HISTORIC HIGHWAYS OF AMERICA
VOLUME 6
[Illustration: CUMBERLAND GAP AND BOONE'S WILDERNESS ROAD]
HISTORIC HIGHWAYS OF AMERICA
VOLUME 6
Boone's Wilderness Road
BY
ARCHER BUTLER HULBERT
_With Maps and Illustrations_
[Illustration]
THE ARTHUR H. CLARK COMPANY
CLEVELAND, OHIO
1903
COPYRIGHT, 1903
BY
THE ARTHUR H. CLARK COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE 11
I. THE PILGRIMS OF THE WEST 19
II. THE FIRST EXPLORERS 48
III. ANNALS OF THE ROAD 78
IV. KENTUCKY IN THE REVOLUTION 145
V. AT THE END OF BOONE'S ROAD 175
ILLUSTRATIONS
I. CUMBERLAND GAP AND BOONE'S WILDERNESS ROAD _Frontispiece_
II. PLAT OF BOONESBOROUGH 97
III. FILSON'S MAP OF KENTUCKY 119
PREFACE
The naming of our highways is an interesting study. Like roads the world
over they are usually known by two names--the destinations to which they
lead. The famous highway through New York state is known as the Genesee
Road in the eastern half of the state and as the Albany Road in the
western portion. In a number of cities through which it passes--Utica,
Syracuse, etc.--it is Genesee Street. This path in the olden time was
the great road to the famed Genesee country. The old Forbes Road across
Pennsylvania soon lost its earliest name; but it is preserved at its
termination, for the Pittsburger of today goes to the Carnegie Library
on the "Forbes Street" car line. The Maysville Pike--as unknown today as
it was of national prominence three quarters of a century ago--leading
across Ohio from Wheeling to Maysville (Limestone) and on to Lexington,
is known in Kentucky as the Zanesville Pike; from that city in Ohio the
road branched off from the old National Road. The "Glade Road" was the
important branch of the Pennsylvania or Pittsburg Road which led through
the Glades of the Alleghenies to the Youghiogheny. One of the most
singular names for a road was that of the "Shun Pike" between Watertown
and Erie, in northwestern Pennsylvania. The large traffic over the old
"French Road"--Marin's Portage Road--between these points on Lake Erie
and French Creek necessitated, early in the nineteenth century, a good
road-bed. Accordingly a road company took hold of the route and improved
it--placing toll gates on it for recompensation. Those who refused to
pay toll broke open a parallel route nearby, which was as free as it was
rough. It became known as the "Shun" Pike because those who traversed it
shunned the toll road.
Few roads named from their builders, such as Braddock, Forbes, Bouquet,
Wayne, Ebenezer Zane, Marin, and Boone preserved the oldtime name.
Indeed nearly all our roads have lost the ancient name, a fact that
should be sincerely mourned. The Black Swamp has been drained, therefore
there can be now no "Black Swamp Road." There are now no refugees and
the "Refugees Road" is lost not only to sight but to the memory of most.
Perhaps there is but one road in the central West which is commonly
known and called by the old Indian name; this is the "Tuscarawas Path,"
a modern highway in Eastern Ohio which was widened and made a white
man's road by the first white army that ever crossed the Ohio River into
what is now the State of Ohio.
One roadway--the Wilderness Road to Kentucky from Virginia and
Tennessee, the longest, blackest, hardest road of pioneer days in
America--holds the oldtime name with undiminished loyalty and is true
today to every gloomy description and vile epithet that was ever written
or spoken of it. It was broken open for white man's use by Daniel Boone
from the Watauga settlement on the Holston River, Tennessee, to the
mouth of Otter Creek on the Kentucky River in the month preceding the
outbreak of open revolution at Lexington and Concord. It was known as
"Boone's Trail," the "Kentucky Road," the "road to Caintuck," or the
"Virginia Road," but its common name was the "Wilderness Road." A
wilderness of laurel thickets lay between the Kentucky settlements and
Cumberland Gap and was the most desolate country imaginable. The name
was transferred to the road that passed through it. It seems right that
the brave frontiersman who opened this route to white men should be
remembered by this act; and for a title to this volume "Boone's
Wilderness Road" has been selected.
As in the case of other highways with which this series of monographs is
dealing, so with Boone's Wilderness Road: the road itself is of little
consequence. The following pages treat of phases of the story of the
West suggested by Boone's Road--the first social movement into the lower
Ohio Valley, Henderson's Transylvania Company, the struggle of the
Watauga settlement to prevent the southern Indians from cutting Kentucky
off from the world, the struggle of the Kentucky settlements against
the British and their Indian allies, the burst of population over
Boone's Road into Kentucky, and what the early founding of that
commonwealth meant to the East and to the West.
Boone and Harrod and their compatriots assured the world of the splendid
lands of Kentucky; Richard Henderson and his associates of the
Transylvania Company proved the questionable fact that a settlement
there could be made and be maintained. Boone's Road, opened for the
Transylvania Company, made a way thither. The result was a marvelous
westward movement that for timeliness, heroism and ultimate success is
without a parallel in our annals. When the armies of the Revolutionary
War are counted, that first army of twenty-five thousand men, women, and
children which hurried over Boone's little path, through dark Powell's
Valley, over the "high-swung gateway" of Cumberland Gap, and down
through the laurel wildernesses to Crab Orchard, Danville, Lexington,
and Louisville must not be forgotten. No army ever meant so much to the
West; some did not mean more to the East.
The author is greatly indebted for facts and figures to Thomas Speed's
invaluable study _The Wilderness Road_, and to other Filson Club
Publications, and for inspiration and suggestion to Mr. Allen's _The
Blue Grass Region of Kentucky_.
A. B. H.
Marietta, Ohio, May 20, 1903.
Boone's Wilderness Road
_It is impossible to come upon this road without pausing,
or to write of it without a tribute._
--JAMES LANE ALLEN.
CHAPTER I
THE PILGRIMS OF THE WEST
No English colony in America looked upon the central West with such
jealous eye as Virginia. The beautiful valley of the _Oyo_--the Indian
exclamation for "Beautiful"--which ran southwesterly through the great
forests of the continent's interior was early claimed as the sole
possession of the Virginians. The other colonies were hemmed in by
prescribed boundary lines, definitely outlined in their royal charters.
New York was bounded by Lake Erie and the Allegheny and thought little
of the West. The Pennsylvanian colony was definitely bounded by the line
which is the western boundary line of that commonwealth today.
Carolina's extremity stopped at thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes.
Virginia's western boundary was not defined; hence the West was hers.
England herself was not at all sure of the West until after the fall of
Quebec; but the Treaty of Paris was soon signed and, so far as the
French were concerned, the colonies extended to the Mississippi. Then
Pontiac's bloody war broke out and matters were at a standstill until
Bouquet hewed his way into "the heart of the enemies' country" and, on
the Muskingum, brought Pontiac's desperate allies, the Delawares and
Shawanese, to terms.
But now, when the West was his, the king of England did a wondrous
thing. He issued a proclamation in the year 1763 which forbade anyone
securing "patents for any lands beyond the heads or sources of any of
the rivers which fall into the Atlantic Ocean from the West or
Northwest!" Thus Lord Hillsborough, British Secretary for the Colonies,
thought to checkmate what he called the "roving disposition" of the
colonists, particularly the Virginians. The other colonies were
restrained by definite boundaries; Virginia, too, should be restrained.
Hillsborough might as well have adopted the plan of the ignoramus who,
when methods for keeping the Indians from crossing the frontier were
being discussed, suggested that a strip of land along the entire western
frontier be cleared of trees and bushes, in the belief that the savages
would not dare to cross the open! Yet the secretary's agent set to work
to mark out a western boundary line which should connect the western
lines of Georgia and New York and so accomplish the limitation of
Virginia.
But the Virginians also acted. They sent an agent of their own, Thomas
Walker, to Fort Stanwix (Rome, New York) to treat with the Six Nations
for some of this very western land that Hillsborough was contriving to
keep them out of. For the king issued the proclamation in the interest
of the western Indians (and the annuities he received when the fur trade
was prosperous) who desired that the West should be preserved to them.
But what could be said if Virginia purchased the Indian's claim? Could a
king's proclamation keep the Virginians from a territory to which, for
value received, the Indians had given a quit-claim deed?
This famous Treaty of Fort Stanwix was held in the fall of 1768. Three
thousand Indians were present. Presents were lavished upon the
chieftains. The western boundary line crossed from the west branch of
the Susquehanna to Kittanning on the Allegheny River; it followed the
Allegheny and Ohio Rivers southwest to the mouth of the Great Kanawha.
Here it met Hillsborough's line which came up from Florida and which
made the Great Kanawha the western boundary of Virginia. Had the Fort
Stanwix line stopped here the western boundary line of the colonies
would have been as Lord Hillsborough desired. But Walker did not pause
here. Sir William Johnson, British Indian Agent for the Northern
District, who was "thoroughly versed in the methods of making profit by
his office," allowed Walker to extend the line so as to enclose
Virginia's prospective purchase; and the Tennessee River was made the
western boundary instead of the Great Kanawha. Thus Johnson at once
satisfied the claims of Virginia and the pride of the Six Nations, who
were still anxious to prove their long-boasted possession over the
Cumberland region, as well as their sovereignty over the hated Cherokee,
by thus formally disposing of the land. So everyone was satisfied--but
Hillsborough. And yet the Crown was compelled, finally, to approve the
Treaty of Fort Stanwix.
This treaty marks an epoch in the history of the central West, since,
thereby, nearly half of it became a portion of one of the Thirteen
Colonies. The other half, north of the Ohio River, remained in the
possession of the Indians who inhabited it.
It is remarkable how little known that great territory was which now
became a part of Virginia. This was largely because it was an
uninhabited country. The territory north of the Ohio River was filled
with Indian nations, some of whom had reigned there from times
prehistoric. This was likewise true of the country south, where the
great southern confederacies had held sway since white men came to this
continent. But between these inhabited areas lay a pleasant land which
any tribe would have gladly possessed had there not been so many rivals
for it. Consequently it became a "dark and bloody" land where a
thousand unrecorded battles were fought by Indians from both North and
South who had the temerity to come there to hunt, or by armies who were
hurrying through it in search of their foes who lived beyond. No Bouquet
had pierced through to the Cumberland to release prisoners who might
bring back reports of the land. No missionaries had carried their "great
and good" words to this battle ground of the Nations and returned with
tidings of its splendid meadows and their fertility. One or two
adventuresome explorers had looked there and brought back practically
all that the world knew of it. But they had never visited the most
pleasant portions and knew little, if anything, of its real value. And
all the Indians seemed to know was that it was a bloody border-land
where no tribe could hunt in peace; where every shadow contained a
lurking foe; and where every inch of soil was drenched with blood.
Thus to an unknown and unoccupied border-land between the Indians of the
North and those to the South, Virginia obtained, from one of its alleged
possessors, a nominal hold. Could she maintain it? The world asked the
question and awaited the answer, wonderingly.
The principal reason why Virginia was successful was because her
inhabitants were an agricultural people like their ancestors before them
in England. Being an agricultural people they had expanded further,
geographically, than the inhabitants of any of the other colonies. As
early as 1740, cabins were being built in Bedford County, Virginia, over
one hundred and fifty miles from the seaboard. There were settlements on
the New River, a branch of the Great Kanawha, before the French and
Indian war. Fort Loudoun, over the border, was erected in 1756, and
Forts Long Island and Chissel in 1758. The Wyoming massacre in New York
State in the Revolutionary War occurred on what was then the frontier,
though Wyoming was less than a hundred miles from New York City. And,
fortunately, this agricultural people was located in the most favorable
place along the Atlantic for expansion, for a reason already mentioned.
Back of New York and Pennsylvania roamed the Iroquois, Delawares,
Shawanese, and other Indian nations. Back of Virginia, whose fine rivers
rose in the mountains, lay a comparatively uninhabited country; for, the
moment the Indians became allied with either of the encroaching European
powers, they ceased contending together in the border-land behind
Virginia. It was not until Virginians began to occupy it that it became
anew a "dark and bloody ground." Virginia knew less of Indian warfare
than some of the neighboring colonies until the era of her expansion
when her sturdy people began occupying the land obtained at the Treaty
of Fort Stanwix.
The expansion of Virginia was greatly facilitated by the geographical
position of the mountains along her western frontier. While the
mountains of western New York and Pennsylvania obstructed expansion, in
Virginia the mountain ranges facilitated it. Further north they trended
directly north and south and even the rivers could find a passage-way
only by following the most tortuous courses. True, the Hudson and Mohawk
valleys offered a clear course to the great highland across to the
Niagara River, but it was not until very late in the eighteenth century
that the path across this watershed was open to white men. The two
routes through Pennsylvania crossed the mountains horizontally and
almost feared to follow the waterways. Braddock's Road crossed the
waters of one stream three times at right angles in the space of eighty
miles and did not follow it one hundred yards altogether. In Virginia
the mountain ranges trend southwesterly, with the rivers between them,
offering a practicable though roundabout route westward.
But there was another thing Virginia possessed in addition to an
agricultural people--an uninhabited territory west of her and some plain
courses into it. She had among her citizens some daring, far-sighted,
energetic men who might easily be called the first promoters of America.
They were moneyed men who sought honestly to make money; but they were
also men of chivalry and intense patriotism--Virginians of Virginians.
They thought of their pockets, but they also thought of their colony
and their king; the standing of the Old Dominion was very dear to them:
its growth in commercial as well as geographical dimensions. They
desired to be thought well of at home; they desired that Virginia should
be thought the best of all America.
Of these men the Washingtons were the most prominent, and George
Washington was a marvelously inspired leader. As early as 1749
Virginians secured a grant of land south of the Ohio and directly west
of old Virginia. The enterprise amounted to nothing save by
precipitating the contest between England and France for the West. The
example of the younger Washington in fighting for the possession of the
West, in encouraging the disheartened people of the frontier in the dark
days of defeat, in aiding in the final victory, in investing heavily in
western land (for he, it is said, died the richest man in America, and
half his wealth lay west of the Alleghenies), in encouraging the
building of the Potomac Canal, in impressing upon the people the
commercial value of exploiting the entire West from Lake Huron to
Cumberland Gap, affords perhaps the most remarkable instance in our
whole national history of one man inspiring a people to greater things.
A place and a rough way thither was ready for expanding Virginia--and
such sons as Washington gave the inspiration.
Through the great "trough" between the Allegheny and Blue Ridge ranges
passes the pioneer route to which we of the central West owe as much as
to any thoroughfare in America--that rough, long, roundabout road which,
coming down from Lancaster and Yorktown, crossed the Potomac at Wadkin's
Ferry, and passed up the Shenandoah valley by Martinsburg, Winchester
and Staunton; and on to the headwaters of the New River, where it was
joined by the thoroughfare through central Virginia from Richmond. Here,
near the meeting of these famous old-time Virginia thoroughfares, stood
Fort Chissel, erected in 1758 and situated two hundred miles east of
Cumberland Gap. Beyond Fort Chissel ran the Indian trail toward the Gap
and, within fifty miles of the Gap, stood Fort Watauga on a branch of
the Holston. This was the most westerly fort at the time of the Stanwix
treaty, and about the rude fort was springing up the Watauga settlement.
Other earlier settlements were made at Draper's Meadows and at Inglis
Ferry on New River by families bearing those names. For more than a
century the population of Virginia and North Carolina had been slowly
sifting up the river valleys toward the West and by the time the king's
proclamation was issued many cabins were already erected beyond the
headwaters of streams which fell "into the Atlantic Ocean from the West
or Northwest." Even the faithful Hillsborough seems to have recognized
this since his boundary line passed through Chiswell's Mine on the Great
Kanawha and the mouth of that river--much further west than a strict
interpretation of the proclamation would allow.
This vanguard which was moving westward was led by explorers and
hunters. Of two of the former, mention will be particularly made. The
parties of hunters who now began to press beyond the furthest
settlements, while they subsisted on game, were also real explorers of
the West and helped to set in motion and give zest to the great
immigration which followed the signing of the Stanwix treaty. It was
only one year after the Stanwix treaty when Daniel Boone came up from
his home on the Yadkin in North Carolina and led a company of men
through the Gap into the land whose hero and idol he was ever to be.
About the same time John Finley and party were trapping on the forbidden
rivers, and Colonel James Knox and company of nine hunted on the New,
Clinch, and Holston Rivers, and reaching even to the lower Cumberland in
1769-70. These parties of men found that a paradise for the husbandman
was to be speedily revealed to the world at the foothills of the
Cumberland and Pine mountains on the great plain falling away westward
to the Mississippi. At first, only the most vague description of the
rich meadows of the West reached the Virginian settlements, but, meager
as they were, they started a tide of immigration quite unparalleled in
American history. One of these descriptions is preserved for us in the
autobiography of Daniel Boone, and, though couched in language with
which he was probably less familiar than his amanuensis, still is not
unlike the stories told in border cabins to eager listening frontiersmen
who were soon on their rough way to this El Dorado beyond the horrid
ranges of the Cumberlands:
"We found everywhere abundance of wild beasts of all sorts, through this
vast forest. The buffalo were more frequent than I have seen cattle in
the settlements, browsing on the leaves of the cane, or cropping the
herbage on those extensive plains, fearless, because ignorant of the
violence of man.... Nature was here a series of wonders and a fund of
delight. Here she displayed her ingenuity and industry in a variety of
flowers and fruits, beautifully colored, elegantly shaped and charmingly
flavored; and we were diverted with innumerable animals presenting
themselves perpetually to our view.... Just at the close of day the
gentle gales retired and left the place to the disposal of a profound
calm. Not a breeze shook the most tremulous leaf. I had gained the
summit of a commanding ridge, and, looking around with astonishing
delight, beheld the ample plains, the beauteous tracts below: On the
other hand had I surveyed the famous Ohio river, that rolled in silent
dignity, marking the western boundary of Kentucky with inconceivable
grandeur. At a vast distance I beheld the mountains lift their venerable
brows, and penetrate the clouds."
Inspired by such descriptions as these, there came in the wake of the
hunter-explorers crowds of immigrants. Very many came even bringing
their families, for the novelty of the adventure and because there was
nothing to keep them where they had had but a tomahawk claim on the
border. There were thousands who entered the West and became valuable
citizens (considering the work to be done) who would best be described
as gypsies. For a larger part of the way across the continent this
peculiar class of people moved westward between the advanced explorers
and the swarm of genuine "settlers" whose feet, even at this time, were
making the middle of our continent tremble. For instance, very many of
the first settlers in the territory near the Mississippi hailed from a
portion of the land between their home there and the Allegheny
mountains, just as many of the first settlers between the Ohio and Lake
Erie hailed from Virginia's land between the Ohio and Tennessee. The
phrase "following the immigration" was a common one and covered this
class of pioneers who moved away from a given district of land when it
began to fill with settlers. There has appeared a disposition in some
quarters to attempt to minimize the value of the hosts of so-called
"squatters" and "tomahawk claimers" who first moved into the West. Our
pioneer literature is full of discreditable allusions, made by the
second tide of pioneers who came West, concerning the scattered ranks of
first comers, their moral character, their ways of thought and living.
The later blueblood stock had not a little to say concerning the
pioneers of Western Virginia and Kentucky flavored with the same spice
that Dickens employed when, a little later, he jotted down his "American
Notes." It seems as though it were reasonable to remember what these
first comers did rather than the picture of what they were. But for them
there could never have been a better West. Who composed the armies of
McIntosh, Brodhead, Crawford, Harmar, St. Clair, and Wayne but these
rough, wild-looking men who first entered the West? What is now western
Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky gave practically all the
troops which conquered the land between the Ohio River and the Great
Lakes. And all of them, save the few who could raise money to buy some
of it, retired again to their slovenly "claims" south of the Ohio--and a
flood-tide of newcomers came after them to bring a new era they could
never have brought, and, incidentally, leave to posterity repulsive
pictures of them. It hath been said: "Instead of the thorn shall come up
the fir tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree;
and it shall be to the Lord for a name, for an everlasting sign that
shall not be cut off." The West was a land of brier and thorn, and men
as rough as briers and thorns were needed to strike the first swift hard
blows. The squatter in the West played an important part and should not
be remembered solely by the pictures drawn of his filth, lawlessness,
and laziness. The Cleaveland of 1798 was a paradise beside the Cleveland
of 1810. Was it not Caleb Atwater who said that "not one young man,
whose family was rich, and of very high standing in the Eastern States,
has succeeded in Ohio?" A little later in this narrative we shall read
of one "Abraham hanks" who went, an unknown pioneer, with Daniel Boone
through Cumberland Gap at the very van of all the western immigration!
Atwater was not referring to his grandson--the immortal son of Nancy
Hanks. Theodore Roosevelt in the following words has emphasized the debt
our country owes to this class of early citizens: "Nevertheless this
very ferocity was not only inevitable, but it was in a certain sense
proper; or at least, even if many of its manifestations were blamable,
the spirit that lay behind them was right. The backwoodsmen were no
sentimentalists; they were grim, hard, matter-of-fact men, engaged all
their lives long in an unending struggle with hostile forces, both
human and natural; men who in this struggle had acquired many unamiable
qualities, but who had learned likewise to appreciate at their full
value the inestimable virtues of courage and common-sense. The crisis
[Revolution] demanded that they should be both strong and good; but,
above all things, it demanded that they should be strong. Weakness would
have ruined them. It was needful that justice should stand before mercy;
and they could no longer have held their homes, had they not put down
their foes, of every kind with an iron hand."
With these uncouth border families moved another class of men known as
land speculators. The schemes of these fortune hunters and of the many
great companies of which they were the representatives would fill a
moderate volume and can only be hinted at here. As we have noted, a
company was organized very early to speculate in western lands, called
the Ohio Company. It received from the king of England a grant of land
between the Monongahela and Great Kanawha Rivers, but failed to fulfil
the required conditions and the Charter reverted to the Crown. From that
day to the breaking out of the Revolutionary War numerous land companies
secured by one means or another a claim to certain lands and many sought
such claims but never secured them. It will be necessary to refer to one
of these companies later in the course of our narrative.
Near the front in this race for the rich meadows between the Ohio and
Tennessee were bounty-land claimants. One of Virginia's most effective
pleas for the great territory which had come into her possession was
that she might reward her soldiers of the French and Indian wars. While
as a people she had known less of Indian warfare than some of the
colonies, Virginia had been liberal in sending troops northward to
defend the frontier. And these Virginians had made a name for themselves
at Braddock's defeat and elsewhere. Washington was always insistent that
the claims of these old veterans of the bloody border war be redeemed in
good lands, and it must be remembered ever with pride that as late as
1770, only six years before he became commander-in-chief of the armies
of the United States at Cambridge, and but two years after the signing
of the Stanwix treaty, he made the difficult journey to the Ohio River
and down that river in a canoe to Virginia's new empire on the Great
Kanawha, where surveys of bounty lands for his heroes of Fort Necessity
were first made. Additional surveys were soon made along the Ohio and
Licking Rivers.
Explorers, hunters, squatters, speculators, and bounty-land
claimants--this was the heterogeneous population that was surging
westward to the land of which Boone wrote. But not all came down the old
thoroughfare between the Allegheny and Blue Ridge Mountains and through
Cumberland Gap. Many followed northward the rough trails which descended
the New and Monongahela Rivers, while many went northwesterly over
Braddock's overgrown twelve-foot road or along the winding narrow track
of Forbes's Road through the Pennsylvania Glades to the little frontier
fortress, Fort Pitt. From the time Bouquet relieved this beleaguered
garrison until the Stanwix treaty, Pittsburg, as the town was now
known, had been growing. One year after that treaty (1769) the manor of
Pittsburg was surveyed, the survey embracing five thousand seven hundred
and sixty-six acres. Upon the signing of the Stanwix treaty, Pittsburg
became an important point and was claimed by both Pennsylvania and
Virginia. About it sprang up villages and from it down the Ohio and up
the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers settlements spread. What was
loosely known as the "Monongahela Country"--the territory between the
Monongahela and Ohio Rivers--became quite populous.
Here, high up along the Ohio River, the Virginians learned how to fight
the red man, if they had never known before. The decade succeeding
Pontiac's war, though nominally a peaceful one, was, nevertheless, one
long and bitter duel between the Indians north of the Ohio and the
Virginians who were coming "in shoals" to its southern bank. It has been
estimated that the total loss of life within that decade was as great as
the total loss in the open war--Dunmore's War--which soon broke out and
which momentarily threatened the extinction of Virginia's great
colonial movement into the southern half of this black forest of the
West.
We have refrained from using the name Kentucky long enough, perhaps, to
accomplish the purpose of impressing upon the reader's mind the part
Virginia and the Virginians played in the creation of the earliest
settlement in the West, first known as the county, then the state, of
Kentucky. As Professor Shaler has said: "She owes to Virginia the most
of the people she received during the half century when her society was
taking shape: her institutions, be they good or evil, her ideals of
life, her place in the nation's history, are all as immediately derived
from her great Mother Virginia as are an individual man's from the
mother who bore him."
The name Kentucky, Kentuckgin, Kantucky, Kentucke, Caintuck, as it was
variously spelled, may have been derived from an Iroquois word
_Ken-ta-kee_, which means "among the meadows." When, in the olden days,
only the long, painted canoes of the Iroquois could be moored in safety
in the shades of the woodland meadows south of the Oyo, the name
Ken-ta-kee was first heard--a name which has come down to us so pregnant
with pride and power. The Catawba River, which gained its name, perhaps,
from the famous war-path which followed it toward the land of the
Catawbas in the south, was first known as the Louisa River (named by
Walker in honor of the wife of the "Bloody Duke" of Cumberland), and
afterwards as the Kentucky River.
After the treaty at the close of Dunmore's War, Virginia had two
quit-claim deeds to her western empire: one from the Iroquois, who
boasted their possession of it, and one from the Shawanese, who had
disputed the settlement. There was yet another claimant to deal with,
the Cherokees of the South. In the year following the battle of Point
Pleasant (1774) a land company headed by Colonel Richard Henderson
purchased from the Cherokees the land between the Ohio, Kentucky, and
Cumberland Rivers. This purchase was achieved at Fort Watauga through
the agency of Daniel Boone. This private purchase from the Indians was
afterward annulled by both Virginia and North Carolina, but so far as
the Indian claims to Kentucky were concerned it had passed into the
possession of the white man. Every inch of soil had been fairly obtained
from each and every claimant who had made it a "dark and bloody ground"
through their battles for it, since the earliest period of recorded
history. But at the time of the Cherokee purchase, an old Indian chief
said to Boone: "Brother, we have given you a fine land, but I believe
you will have much trouble in settling it." Perhaps the Cherokees knew
what Shawanese quit-claim deeds were worth!
After making this purchase for Colonel Henderson, Boone engaged to mark
out a road through Cumberland Gap to the center of the newly acquired
territory. Following the old trail through the Gap, Boone's Road ended
at a new settlement at the mouth of Otter Creek on the Kentucky River
named Boonesborough, in his honor. Fort Boonesborough was completed July
14, 1775. Colonel Logan and party came westward through the Gap at the
same time but diverged from Boone's Road on Rockcastle Creek, and
opened the more important branch of the road toward Louisville by way of
Crab Orchard and Danville, and erected Fort Logan one mile west of
Standford, in what is now Lincoln County, Kentucky. Harrod's, Logan's,
and Boone's forts were the important early "stations" in the West. To
them the thousands wended their tedious way over the "Wilderness Road,"
as both branches (Logan's and Boone's) were fitly called, or down the
Ohio from Pittsburg. And along these lines of western movement cabins
and clearings made their rapid appearance despite the era of bloodshed
which began almost simultaneously with the opening of the Revolutionary
War in the East.
Such were the pilgrims of the West. It is interesting to note that these
leaders of civilization in the West were true Americans--American born
and American bred. It is remarkable that the discoverers of the American
central West were either French or American. For the work of exploring
this _hinterland_, England scarcely furnished a man; she can write no
names opposite those of Brulé, Cartier, Champlain, Du Lhuth, Hennepin,
Joliet, Marquette, and La Salle. Nearly all that England knew of the
interior she learned from the French. Her great explorers were maritime
explorers and her conquest of New France was effected by water. But
while the West could not have for its first colonists the counterpart of
the hardy, irresistible race who first came to the Atlantic seaboard, it
did have the next best thing--the direct descendants of them. It was a
race of Americanized Britons who pressed from Virginia into the West.
Hardly a name among them but was pure Norman or Saxon. Of the
twenty-five members of the Political Club at Danville, Kentucky, which
discussed with ability the Federal Constitution, all but two were
descendants of colonists from Great Britain and Ireland. Of forty-five
members of the convention which framed Kentucky's first constitution,
only three could claim European ancestry. Of the seven hundred members
of the Filson Club, the representative historical society of Kentucky
today, there are not more than twenty who are not either English,
Scotch, Welsh, or Irish. The blood of the mother country flowed in purer
strain in no portion of the continent at the outbreak of the
Revolutionary War than in the Virginian settlement of Kentucky. That the
blood was true to its fighting traditions is proved by the Revolutionary
pension rolls. In 1840 there were nine hundred Revolutionary soldiers
receiving pensions in Kentucky. This race gave to the West its real
heroes--the Gists, Walkers, Boones, Clarks, Todds, Shelbys, Kentons,
Logans, Lewises, Crawfords, Gibsons, and St. Clairs. In frontier cabins
they were bred to a free life in a free land--worthy successors to
Washington and his school, worthy men to subdue and rule the empire of
which they began the conquest before the outbreak of the Revolutionary
War. In the form of these sturdy colonizers the American republic
stretched its arm across the Appalachian mountain system and took in its
grasp the richest river valley in the world at the end of Boone's
Wilderness Road. That arm was never withdrawn, that grasp never
relinquished. The leaven of old Virginia leavened the whole lump.
Thus may be outlined briefly the era of expansion in which Boone's Road
played an all-important part. In the succeeding chapters the phases of
this historic movement are reviewed as the meager data now obtainable
can permit.