James Boone (1757-1773)

James Boone was the oldest child of Daniel and Rebecca Boone. He was born on May 3, 1757 in North Carolina and died on October 10, 1773 in the Clinch Mountains of Virginia.[1] He lived 16 years, 5 months, 7 days.

James learned the ways of the frontier from his boyhood in North Carolina and Virginia. James' younger brother Nathan later said of their father Daniel Boone,

sometimes on his shorter trips, he would take his oldest son, James, out with him. He began taking James on hunts when he was seven or eight years old; and sometimes during a cold, snowy spell, Father would have difficulty in keeping little James comfortable warm and could do so only by hugging him up to him.[2]

James was killed on the Boone family’s first attempt to enter Kentucky in 1773. They were traveling through the Clinch Mountains of Virginia on their way to the Cumberland Gap. James, along with seven others, mostly young men like himself, were attacked by Indians while they camped in Powell's Valley on the northern bank of Wallen’s Creek, three miles away from the main camp.[3] They were catching up after getting additional supplies. Two of them were killed instantly, two were wounded and fled, one was taken captive, and one hid under some driftwood and watched what happened to James Boone and Henry Russell. Olive Boone later recounted, 

In the attack James Boone was wounded through both hips, which were broken. I think young Russell was wounded in the same manner. When the Indians tortured James Boone, they pulled out his toenails and fingernails. He first begged Big Jim to spare him and finally, when being tortured, to kill him at once and put him out of his misery. Young Russell was tortured in the same way. Finally they were both severely stabbed all to pieces and probably tomahawked, which put them out of their misery.[4]

Big Jim had been befriended and shown hospitality by the Boones earlier in North Carolina. He was later killed in battle with Daniel Boone and others in 1786.[5]

When James was killed, the Boones and their friends turned back from their journey to Kentucky. The Boones lived in Virginia for a time. Daniel Boone returned to the site of the massacre on a hunting trip the following year to more securely bury James and Henry Russell, preventing the wolves from disturbing the graves. When a storm arose just after he finished, "Boone felt more dejected, as he used afterwards to relate, than he ever did in all his life ... He could never in after years speak of this affecting incident, even to his own family, without having his feelings deeply stirred within him."[6] This massacre in Powell's Valley was one of the events that culminated in Lord Dunmore's War between the Shawnee and the colony of Virginia in 1774. Daniel Boone served in that war as a scout and officer in the Virginia militia. After that war concluded, the Boones successfully moved to Kentucky in 1775.

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[1] Ella Hazel Spraker, The Boone Family (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Pub., 1993 [1922]), 65.

[2] My Father, Daniel Boone:The Draper Interviews with Nathan Boone, ed. Neal O. Hammon (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 20.

[3] John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Co., 1992), 92-93.

[4] My Father, Daniel Boone, p. 41.

[5] My Father, Daniel Boone, p. 81.

[6] Lyman Draper, The Life of Daniel Boone (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1998), 304-305