came to grief, but the grants made to actual settlers were confirmed in fee simple by the legislature of Virginia three years later.

Three other settlements were founded in Kentucky in 1775, Harrodstown, Boiling Spring, and St. Asaphs or Logan's Station. In 1779 John Robertson, the leading spirit of the Watauga colony, led a migration along the Cumberland River to the Bluffs and there founded Nashboro. Every such settlement centered in a palisaded village where Imlay, the families were housed during the Indian raids. Each 149. settler felled the trees, planted corn, and built a log hut in the land assigned him; but the cabins in the isolated clearings could not be defended against serious assault.

Roosevelt,

I, Ch. XI;

II, Ch. I-V;
III, Ch. II,

Westward
Movement,
Ch. VIII,

Indian Wars. Ever since the acquisition of this territory in 1763, it had been the policy of the British government to withhold the lands from settlement in the interest of the fur trade. Now that the settlers were also rebels, a systematic VII; effort was made to drive them back to the seaboard. Cam- IV, Ch. I, II eron, the representative of King George on the Carolina Winsor, frontier, incited the Cherokees to take the warpath against the invaders, and throughout 1776 the border settlements were ravaged by fire and tomahawk. The Watauga men, XII. aided by militia from Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia, finally succeeded in forcing the tribes to make peace and to yield a considerable portion of their lands to the Americans. Thenceforth the pack trains of the pioneers traveled the Wilderness Road free from the fear of molestation.

In Kentucky the contest against the Indians and their British allies proved an even more serious affair. Hamilton, the British commander at Detroit, supplied the Iroquois with arms and bribed them to raid the American outposts. No frontier settlement from Fort Pitt and Fort Henry on the Ohio, to the palisaded villages of Kentucky, was exempt from their cruel assaults. The ferocity of the savages was matched by the fury of the backwoodsmen, many of whom cherished an hereditary hatred of England, most of whom had lost wife or child or friend through this latest

Roosevelt,

II,Ch.VII, X,

XII; III, Ch.

I; IV, Ch. V.

Chart, Dist. of Population in 1790, P. 133.

development of British policy. All the toil and suffering that had gone to the building of the frontier settlements seemed likely to end in ruin when Colonel George Rogers Clark, the most adroit of Indian fighters, determined to carry the war into the enemy's country. Having secured funds and ammunition from Patrick Henry, then governor of Virginia, he issued a call for volunteers. The mother state could spare no men, but the "long hunters" of the frontier found here their opportunity to pay off old grudges, and they rallied to Clark's standard at Fort Pitt. Four companies of picked men with their equipment floated down the Ohio to the mouth of the Tennessee, and there, disembarking, they marched overland to the French settlements on the Kaskaskia and the Wabash. Taken by surprise, the habitants surrendered without a blow. They were quite as well content to be "congress men" as king's men, since both were alien powers. The Indian chiefs, gathered at Cahokia, were overawed by the prowess of the "long knives," and Clark's diplomacy soon persuaded them to make peace with the Americans. Hamilton, then in winter quarters at Vincennes, preparing an attack on Fort Pitt, was caught off his guard and forced to yield his little garrison (1778). Thus Congress became the dominant power both north and south of the Ohio, and thus, when five years later peace was made with Great Britain, all the British territory between the Great Lakes and the Floridas was ceded to the United States.

Peace and Prosperity. - The country once freed from danger of Indian outrage, settlers crossed the mountains" in shoals." Twelve thousand people came out in 1784 to Kentucky alone. When the first United States census was taken, fifteen years after the building of Boonesborough, there were more than seventy thousand whites in Kentucky and thirty-five thousand odd in Tennessee. There were probably in 1790 four hundred thousand settlers on the rivers that flow into the Mississippi.

North Carolina opened a land office in the Watauga Valley in 1778 and offered farms on easy terms. Every head of a family might take up six hundred and forty acres

Imlay,

150-153.

on his own account, one hundred for his wife, and one hundred for each child. The price was $10 per hundred acres ; but since this might be paid in depreciated currency or set off against military service, the settlers had no difficulty in securing full title. Virginia (1779) offered the Kentucky pioneers four-hundred-acre tracts at the rate of $2.50 per hundred, on condition that a house should be built and corn planted within the year. Every man who could prove such a "cabin right" had a preëmption claim to one thousand acres more at a cost of $40 per hundred. Clark's men were rewarded in bounty lands north of the Ohio, three hundred acres each. The arrears of pay due the soldiers of the Continental army were made good in the same inexpensive fashion.

A contemporary writer has left a careful statement of what such a pioneer might accomplish. "A log-house is very soon erected, and in consequence of the friendly disposition which exists among those hospitable people, every neighbor flew to the assistance of each other upon occasions of emergency. Sometimes they were built of round logs entirely, covered with rived ash shingles, and the interstices stopped with clay, or lime and sand, to keep out the weather. The next object was to open the land for cultivation. There is very little under-wood in any part of this country, so that by cutting up the cane, and girdling the trees, you are sure of a crop of corn. The fertility of the soil amply repays the labourer for his toil; for if the large trees are not very numerous, and a large proportion of them the sugar maple, it is very likely from this imperfect cultivation, that the ground will yield from fifty to sixty bushels of corn to the acre. The second crop will be more ample; and as the shade is removed by cutting the timber away, great part of our land will produce from seventy to one hundred bushels of corn from every acre. This extraordinary fertility enables the farmer who has but a small capital to increase his wealth in a most rapid manner (I mean by wealth the comforts of life). His cattle and hogs will find sufficient food in the woods, not only for them to subsist