Volume I Part 23 (1/2)

8. McAfee MSS.

9. Such was the case with the Clarks, Boons, Seviers, Shelbys, Robertsons, Logans, c.o.c.kes, Crocketts, etc.; many of whose descendants it has been my good-fortune personally to know.

10. This is as true to-day in the far west as it was formerly in Kentucky and Tennessee; at least to judge by my own experience in the Little Missouri region, and in portions of the Kootenai, Coeur d'Alene, and Bighorn countries.

11. McAfee MSS. See also ”Trans-Alleghany Pioneers,” p. III. As Mr. Hale points out, this route, which was travelled by Floyd, Bullitt, the McAfees, and many others, has not received due attention, even in Colonel Speed's invaluable and interesting ”Wilderness Road.”

12. Up to 1783 the Kentucky immigrants came from the backwoods of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, and were of almost precisely the same character as those that went to Tennessee. See Imlay, p. 168. At the close of the Revolutionary war, Tennessee and Kentucky were almost alike in population. But after that time the population of Kentucky rapidly grew varied, and the great immigration of upper-cla.s.s Virginians gave it a peculiar stamp of its own. By 1796, when Logan was defeated for governor, the control of Kentucky had pa.s.sed out of the hands of the pioneers; whereas in Tennessee the old Indian fighters continued to give the tone to the social life of the State, and remained in control until they died.

13. McAfee MSS. Just as the McAfee family started for Kentucky, the wife of one of their number, George, was confined. The others had to leave her; but at the first long halt the husband hurried back, only to meet his wife on the way; for she had ridden after them just three days after her confinement, taking her baby along.

14. ”Pioneer Biography,” James McBride (son of a pioneer who was killed by the Indians in 1789 in Kentucky), p. 183, Cincinnati, 1869. One of the excellent series published by Robert Clarke & Co., to whom American historians owe a special and unique debt of grat.i.tude.

15. McAfee MSS.

16. McBride, II., 197.

17. McAfee MSS.

18. _Do._

19. Morehead, App. Floyd's letter.

20. They retained few Indian names; Kentucky in this respect differing from most other sections of the Union. The names were either taken from the explorers, as Floyd's Fork; or from some natural peculiarity, as the Licking, so called from the number of game licks along its borders; or else they commemorated some incident. On Dreaming Creek Boon fell asleep and dreamed he was stung by yellow-jackets. The Elkhorn was so named because a hunter, having slain a monstrous bull elk, stuck up its horns on a pole at the mouth. At b.l.o.o.d.y Run several men were slain. Eagle Branch was so called because of the many bald eagles round it. See McAfee MSS.

21. Marshall, 45.

22. Afterwards General William Ray. Butler, p. 37.

23. Pet.i.tion of the committee of West Fincastle, dated June 20, 1776. It is printed in Col. John Mason Brown's ”Battle of the Blue Licks”

pamphlet.

24. Patrick Henry.

25. Among their number were John Todd (likewise chosen burgess--in these early days a man of mark often filled several distinct positions at the same time), Benj. Logan, Richard Galloway, John Bowman, and John Floyd; the latter was an educated Virginian, who was slain by the Indians before his fine natural qualities had time to give him the place he would otherwise a.s.suredly have reached.

26. The first colonel was John Bowman.

27. John Dodd and Richard Calloway. See Diary of Geo. Rogers Clark, in 1776. Given by Morehead, p. 161.

28. Butler, 166.

29. The Iroquois, as well as the Cherokees, used these expressions concerning portions of the Ohio valley. Heckewelder, 118.

30. State Department MSS., No. 147, Vol. VI., March 15, 1781.

31. As one instance among many see Haldimand MSS., letter of Lt. Col.

Hamilton, August 17, 1778, where Girty reported, on behalf of the Delawares, the tribe least treacherous to the Americans, that even these Indians were only going in to Fort Pitt and keeping up friendly relations with its garrison so as to deceive the whites, and that as soon as their corn was ripe they would move off to the hostile tribes.