The Taking of Jemima Boone

May 1, 2021

Shortly after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Daniel Boone's daughter, 13-year-old Jemima, and friends Betsy and Fanny were kidnapped from their Kentucky outpost by a Cherokee-Shawnee raiding party challenging the settlers' theft and decimation of their land. Hanging Maw, the raiders' leader, soon recognized Jemima's value as a bargaining chip, and she planned to use Jemima to secure a peaceful resolution of tensions. As New York Times best-selling novelist Pearl argues in his nonfiction debut, Jemima's rescue in an ambush led by her father upended Hanging Maw's plans--and possibly changed how America's colonists and its original peoples would interact in the future. With a 150,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2021
Novelist Pearl turns to history in this study of Daniel Boone and the settlement of Kentucky. The moment that fuels the narrative is largely a footnote in the larger history of the Revolutionary War: Shawnee and Cherokee warriors captured Boone's daughter Jemima, along with two other girls, and took them to the British stronghold of Fort Detroit. Boone and a few hardy frontiersmen tracked them, rescued the girls, and killed a couple of their kidnappers. "The drive to protect and avenge family would not end with Jemima and Daniel Boone: An Indian killed in the rescue, reports suggested, was the son of War Chief Blackfish, one of the...most feared leaders and strategists," writes Pearl, who zooms out to look at this well-known episode in the context of the ensuing war on the frontier. That context is as a peripheral theater of operations in which British forces, having driven the French from the western frontier, were busily engaged in recruiting Native peoples to go to war against settlers like Boone. As Pearl makes clear, in a sense it doesn't matter which side the Natives cast their lot with. They would have lost political power and, in time, their lands to the voracious appetites of the Euro-Americans, even though one thoughtful Native commander concocted an interesting scheme by which captured settlers could be repurposed as citizens of those Indigenous nations, which would "turn the frontier into an integrated, shared space." It would not come to pass. Though Bob Drury and Tom Clavin's Blood and Treasure covers this ground better, Pearl spins an entertaining story. The capable, resourceful Jemima, occasionally forgotten in the narrative, turns up at just the right moments, plot points if this were a novel. Memorably, she was there to hold her father's hand as he died at the improbably old age of 85. A readable though ancillary work of frontier history.

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Starred review from September 6, 2021
Novelist Pearl (The Dante Club) makes his nonfiction debut with a riveting account of the July 1776 kidnapping of frontiersman Daniel Boone’s daughter and two friends by Cherokee and Shawnee Indians. Pearl vividly evokes life on the Kentucky frontier and details how Jemima Boone and sisters Betsy and Fanny Callaway dropped clues along the trail telling the rescue party how many captors there were, and where they were being taken. During the rescue, the son of Shawnee leader Blackfish was killed; in retaliation, raids on colonial settlements increased. Months after the girls’ rescue, the Shawnee captured Daniel Boone and 28 other men from the settlement of Boonesboro and adopted many of them into the tribe. Boone became the replacement for Blackfish’s murdered son and developed a strong rapport with the Shawnee chief that lasted even after Boone made his escape. Pearl illuminates shifting alliances and betrayals among Native tribes, British soldiers, and American colonists during the early years of the Revolutionary War, and notes that Blackfish advocated diplomacy over violence and tried to turn the frontier into an “integrated shared space.” Instead, the Kentucky settlements became “a testing ground” for manifest destiny, with catastrophic results for the tribes. This enthralling, meticulously researched tale sheds news light on Daniel Boone and early American culture. Agent: Susan Gluck, WME.

September 1, 2021
The kidnapping and rescue of Daniel Boone's daughter may be the inciting incident of novelist Pearl's (The Dante Chamber, 2018) nonfiction debut, but it serves as the narrative catalyst for much more. In the book's early chapters, Pearl chronicles this capture and release tale, playing to the strengths of his fiction background as he elegantly weaves the perspectives of settlers, Native populations, and enslaved peoples. However, as the narrative continues, Pearl begins to get lost in something of a name-dropping soup, sometimes losing the story to a barrage of facts. Those facts are important, though and with more than 230 sources, Pearl painstakingly cultivates an accurate account of events. But he's at his best when he leans into more expressive language: ""To be stuck in the middle of a fierce war in which one's own land was directly at issue felt apocalyptic, with good reason."" Despite these ebbs and flows, The Taking of Jemima Boone is an authoritative primer on Kentucky's white settlers and Indigenous populations.

COPYRIGHT(2021) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

August 27, 2021

In this, his first nonfiction book, novelist Pearl (The Dante Club) takes on a dramatic but minor incident in U.S. history and uses it to illuminate the complicated back and forth of relations between colonial-era settlers and Indigenous peoples. The incident is the July 14, 1776, abduction of three white teenage girls (one of them was Jemima Boone, daughter of frontiersman Daniel Boone) by five Shawnee and Cherokee men outside the colonial town of Boonesboro, along the Kentucky River. The abduction was part of a 20-year history of Cherokee and Shawnee resistance to being displaced by colonizers from their ancestral lands along the river. Daniel Boone led a rescue party of other colonial men to recover the girls; despairing of following the raiders' trail, Boone leapfrogged his rescue party to where he thought the girls and their captors would resurface. In the ensuing violence, the colonial girls were rescued while the son of Blackfish (war chief of the Chillicothe division of the Shawnee tribe) was killed. A century later, Theodore Roosevelt wrote that the incident was the stuff of a James Fenimore Cooper novel; in fact, Pearl writes here, the event had indeed inspired an episode in Cooper's 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans. The foray was only one incident in an escalating war that involved colonists, British troops, and Indigenous peoples, most prominently the Shawnee nation. More raids followed, including one in which Daniel Boone was captured, and a siege of Boonesboro led by Blackfish. VERDICT This is a stimulating read which honors the complexity of the events described. History buffs will eat it up.--David Keymer, Cleveland

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.