when a dash would be made
across the river and the war carried for a week or two into the enemy's
country. But as the Indians, with their characteristic wariness, had
usually timely notice of the approaching danger, and would abandon their
villages for the more secure shelter of the forest, the white invaders
could do little more in the way of vengeance and intimidation than burn
the deserted towns and level the corn-fields to the ground. A brief
interval of quiet would sometimes follow these raids; but it happened
not unfrequently that the pioneers would hardly be back to their several
stations, disbanded, and fairly at their labors in the field, when there
again was the Indian war-whoop ringing along the periled border as
melodiously as ever, and the pillaging, murdering, scalping, and
burning going on in the good old orthodox fashion the pesky red ravagers
loved so well.

What greatly aggravated this distressing state of things, Kentucky was
still but a district of Virginia, hence powerless to use to the full
extent the means of self-defense which otherwise had lain within her
reach; while the seat of government was so remote from the scenes of
disorder that the mother State could succor her infant settlements
scarcely more than had they lain on the other side of the Rocky
Mountains, instead of the Alleghenies. Thus trammeled, Kentucky could do
little more than, like a tethered bison, butt at the dangers which year
in and year out beset her on every side. To be sure, conventions
composed of her best men, and having for their object her erection into
a separate State of the Union, had been for the last three years, and
for the next three years continued to be, as frequent as
camp-meetings--quite as demonstrative too, and noisy, and quite as much
to the purpose, so far as concerned the object in view. Why, does not
beseem us here to inquire. Finally, just as the danger was over and
gone, and the last hand of hostile Indians that ever raised the
war-whoop in the land of the "Dark and Bloody Ground" had been driven
across the Ohio, Kentucky was untrammeled, and suffered to rear her
bleeding front among the mighty sisterhood of States--an independent,
sovereign part of the independent, sovereign whole, as the phrase should
go, until the great rebellion should call for new constructions and
clear definitions. Thenceforth for twenty years the fiery lines of war
receded fitfully northward, till stayed at the Battle of the Th