To evade the notice of the Indian bands which were
moving about the country the three stripped and painted
themselves as warriors and donned the feathered headdress. So
successful was their disguise that they were fired on by a party
of surveyors near the outskirts of Harrodsburg.
The records do not state what were the sensations of certain
speculators in a land office in Harrodsburg when a blue-eyed
savage in a war bonnet sprang through the doorway and, with
uplifted weapon, declared the office closed; but we get a hint of
the power of Clark's personality and of his genius for dominating
men from the terse report that he "enrolled" the speculators. He
was informed that another party of men, more nervous than these,
was now on its way out of Kentucky. In haste he dispatched a
dozen frontiersmen to cut the party off at Crab Orchard and take
away the gun of every man who refused to turn back and do his bit
for Kentucky. To Clark a man was a gun, and he meant that every
gun should do its duty.
The leaders and pioneers of the Dark and Bloody Ground were now
warriors, all under Clark's command, while for two years longer
the Red Terror ranged Kentucky, falling with savage force now
here, now there. In the first battle of 1780, at the Blue Licks,
Daniel's brother, Edward Boone, was killed and scalped.
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