a race which they believed was more truly
His chosen people than was that nation which Joshua led across the
Jordan. They exhorted no less earnestly in the bare meeting-houses on
Sunday, because their hands were roughened with guiding the plow and
wielding the axe on week-days; for they did not believe that being
called to preach the word of God absolved them from earning their living
by the sweat of their brows. The women, the wives of the settlers, were
of the same iron temper. They fearlessly fronted every danger the men
did, and they worked quite as hard. They prized the knowledge and
learning they themselves had been forced to do without; and many a
backwoods woman by thrift and industry, by the sale of her butter and
cheese, and the calves from her cows, enabled her husband to give his
sons good schooling, and perhaps to provide for some favored member of
the family the opportunity to secure a really first-class education.[5]

The valley in which these splendid pioneers of our people settled, lay
directly in the track of the Indian marauding parties, for the great war
trail used by the Cherokees and by their northern foes ran along its
whole length. This war trail, or war trace as it was then called, was in
places very distinct, although apparently never as well marked as were
some of the buffalo trails. It sent off a branch to Cumberland Gap,
whence it ran directly north through Kentucky to the Ohio, being there
known as the warriors' path. Along these trails the northern and
southern Indians passed and re-passed when they went to war against each
other; and of course they were ready and eager to attack any white man
who might settle down along their course.

In 1769, the year that Boon first went to Kentucky, the first permanent
settlers came to the banks of the Watauga,[6] the settlement being
merely an enlargement of the Virginia settlement, which had for a short
time existed on the head-waters of the Holston, especially near Wolf
Hills.[7] At first the settlers thought they were still in the domain of
Virginia, for at that time the line marking her southern boundary had
not been run so far west.[8] Indeed, had they not considered the land as
belonging to Virginia, they would probably not at the moment have dared
to intrude farther on territory claimed by the Indians. But while the
treaty between the crown and the Iroquois at Fort Stanwix[9] had
resulted in the cession of whatever right the Six Nations had to