The Ely miner. [volume] (Ely, Minn.) 1895-1986, 1933-09-22

its efforts to throw him off and quietly followed
the Others
During the next two days Kenton was again
and again tied on the colt but by this time it
had become more accustomed to him and after
a few plunges it quoted down and carried him
along with the rest of the party, although he
was so nearly insensible from the pain of his in
juries that it mattered little whether the horse
behaved or not.
Upon his arrival at Chillicothe, the cruel pre-
liminaries to his torture at the stake began. He
was forced to run the gauntlet, the first of nine
he was to run before at last he tied to the
stake Then the Shawnees decided to take him
to their principal village, Wappatomika, for the
last act of the drama. On the way he was forced
to run the gauntlet at every village through
which he and his captors passed
At Wappatomika the first of his miraculous
escapes came to pass. For there he was recog-
nized by Simon Girty, the. white renegade as
"Simon Butler" (Kenton had taken that name
when he fled from Virginia early in his career),
a comrade in arms during the Dunmore war,
and Girty succeeded in winning over the Shaw
nees to freeing their prisoner. But his freedom
was short-lived for party which returned
from an unsuccessful raid in Virginia demanded
that his torture proceed. Even Girty could not
prevail against them, but he did succeed in hav-
ing the date for the torture postponed until the
gathering of all the tribes at Sandusky
On the way to Sandusky the famous Mingo
chief, Logan, befriended Kenton and spared him
some sufferings but near Sandusky he was
again forced to run the gauntlet, his ninth time.
Then when preparations were going forward for
burning him at the stake, again fate interviewed.
As the torch was applied to the wood piled up
around him, heavy rain started to fall and put
it out 1t was two days before the wood was
dry enough to try again. In the meantime Peter
Druillard, British agent from Detroit, arrived
and ransomed Kenton so that he could be taken
to Detroit for questioning by Gen. Henry Ham.
ilton, the British commander there Kenton was
held prisoner at Detroit until June, 1779 when
he escaped and safely made the perlous journey
back to Kentucky.
AS for the story of how Simon Kenton, the
frontiersman, became the subject for famous
picture by two celebrated artists it came about
when Karl Bodmer, Swiss artist, accompanied
Macmillan. prince of Neuweid to America to Il.
lustrate the book his royal patron was to write
on Travels in the Interior of North America,
1S321S34."
After Bodmer's return to Europe he lived for
awhile at Fontainebeau in France where he was
a neighbor of Jean Francois Millet He told Mil
let some of the classic stories of the American
border, especially that of Kenton's Mazeppa ride
and Millet began to make drawings of Indians In
crayon and charcoal. Eventually he and Bodmer
elaborated in a series of Autographs Bodmer
doing the landscapes and horses and Millet doing
the human figures, both Indians and white men.
These were published in 1852 and one of them
was "Simon Butler, or, Mazeppa American"
And this was another curious manifestation OF
the fate which interviewed repeatedly in the life
of Simon Kenton-that his last portrait" should
be painted more than decade after his death
by foreigner, man who had never seen him
and who noted for being the delineator of quiet
pastoral French scenes, would be about the last
man on earth one would expect to portray an in.
cident In the tumultuous life of an Americap
frontiersman!
&C by Western Newspaper union.)