Volume I Part 18 (2/2)

In this year also Clark[30] and Shelby[31] first came to Kentucky; and many other men whose names became famous in frontier story, and whose sufferings and long wanderings, whose strength, hardihood, and fierce daring, whose prowess as Indian fighters and killers of big game, were told by the firesides of Kentucky to generations born when the elk and the buffalo had vanished from her borders as completely as the red Indian himself. Each leader gathered round him a little party of men, who helped him build the fort which was to be the stronghold of the district. Among the earliest of these town-builders were Hugh McGarry, James Harrod, and Benjamin Logan. The first named was a coa.r.s.e, bold, brutal man, always clas.h.i.+ng with his a.s.sociates (he once nearly shot Harrod in a dispute over work). He was as revengeful and foolhardy as he was daring, but a natural leader in spite of all. Soon after he came to Kentucky his son was slain by Indians while out boiling sugar from the maples; and he mercilessly persecuted all redskins for ever after.

Harrod and Logan were of far higher character, and superior to him in every respect. Like so many other backwoodsmen, they were tall, spare, athletic men, with dark hair and grave faces. They were as fearless as they were tireless, and were beloved by their followers. Harrod finally died alone in the wilderness, nor was it ever certainly known whether he was killed by Indian or white man, or perchance by some hunted beast.

The old settlers always held up his memory as that of a man ever ready to do a good deed, whether it was to run to the rescue of some one attacked by Indians, or to hunt up the strayed plough-horse of a brother settler less skilful as a woodsman; yet he could hardly read or write.

Logan was almost as good a woodsman and individual fighter, and in addition was far better suited to lead men. He was both just and generous. His father had died intestate, so that all of his property by law came to Logan, who was the eldest son; but the latter at once divided it equally with his brothers and sisters. As soon as he came to Kentucky he rose to leaders.h.i.+p, and remained for many years among the foremost of the commonwealth founders.

All this time there penetrated through the sombre forests faint echoes of the strife the men of the seacoast had just begun against the British king. The rumors woke to pa.s.sionate loyalty the hearts of the pioneers; and a roaming party of hunters, when camped on a branch[32] of the Elkhorn, by the hut of one of their number, named McConnell, called the spot Lexington, in honor of the memory of the Ma.s.sachusetts minute-men, about whose death and victory they had just heard.[33]

By the end of 1775 the Americans had gained firm foothold in Kentucky.

Cabins had been built and clearings made; there were women and children in the wooden forts, cattle grazed on the range, and two or three hundred acres of corn had been sown and reaped. There were perhaps some three hundred men in Kentucky, a hardy, resolute, strenuous band. They stood shoulder to shoulder in the wilderness, far from all help, surrounded by an overwhelming number of foes. Each day's work was fraught with danger as they warred with the wild forces from which they wrung their living. Around them on every side lowered the clouds of the impending death struggle with the savage lords of the neighboring lands.

These backwoodsmen greatly resembled one another; their leaders were but types of the rank and file, and did not differ so very widely from them; yet two men stand out clearly from their fellows. Above the throng of wood-choppers, game-hunters, and Indian fighters loom the sinewy figures of Daniel Boon and George Rogers Clark.

1. The first permanent settlement was Harrodsburg, then called Harrodstown, founded in 1774, but soon abandoned, and only permanently occupied on March 18, 1775, a fortnight before Boon began the erection of his fort.

2. The whole account of this treaty is taken from the Jefferson MSS., 5th Series, Vol. VIII.; ”a copy of the proceedings of the Virginia Convention, from June 15 to November 19, 1777, in relation to the Memorial of Richard Henderson, and others”; especially from the depositions of James Robertson, Isaac Shelby, Charles Robertson, Nathaniel Gist, and Thomas Price, who were all present. There is much interesting matter aside from the treaty; Simon Girty makes depositions as to Braddock's defeat and Bouquet's fight; Lewis, Croghan, and others show the utter vagueness and conflict of the Indian t.i.tles to Kentucky, etc., etc. Though the Cherokees spoke of the land as a ”dark” or ”b.l.o.o.d.y” place or ground, it does not seem that by either of these terms they referred to the actual meaning of the name Kentucky. One or two of the witnesses tried to make out that the treaty was unfairly made; but the bulk of the evidence is overwhelmingly the other way.

Haywood gives a long speech made by Oconostota against the treaty; but this original report shows that Oconostota favored the treaty from the outset, and that it was Dragging Canoe who spoke against it. Haywood wrote fifty years after the event, and gathered many of his facts from tradition; probably tradition had become confused, and reversed the position of the two chiefs. Haywood purports to give almost the exact language Oconostota used; but when he is in error even as to who made the speech, he is exceedingly unlikely to be correct in any thing more than its general tenor.

3. Then sometimes called the Louisa; a name given it at first by the English explorers, but by great good-fortune not retained.

4. Collins, II., 498. Letter of Daniel Boon, April 1, 1775. Collins has done good work for Kentucky history, having collected a perfect ma.s.s of materials of every sort. But he does not discriminate between facts of undoubted authenticity, and tales resting on the idlest legend; so that he must be used with caution, and he is, of course, not to be trusted where he is bia.s.sed by the extreme rancor of his political prejudices.

Of the Kentucky historians, Marshall is by far the most brilliant, and Mann Butler the most trustworthy and impartial. Both are much better than Collins.

5. Benjamin Logan; there were many of the family in Kentucky. It was a common name along the border; the Indian chief Logan had been named after one of the Pennsylvania branch.

6. McAfee MSS.

7. Boon's letter.

8. Richard Henderson's ”Journal of an Expedition to Cantucky in 1775”

(Collins).

9. April 5th.

10. It is printed in the Filson Club publications; see ”The Wilderness Road,” by Thomas Speed, Louisville, Ky., 1886; one of the best of an excellent series.

11. It is not necessary to say that ”corn” means maize; Americans do not use the word in the sense in which it is employed in Britain.

12. McAfee MSS. Some of the McAfees returned with Henderson.

13. Boon's letter, Henderson's journal, Calk's diary, McAfee's autobiography all mention the way in which the early settlers began to swarm out of the country in April, 1775. To judge from their accounts, if the movement had not been checked instantly the country would have been depopulated in a fortnight, exactly as in 1774.

14. It must be remembered that the outrages of the Indians this year in Kentucky were totally unprovoked; they were on lands where they did not themselves dwell, and which had been regularly ceded to the whites by all the tribes--Iroquois, Shawnees, Cherokees, etc.--whom the whites could possibly consider as having any claim to them. The wrath of the Kentuckians against all Indians is easily understood.

15. When the block-house and palisade enclosed the farm of a single settler the ”tun,” in its still earlier sense, was even more nearly reproduced.

<script>