Upon the sixteenth of June, while Black Fish's party were boiling salt at the saline springs of the Scioto--about a dozen miles south of the present Chillicothe--Boone managed, by exercise of rare sagacity and enterprise, to escape the watchful eyes of his keepers, their attention having been arrested by the appearance of a huge flock of wild turkeys. He reached Boonesborough four days later after a perilous journey of a hundred and sixty miles through the forest, during which he had eaten but one meal--from a buffalo which he shot at Blue Licks. He had been absent for four and a half months, and Mrs. Boone, giving him up for dead, had returned with their family to her childhood home upon the Yadkin. His brother Squire, and his daughter Jemima--now married to Flanders Calloway--were the only kinsfolk to greet the returned captive, who appeared out of the woods as one suddenly delivered from a tomb.
During the absence of Daniel Boone there had been the usual Indian troubles in Kentucky. Colonel Bowman had just written to Colonel George Rogers Clark, "The Indians have pushed us hard this summer." But Clark himself at this time was gaining an important advantage over the enemy in his daring expedition against the British posts of Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Vincennes, in the Illinois country. Realizing that there would be no end to Kentucky's trouble so long as the British, aided by their French-Canadian agents, were free to organize Indian armies north of the Ohio for the purpose of harrying the southern settlements, Clark "carried the war into Africa." With about a hundred and fifty men gathered from the frontiers of Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky, he descended the Ohio River, built a fort at Louisville, and by an heroic forced march across the country captured Kaskaskia, while Cahokia and Vincennes at once surrendered to the valorous Kentuckian.
Meanwhile there was business at hand for the people of Boonesborough. Amid all these alarms they had still neglected to complete their defenses; but now, under the energetic administration of Boone, the palisades were finished, gates and fortresses strengthened, and all four of the corner blockhouses put in order. In ten days they were ready for the slowly advancing host.