed the camp, the warriors scattering like hot grease in a pan. Fanny and Jemima dropped to the dirt, while Betsy jumped up, a warrior swinging his club at her head. “She later said she felt it ‘touch her head as it passed.’”7Boone and another man fired at the same time, hitting the warrior, who stumbled into the fire, but quickly recovered and ran into the woods. The girls were finally free. As Drury and Clavin recount, “Years later Jemima Boone told her granddaughter that when the finality of their rescue set in, all three girls collapsed in a weeping cluster. They were joined by Betsy’s fiancé, Samuel Henderson, and Boone himself, who sank to his knees and bawled like an infant. Jemima had never seen her father cry.”8
This reunion inspired James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans, a tale brought to life in the 1992 film starring Daniel Day-Lewis, which grossed over $143 million worldwide. The girls' real-life resourcefulness was mirrored in one scene where Cora snaps a branch for Hawkeye to find, a character often linked to Boone.
Growing up, my father’s tales of Daniel Boone filled our Kentucky backroad drives, weaving history into every curve. One unforgettable trip, we drove to the top of Chimney Rock, where he blasted The Last of the Mohicans’ “Promontory” from our SUV. Windows open, my brothers, cousins, and I sat on the tailgate, lost in my dad and uncle’s stories of Boone’s wild Kentucky. This Father’s Day, his passion for those legends lives in me, and Boone’s daring rescue reminds us of every father’s unspoken vow to protect their own.
Footnotes:
John Filson, The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke (Wilmington: James Adams, 1784), 58.
John Bakeless, Daniel Boone, Master of the Wilderness (William Morrow & Company, 1939), 126.
Ibid.
C.H. Forbes-Lindsay, Daniel Boone: Backswoodsman (Philadelphia & London: J.B. Lippincott Company, 1909), 28.
John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (Henry Holt and Company, 1992), 135.
Ibid., 137.
Meredith Mason Brown, Frontiersman: Daniel Boone and the Making of America (Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 109.
Bob Drury and Tom Clavin, Blood and Treasure: Daniel Boone and the Fight for America’s First Frontier (St. Martin’s Press, 2021), 218–219.
