len, Harrodsburg alone could not
have stood. The Indians under the British would have overrun Kentucky;
and George Rogers Clark--whose base for his Illinois operations was
the Kentucky forts--could not have made the campaigns which wrested the
Northwest from the control of Great Britain.

Again Virginia took official note of Captain Boone when in 1779 the
Legislature established Boonesborough "a town for the reception of
traders" and appointed Boone himself one of the trustees to attend to
the sale and registration of lots. An odd office that was for Daniel,
who never learned to attend to the registration of his own; he declined
it. His name appears again, however, a little later when Virginia made
the whole of Kentucky one of her counties with the following officers:
Colonel David Robinson, County Lieutenant; George Rogers Clark, Anthony
Bledsoe, and John Bowman, Majors; Daniel Boone, James Harrod, Benjamin
Logan, and John Todd, Captains.

Boonesborough's successful resistance caused land speculators as well as
prospective settlers to take heart of grace. Parties made their way to
Boonesborough, Harrodsburg, and even to the Falls of the Ohio, where
Clark's fort and blockhouses now stood. In the summer of 1779 Clark had
erected on the Kentucky side of the river a large fort which became the
nucleus of the town of Louisville. Here, while he was eating his heart
out with impatience for money and men to enable him to march to the
attack of Detroit, as he had planned, he amused himself by drawing up
plans for a city. He laid out private sections and public parks and
contemplated the bringing in of families only to inhabit his city, for,
oddly enough, he who never married was going to make short shift of mere
bachelors in his City Beautiful. Between pen scratches, no doubt, he
looked out frequently upon the river to descry if possible a boatload of
ammunition or the banners of the troops he had been promised.

When neither appeared, he gave up the idea of Detroit and set about
erecting defenses on the southern border, for the Choctaws and
Cherokees, united under a white leader named Colbert, were threatening
Kentucky by way of the Mississippi. He built in 1780 Fort Jefferson in
what is now Ballard County, and had barely completed the new post and
garrisoned it with about thirty men when it was besieged by Colbert
and his savages. The Indians, assaulting by night, were lured into a
position directly before a cannon which