ous nature of my business, resulting from the very serious nature of
the times, held me back.

On this particular morning when the summer was in full tide of song and
scents and pleasing vistas, I was bringing important despatches to
Governor Dunmore. The long-looked-for Indian war was upon us. From the
back-country to the seaboard Virginians knew this year of 1774 was to
figure prominently in our destiny.

In the preceding spring we realized it was only a question of time when we
must "fort" ourselves, or abandon the back-country, thereby losing crops
and cabins. When young James Boone and Henry Russell were killed by
Indians in Powell's Valley in the fall of 1773, all hope of a friendly
penetration of the western country died. Ever since Colonel Bouquet's
treaty with the Ohio tribes on the collapse of Pontiac's War the frontier
had suffered from many small raids, but there had been no organized
warfare.

During those ten years much blood had been spilled and many cabins burned,
but the red opposition had not been sufficient to stop the backwoodsmen
from crowding into the Alleghanies. And only a general war could prevent
them from overflowing down into the bottoms of the Ohio. The killing of
friendly Shawnees at Pipe Creek below the mouth of the Little Kanawha in
April, followed three days later by the cruel slaughter of John Logan's
relatives and friends at Baker's groggery opposite Yellow Creek, had
touched off the powder.

But the notion that the massacre of Logan's people at Joshua Baker's house
was the cause of the war is erroneous. For any one living in the country
at the time to have believed it would be too ridiculous. That brutal
affair was only one more brand added to a fire which had smoldered for ten
years.

It happened to be the last piece of violence before both red and white
threw aside make-believe and settled down to the ghastly struggle for
supremacy. Hunters bound for Kentucky had suffered none from the Indians
except as they had a brush with small raiding-parties. But when Daniel
Boone undertook to convey his wife and children and the families of his
friends into the wonderland the natives would have none of it. In killing
his son and young Russell, along with several of their companions, the
Indians were merely serving notice of no thoroughfare for home-builders.

So let us remember that Dunmore's War was the inevitable outcome of two
alien races determined on the same prize, with each primed