What Really Happened 234 Years Ago at the Siege of Boonesboro?
The 1778 Siege of Fort Boonesboro is taught to Kentucky schoolchildren starting in kindergarten, from the Shawnees capturing Daniel Boone through his escape to the settlers' successful defense despite being severely outnumbered.
But there's more to the story, and a Kentucky archaeologist is finding it.
Tom Eblen at the Herald:
O'Malley, an expert on Kentucky pioneer settlements who first confirmed Fort Boonesborough's location in 1987, was trying to figure out exactly how much of the fort still exists. She was specifically searching for evidence of the most famous event that occurred there: a nine-day siege 234 years ago this week in which Daniel Boone and a small group of pioneers repelled an attack by several hundred Native Americans.
"This siege is just completely out of the ordinary in terms of what was happening in Kentucky during the Revolutionary War," O'Malley said. "On the face of it, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense — some of the things that happened and, more to the point, some of the things that didn't happen."
SNIP
O'Malley plans to keep looking at physical evidence and historical records to try to clarify the often conflicting accounts of siege survivors, whose memories were colored by the passage of time and other versions they later heard and read.
"There were just so many things about the siege that were very strange, and so many funny stories, that after a while you wonder what to believe," O'Malley said. "History is a messy business."
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment