THE NUMEROUS DESCENDANTS of Zachariah and Dinah Boone Allen in this region perhaps will be interested in knowing
what life was like when these two children of the wilderness started life together in a log cabin in the wilds
of Kentucky in the period of the American Revolution. Their story, with varying details, is the story of many others
who came from Kentucky and settled here in Pike county in pioneer times.
The Revolutionary war was in its fifth year. The American cause was in doubt. Patriotism was at low ebb. The young
husband was away, fighting in the war for independence. In the deep morasses of the Carolinas, in the closing years
of the war, he had his rendezvous with Marion.
Terrible were the hardships in the winter that followed their marriage. This was the winter of 1779-80, the bitterest
winter of the eighteenth century. For 75 years it was said that time was reckoned from that winter. On the Atlantic
seaboard, the heroes of the Revolution suffered terribly. The terrors of Valley Forge were repeated in the huts
of Morristown.
In the wild land of Kentucky, this winter was known as the Hard Winter. The autumn had been exceptionally mild
and late, but in mid-November came a cold snap that continued unbroken for months. The snow fell to a great depth,
and was drifted by the piercing winds that shrieked and howled in the wilderness. Immigrant wagons (a tide of migration
had by this time set in over the Wilderness Road into Daniel Boone's Kentucky) were stalled and held until the
spring thaws.
Says White: "The streams were solid. The snow on the ground was crushed, the trees were as though made of
glass, the firewood had to be chopped from blocks of ice. The very animals perished of the extreme cold; cattle
and hogs around the station, and even bears, buffaloes, wolves and wild turkeys were found frozen in the woods.
Sometimes the starving wild animals would come up to the very gates of the fort, accompanying the domestic cattle."
The settlers were hard up for food. Doubtless starvation was an ever present menace in the cabin of Dinah Boone,
as in all the cabins in Kentucky. Her grandson, Squire Nathan Thornton, once related having heard his mother (Dinah's
youngest child), when chiding a neighbor woman who had complained of hard times, tell of his grandmother having
lived on starvation rations in Kentucky and of cutting pieces of old leather into bits and boiling them in water
to make coffee. (Abel Dunham, an early settler in Griggsville township, once told of his father, William Dunham,
a Revolutionary soldier, cutting his shoes into pieces and broiling then on the fire to make coffee.) Both of these
accounts probably relate to the hard winter of 1779-80.
The Indians, ravaging the country, destroyed the settlers' crop; at the end of the season in which Dinah Boone
was married, little corn was harvested. Cold and starvation beleaguered the cabins of the settlers.
"Such was the scarcity of food," Bogart tells us, "that a single johnny-cake would be divided into
a dozen parts, and distributed around to the inmates to serve for two meals. Sixty dollars a bushel was given for
corn."
Says Barnes, the historian: "Continental money, issued by the Congress to the amount of two hundred million
dollars was at this time so much depreciated that forty dollars in bills was worth only one dollar in specie. A
pair of boots cost six hundred dollars in these paper promises. A soldier's pay for a month would hardly buy him
a dinner. To make the matter worse, the British had flooded the country with counterfeits which could not be told
from the genuine. Many persons entirely refused to take Continental money."
Says White: "The people lived largely on wild game, which was lean, poor and unpalatable. Boone and Harrod
(Colonel James Harrod who on June 16, 1774 had erected the first fort in the Kentucky wilderness, at Harrodsburg)
hunted all winter in the severest of weather, making long trips into the wilderness. The only gleam of comfort
in the whole situation was that the cold kept the savages at home."
Robinson of Kentucky gives us a vivid picture of those days when Kentucky was a-settling and Dinah Boone was a
young bride in the wilderness:
"Through privations incredible and perils thick, thousands of men, women and children came in successive caravans,
forming continuous streams of human beings, horses, cattle and other domestic animals, all moving onward along
a lonely and houseless path to a wild and cheerless land. Behold the men on foot with their trusty guns on their
shoulders, driving stock and leading packhorses, and the women, some walking with pails on their heads, or riding
with children in their laps, and other children swung in baskets on horses fastened to the tails of others going
before; see them encamped at night expecting to be massacred by Indians; behold them in the month of December in
that ever-memorable season of unprecedented cold called the ‘hard winter,' traveling two or three miles a day,
frequently in danger of being frozen, or killed by the falling horses on the icy and almost impassable trace."
The Indian troubles, too, had gone on. Old Colonel Callaway and several others had been killed within rifle shot
of the walls at Boone's fort at Boonesborough. Colonel John Bowman had made an incursion into the Indian country
in Ohio and had suffered defeat. George Rogers Clark had been more successful and had burned the Indian town of
Chillicothe in the Ohio Indian territory. Colonel Byrd, on the other hand, a British officer, at the head of a
large Indian and British force, had invaded Kentucky, dragging two or more small iron cannons with him, and two
small blockhouses or stations, ruddle's and Martin's, had fallen and their inhabitants been massacred or carried
into captivity.
At Ruddle's, among those spared from the tomahawks of the savages was a 14-year-old boy by the name of Stephen
Ruddle, scion of the family from whom the stockade took its name. He, with his brother Andrew, was carried into
captivity by the Shawnees and for sixteen years was kept by the tribe until he was 30 years of age. Becoming then
a Christian minister, he followed those other great Christian ministers, the early Garrisons, to Pike county, Illinois,
arriving in the same year as Elijah Garrison. At the house of Thomas Barton in what is now Pleasant Hill township,
this same Stephen Ruddle, an elder of the Christian church, in 1826 at the age of 60 preached the first sermon
heard in that region. It was said that every man, woman and child in the early settlement was there to hear him.
Daniel Boone, captured by the Shawnees in February, 1778, and adopted by them, remained with Chief Blackfish and
his braves at the Indian town of Old Chillicothe in the Ohio country until mid-June when, noting the preparation
for a war expedition against Boonesborough, he escaped and for 160 miles outran the fleetest-footed of the tribe,
reaching his fort in time to warn those within of impending attack. Successfully withstanding the siege of the
fort that ensued, Boone then began to think of his loved ones who, believing him dead, had returned to their old
home on the Yadkin in North Carolina. With the siege raised and reenforcements at hand, he set out for the banks
of the Yadkin and found his family in their old habitation there. Doubtless he was looked upon by them as one returned
from the dead; the first intimation they had he was still alive was when he appeared at the cabin door.
Boone's restless spirit did not permit him to tarry long. Once more we find him setting out for his fort on the
Kentucky river, again taking his family with him. It is interesting to note that on this trip back to Boonesborough,
he is accompanied, among others, by a man named Abraham Lincoln, who is moving the Lincoln family out of North
Carolina into Kentucky where, near thirty years later (February 12, 1809), in a log cabin three miles south of
present Hodgenville, a cabin now enclosed by a magnificent granite memorial erected by the United States government,
a great President, grandson of this companion of Boone, was born. The Lincolns and the Boones had long been friends,
and in fact, at this time had already intermarried.
At this period, the Illinois country, too, was constantly harassed by Indians. Fort Bowman at Cahokia was attacked.
In May, 1780, St. Louis, capital of Upper Louisiana and then with a population about one-third that of present
Pittsfield, was attacked by an Indian force said to number 1400, with some British officers and Canadians. The
attackers, after inflicting considerable loss on the inhabitants, withdrew, fearing the appearance of George Rogers
Clark, who was on the river below.
These historic facts are by way of characterizing the period when Zachariah and Dinah Boone Allen were beginning
on the "banks of Green" the long wilderness journey that was to end here between the two great ‘rivers
near the site of modern Milton.
Another tragic incident and one that weighed upon Daniel Boone's mind as did few other happenings occurred about
this time in October, 1779, the year in which Dinah Boone was married. Daniel and his younger brother, Edward,
hundreds of whose descendants have sojourned here in Pike, had gone hunting on Hinkston and had stopped to graze
their horses in a grassy clearing, when they were set upon by Indians. Daniel had stepped outside the clearing
to do a little scouting; Edward had sat down on a stump in the clearing to watch the horses and was cracking some
nuts on a stone in his lap, when several guns cracked and he fell dead with seven balls in his body. The Indians
rushed forward and scalped their victim, this momentary delay giving Daniel his needed start, and by twisting and
doubling in the dense cane he finally shook off the pursuing savages. The Indians, however, had with them what
was called in the quaint diction of the backwoods a "smell-hound," which pursued him so relentlessly
that he was compelled at length to waylay the animal, which dropped at the crack of his rifle.
Few of Boone's many losses and misfortunes seemed to affect him as did the loss of this beloved brother, young
Neddie Boone. Daniel and Neddie had married sisters, Rebecca and Martha Bryan, daughter of Joseph and Alee Bryan,
of the Yadkin country in North Carolina. Neddie Boone was the ancestor of the Pike county Elledges and of many
of the Scholls; numerous of the Scholls also being descended directly from Daniel Boone, one of Abraham Scholl's
brothers having married a daughter of Daniel and another a daughter of Neddie. Readers of this history will be
introduced more fully to Neddie Boone in succeeding chapters, his descendants having played a large part in the
history of this country.
In Kentucky, about this time, there also appear upon the wilderness stage two other youths in whom we of Pike county
have an interest, namely. Harding and Roger lewis, members of the noted Lewis family whose earliest adventurers
into this region tarried in the neighborhood of modern Pleasant Hill long before the military lands were opened
to settlement and before there were any titles established in this region. Harding and Rogers Lewis, either brothers
or the sons of brothers, both appear to have been with the Boones at the Blue Licks; prior to this, James Lewis
had married a sister of Daniel Boone. Later we shall find a son of Daniel Boone marrying a daughter of the house
of Lewis. For centuries the families of Harding and Rogers appear to have been linked with that of Lewis, the family
revealing such names as Rogers Lewis, Lewis Rogers, Harding Lewis and Lewis Harding Rogers; likely it was from
this Lewis family, one of whom had married a Boone, that the pioneer Pike county Baptist, Lewis Allen, son of Dinah
Boone, took his name.
The name of young Harding Lewis, who was one of the seventy whites who fell at the Blue Licks (died of wounds),
along with a son of Daniel Boone, and a son of Samuel, Daniel's brother, is found repeated in the name of Samuel
Harding Lewis, pioneer settler at Pleasant Hill, who died there in 1832, and who, in the early days of Upper Louisiana,
in the region that is now Missouri, married a little 90-pound red-headed border girl by the name of Mary Barnett,
who once, in early Territorial days, in the dead of winter, amid cakes of floating ice, swam a wild river to warn
a garrison of approaching hostile Indians, thereby saving the entire garrison from massacre.
Mary Barnett, living to the age of 89, lies beside her husband in Galloway cemetery at Pleasant Hill; but those
who pause beside her grave do not know her story or even the girlhood name of the border heroine who sleeps there.
One of her daughters, Ursula A. Lewis, born in those changing days, when, within a few brief hours, the flags of
three nations floated over Old St. Louis, and reputed in Lewis tradition to have been the first white child born
in what is now Missouri, married James Galloway, first of the Pike county Galloways. Another daughter, Martha Damaris,
born in the closing days of the second war with Britain, on an Indian-harassed frontier, married a Kentuckian,
Felix Alver Collard, first Pleasant Hill justice of the peace and one of Pleasant Hill's earliest teachers, who,
later, pioneering behind an ox-team in the far Northwest, sat three times in the legislature of early Oregon. There
today live scores of descendants of Felix and Damaris (Lewis) Collard, so many of them in fact that on the Pacific
coast there is held an annual reunion of the descendants of Lewis, Collard, Rogers, Henderson, and kindred families,
such a reunion being scheduled in the city of Portland for next Sunday, June 21, 1936.
The thrilling story of these pioneers - the Lewis, Collard, Galloway, Rogers, Venable, Thurman, Smith, Henderson,
Sconce, Sinklear, Hubbard, Ward and kindred families— will be told in later chapters of this history, dedicated
to the Pleasant Hill Centennial. Perhaps no families in Illinois have a more colorful background, adorned as it
is with some of the greatest names in history, in both the new world and the old, lighted at times by the glowing
stake of martyrdom and again by the tender radiance of one of the world's greatest romances, reaching far back
into distant climes and ages.
