hway of the Indian tribes, and while their war paths crossed it at
frequent intervals, none were so bold as to attempt exclusive dominion
over it.

As was once said in the senate of the United States, "You might as well
inhibit the fish from swimming down the western rivers to the sea, as to
prohibit the people from settling on the new lands." While the great
revolution was opening, that should wrest our independence from Great
Britain, the stream of "long rifles" and hunting shirt men of Virginia
and Pennsylvania, who followed the valleys of the Allegheny and the Blue
Ridge from north to south, suddenly broke through the western mountain
barriers and flowed in diminutive rivulets into the basins of the
Tennessee, the Ohio and the Cumberland; afterwards forming, as Theodore
Roosevelt most strikingly says, "a shield of sinewy men thrust in
between the people of the seaboard and the red warriors of the
wilderness." In 1774, James Harrod built the first log cabin in
Kentucky. On the 14th of June, 1775, the first fort of the white man was
erected at Boonesborough.

The situation of the first pioneers of Kentucky was indeed precarious.
"They were posted," says Mann Butler, "in the heart of the most favorite
hunting ground of numerous and hostile tribes of Indians, on the north
and on the south; a ground endeared to these tribes by its profusion of
the finest game, subsisting on the luxuriant vegetation of this great
natural park. * * * * It was emphatically the Eden of the red man." On
the waters of the Wabash, the Miamis and the Scioto, dwelt powerful
confederacies of savages who regarded their intrusion as a menace and a
threat. Behind these savages stood the minions of Great Britain, urging
war on non-combatants and offering bounties for scalps. It was three or
four hundred miles to the nearest fort at Pittsburgh, and a wilderness
of forest and mountain fully six hundred miles in extent, separated them
from the capital of Virginia.

But it is to the everlasting glory of these men that they knew no fear,
and valiantly held their ground. Standing as they were, on the very
outskirts of civilization, they looked on the perils of the wilderness
with unquailing eye, and with stout hearts and brawny arms they carried
forward the standards of the republic. The thin line of skirmishers thus
thrown far out beyond the western ranges, was all that stood between the
grasping power of Great Britain, and the realization of her desire