Author Note

Joseph Jackson was born in Bedford County, Virginia, in 1755, and served as a private in the Virginia Line during the Revolution. With Daniel Boone and others, he was captured by the Shawnee in February 1778, as described in this document, and spent the next two decades with them. A neighbor reported that he married late and unhappily, and hung himself in May 1844 in Bourbon County, Kentucky, shortly after Draper questioned him.

Document Note

Lyman Copeland Draper interviewed Jackson on one of his first research trips through the South, in April 1844. Draper’s notes of Jackson’s reminiscences given here are in volume 11C of the Draper manuscripts (Daniel Boone Papers), item number sixty-two. Because of their fragile condition, the images presented here were digitized from a microfilm copy. For more documents on early Kentucky, see AJ-125, AJ-151, AJ-155, AJ-157, AJ-158, and AJ-159.

Other Internet and Reference Resources

Boone’s own account of these events is in document AJ-125. A short biography of him that includes more details is available at Ohio History Central at http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/ohc/history/path/people/booned.shtml.

A brief account of the Shawnees during these years is available at Ohio History Central at http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/ohc/history/h_indian/tribes/ shawnee.shtml.

The printed literature on Daniel Boone and the exploration and settlement of Kentucky is immense. Selected digitized images of this literature are available at the Kentuckiana Digital Library at www.kyvl.org/.

Another useful web site is “The First American West: the Ohio River Valley 1750-1820” http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/, a collection of 15,000 pages of original historical materials documenting the land, people, exploration and transformation of the trans-Appalachian West, selected from the collections of the University of Chicago Library and the Filson Historical Society of Louisville, Kentucky.

Finally, the University Library, University of Louisville, http://library.louisville.edu/government/states/kentucky/ kyhistory/boone.html provides links to Daniel Boone biography, Boone family history, and Boone historic sites.