At the very time when Grifth Rutherford set out for the relief of McDowell's Fort, a marauding Indian band captured by stealth near the Transylvania Fort, known as Boone's Fort (Boonesborough), Elizabeth and Frances Callaway, and Jemima Boone, the daughters of Richard Callaway and Daniel Boone, and rapidly marched them away toward the Shawanoe towns on the Ohio.

A relief party, in two divisions, headed respectively by the young girls' fathers, and composed among others of the lovers of the three girls, Samuel Henderson, John Holder, and Flanders Callaway, pursued them with almost incredible swiftness.

Guided by broken twigs and bits of cloth surreptitiously dropped by Elizabeth Callaway, they finally overtook the unsuspecting savages, killed two of them, and rescued the three maidens unharmed.

This romantic episode--which gave Fenimore Cooper the theme for the most memorable scene in one of his Leatherstocking Tales had an even more romantic sequel in the subsequent marriage of the three pairs of lovers.
This bold foray, so shrewdly executed and even more sagaciously foiled, was a true precursor of the dread happenings of the coming neighborhood of the stations; and relief was felt when the Transylvania Fort, the great stockade planned by Judge Henderson, was completed by the pioneers (July, 1776).

Glad tidings arrived only a few days later when the Declaration of Independence, read aloud from the Virginia Gazette, was greeted with wild huzzas by the patriotic backwoodsmen.