No English colony in America looked upon the central West with such jealous eye as Virginia. The beautiful valley of the Oyo—the Indian exclamation for “Beautiful”—which ran southwesterly through the great forests of the continent’s interior was early claimed as the sole possession of the Virginians. The other colonies were hemmed in by prescribed boundary lines, definitely outlined in their royal charters. New York was bounded by Lake Erie and the Allegheny and thought little of the West. The Pennsylvanian colony was definitely bounded by the line which is the western boundary line of that commonwealth today. Carolina’s extremity stopped at thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes. Virginia’s western boundary was not defined; hence the West was hers.

England herself was not at all sure of the West until after the fall of Quebec; but the Treaty of Paris was soon signed and, so far as the French were concerned, the colonies extended to the Mississippi. Then Pontiac’s bloody war broke out and matters were at a standstill until Bouquet hewed his way into “the heart of the enemies’ country” and, on the Muskingum, brought Pontiac’s desperate allies, the Delawares and Shawanese, to terms.

But now, when the West was his, the king of England did a wondrous thing. He issued a proclamation in the year 1763 which forbade anyone securing “patents for any lands beyond the heads or sources of any of the rivers which fall into the Atlantic Ocean from the West or Northwest!” Thus Lord Hillsborough, British Secretary for the Colonies, thought to checkmate what he called the “roving disposition” of the colonists, particularly the Virginians. The other colonies were restrained by definite boundaries; Virginia, too, should be restrained.

Hillsborough might as well have adopted the plan of the ignoramus who, when methods for keeping the Indians from crossing the frontier were being discussed, suggested that a strip of land along the entire western frontier be cleared of trees and bushes, in the belief that the savages would not dare to cross the open! Yet the secretary’s agent set to work to mark out a western boundary line which should connect the western lines of Georgia and New York and so accomplish the limitation of Virginia.

But the Virginians also acted. They sent an agent of their own, Thomas Walker, to Fort Stanwix (Rome, New York) to treat with the Six Nations for some of this very western land that Hillsborough was contriving to keep them out of. For the king issued the proclamation in the interest of the western Indians (and the annuities he received when the fur trade was prosperous) who desired that the West should be preserved to them. But what could be said if Virginia purchased the Indian’s claim? Could a king’s proclamation keep the Virginians from a territory to which, for value received, the Indians had given a quit-claim deed?

This famous Treaty of Fort Stanwix was held in the fall of 1768. Three thousand Indians were present. Presents were lavished upon the chieftains. The western boundary line crossed from the west branch of the Susquehanna to Kittanning on the Allegheny River; it followed the Allegheny and Ohio Rivers southwest to the mouth of the Great Kanawha. Here it met Hillsborough’s line which came up from Florida and which made the Great Kanawha the western boundary of Virginia. Had the Fort Stanwix line stopped here the western boundary line of the colonies would have been as Lord Hillsborough desired. But Walker did not pause here. Sir William Johnson, British Indian Agent for the Northern District, who was “thoroughly versed in the methods of making profit by his office,” allowed Walker to extend the line so as to enclose Virginia’s prospective purchase; and the Tennessee River was made the western boundary instead of the Great Kanawha. Thus Johnson at once satisfied the claims of Virginia and the pride of the Six Nations, who were still anxious to prove their long-boasted possession over the Cumberland region, as well as their sovereignty over the hated Cherokee, by thus formally disposing of the land. So everyone was satisfied—but Hillsborough. And yet the Crown was compelled, finally, to approve the Treaty of Fort Stanwix.

This treaty marks an epoch in the history of the central West, since, thereby, nearly half of it became a portion of one of the Thirteen Colonies. The other half, north of the Ohio River, remained in the possession of the Indians who inhabited it.

It is remarkable how little known that great territory was which now became a part of Virginia. This was largely because it was an uninhabited country. The territory north of the Ohio River was filled with Indian nations, some of whom had reigned there from times prehistoric. This was likewise true of the country south, where the great southern confederacies had held sway since white men came to this continent. But between these inhabited areas lay a pleasant land which any tribe would have gladly possessed had there not been so many rivals for it. Consequently it became a “dark and bloody” land where a thousand unrecorded battles were fought by Indians from both North and South who had the temerity to come there to hunt, or by armies who were hurrying through it in search of their foes who lived beyond. No Bouquet had pierced through to the Cumberland to release prisoners who might bring back reports of the land. No missionaries had carried their “great and good” words to this battle ground of the Nations and returned with tidings of its splendid meadows and their fertility. One or two adventuresome explorers had looked there and brought back practically all that the world knew of it. But they had never visited the most pleasant portions and knew little, if anything, of its real value. And all the Indians seemed to know was that it was a bloody border-land where no tribe could hunt in peace; where every shadow contained a lurking foe; and where every inch of soil was drenched with blood.

Thus to an unknown and unoccupied border-land between the Indians of the North and those to the South, Virginia obtained, from one of its alleged possessors, a nominal hold. Could she maintain it? The world asked the question and awaited the answer, wonderingly.

The principal reason why Virginia was successful was because her inhabitants were an agricultural people like their ancestors before them in England. Being an agricultural people they had expanded further, geographically, than the inhabitants of any of the other colonies. As early as 1740, cabins were being built in Bedford County, Virginia, over one hundred and fifty miles from the seaboard. There were settlements on the New River, a branch of the Great Kanawha, before the French and Indian war. Fort Loudoun, over the border, was erected in 1756, and Forts Long Island and Chissel in 1758. The Wyoming massacre in New York State in the Revolutionary War occurred on what was then the frontier, though Wyoming was less than a hundred miles from New York City. And, fortunately, this agricultural people was located in the most favorable place along the Atlantic for expansion, for a reason already mentioned. Back of New York and Pennsylvania roamed the Iroquois, Delawares, Shawanese, and other Indian nations. Back of Virginia, whose fine rivers rose in the mountains, lay a comparatively uninhabited country; for, the moment the Indians became allied with either of the encroaching European powers, they ceased contending together in the border-land behind Virginia. It was not until Virginians began to occupy it that it became anew a “dark and bloody ground.” Virginia knew less of Indian warfare than some of the neighboring colonies until the era of her expansion when her sturdy people began occupying the land obtained at the Treaty of Fort Stanwix.

The expansion of Virginia was greatly facilitated by the geographical position of the mountains along her western frontier. While the mountains of western New York and Pennsylvania obstructed expansion, in Virginia the mountain ranges facilitated it. Further north they trended directly north and south and even the rivers could find a passage-way only by following the most tortuous courses. True, the Hudson and Mohawk valleys offered a clear course to the great highland across to the Niagara River, but it was not until very late in the eighteenth century that the path across this watershed was open to white men. The two routes through Pennsylvania crossed the mountains horizontally and almost feared to follow the waterways. Braddock’s Road crossed the waters of one stream three times at right angles in the space of eighty miles and did not follow it one hundred yards altogether. In Virginia the mountain ranges trend southwesterly, with the rivers between them, offering a practicable though roundabout route westward.

But there was another thing Virginia possessed in addition to an agricultural people—an uninhabited territory west of her and some plain courses into it. She had among her citizens some daring, far-sighted, energetic men who might easily be called the first promoters of America. They were moneyed men who sought honestly to make money; but they were also men of chivalry and intense patriotism—Virginians of Virginians. They thought of their pockets, but they also thought of their colony and their king; the standing of the Old Dominion was very dear to them: its growth in commercial as well as geographical dimensions. They desired to be thought well of at home; they desired that Virginia should be thought the best of all America.

Of these men the Washingtons were the most prominent, and George Washington was a marvelously inspired leader. As early as 1749 Virginians secured a grant of land south of the Ohio and directly west of old Virginia. The enterprise amounted to nothing save by precipitating the contest between England and France for the West. The example of the younger Washington in fighting for the possession of the West, in encouraging the disheartened people of the frontier in the dark days of defeat, in aiding in the final victory, in investing heavily in western land (for he, it is said, died the richest man in America, and half his wealth lay west of the Alleghenies), in encouraging the building of the Potomac Canal, in impressing upon the people the commercial value of exploiting the entire West from Lake Huron to Cumberland Gap, affords perhaps the most remarkable instance in our whole national history of one man inspiring a people to greater things. A place and a rough way thither was ready for expanding Virginia—and such sons as Washington gave the inspiration.

Through the great “trough” between the Allegheny and Blue Ridge ranges passes the pioneer route to which we of the central West owe as much as to any thoroughfare in America—that rough, long, roundabout road which, coming down from Lancaster and Yorktown, crossed the Potomac at Wadkin’s Ferry, and passed up the Shenandoah valley by Martinsburg, Winchester and Staunton; and on to the headwaters of the New River, where it was joined by the thoroughfare through central Virginia from Richmond. Here, near the meeting of these famous old-time Virginia thoroughfares, stood Fort Chissel, erected in 1758 and situated two hundred miles east of Cumberland Gap. Beyond Fort Chissel ran the Indian trail toward the Gap and, within fifty miles of the Gap, stood Fort Watauga on a branch of the Holston. This was the most westerly fort at the time of the Stanwix treaty, and about the rude fort was springing up the Watauga settlement. Other earlier settlements were made at Draper’s Meadows and at Inglis Ferry on New River by families bearing those names. For more than a century the population of Virginia and North Carolina had been slowly sifting up the river valleys toward the West and by the time the king’s proclamation was issued many cabins were already erected beyond the headwaters of streams which fell “into the Atlantic Ocean from the West or Northwest.” Even the faithful Hillsborough seems to have recognized this since his boundary line passed through Chiswell’s Mine on the Great Kanawha and the mouth of that river—much further west than a strict interpretation of the proclamation would allow.

This vanguard which was moving westward was led by explorers and hunters. Of two of the former, mention will be particularly made. The parties of hunters who now began to press beyond the furthest settlements, while they subsisted on game, were also real explorers of the West and helped to set in motion and give zest to the great immigration which followed the signing of the Stanwix treaty. It was only one year after the Stanwix treaty when Daniel Boone came up from his home on the Yadkin in North Carolina and led a company of men through the Gap into the land whose hero and idol he was ever to be. About the same time John Finley and party were trapping on the forbidden rivers, and Colonel James Knox and company of nine hunted on the New, Clinch, and Holston Rivers, and reaching even to the lower Cumberland in 1769-70. These parties of men found that a paradise for the husbandman was to be speedily revealed to the world at the foothills of the Cumberland and Pine mountains on the great plain falling away westward to the Mississippi. At first, only the most vague description of the rich meadows of the West reached the Virginian settlements, but, meager as they were, they started a tide of immigration quite unparalleled in American history. One of these descriptions is preserved for us in the autobiography of Daniel Boone, and, though couched in language with which he was probably less familiar than his amanuensis, still is not unlike the stories told in border cabins to eager listening frontiersmen who were soon on their rough way to this El Dorado beyond the horrid ranges of the Cumberlands:

“We found everywhere abundance of wild beasts of all sorts, through this vast forest. The buffalo were more frequent than I have seen cattle in the settlements, browsing on the leaves of the cane, or cropping the herbage on those extensive plains, fearless, because ignorant of the violence of man.... Nature was here a series of wonders and a fund of delight. Here she displayed her ingenuity and industry in a variety of flowers and fruits, beautifully colored, elegantly shaped and charmingly flavored; and we were diverted with innumerable animals presenting themselves perpetually to our view.... Just at the close of day the gentle gales retired and left the place to the disposal of a profound calm. Not a breeze shook the most tremulous leaf. I had gained the summit of a commanding ridge, and, looking around with astonishing delight, beheld the ample plains, the beauteous tracts below: On the other hand had I surveyed the famous Ohio river, that rolled in silent dignity, marking the western boundary of Kentucky with inconceivable grandeur. At a vast distance I beheld the mountains lift their venerable brows, and penetrate the clouds.”

Inspired by such descriptions as these, there came in the wake of the hunter-explorers crowds of immigrants. Very many came even bringing their families, for the novelty of the adventure and because there was nothing to keep them where they had had but a tomahawk claim on the border. There were thousands who entered the West and became valuable citizens (considering the work to be done) who would best be described as gypsies. For a larger part of the way across the continent this peculiar class of people moved westward between the advanced explorers and the swarm of genuine “settlers” whose feet, even at this time, were making the middle of our continent tremble. For instance, very many of the first settlers in the territory near the Mississippi hailed from a portion of the land between their home there and the Allegheny mountains, just as many of the first settlers between the Ohio and Lake Erie hailed from Virginia’s land between the Ohio and Tennessee. The phrase “following the immigration” was a common one and covered this class of pioneers who moved away from a given district of land when it began to fill with settlers. There has appeared a disposition in some quarters to attempt to minimize the value of the hosts of so-called “squatters” and “tomahawk claimers” who first moved into the West. Our pioneer literature is full of discreditable allusions, made by the second tide of pioneers who came West, concerning the scattered ranks of first comers, their moral character, their ways of thought and living. The later blueblood stock had not a little to say concerning the pioneers of Western Virginia and Kentucky flavored with the same spice that Dickens employed when, a little later, he jotted down his “American Notes.” It seems as though it were reasonable to remember what these first comers did rather than the picture of what they were. But for them there could never have been a better West. Who composed the armies of McIntosh, Brodhead, Crawford, Harmar, St. Clair, and Wayne but these rough, wild-looking men who first entered the West? What is now western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky gave practically all the troops which conquered the land between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes. And all of them, save the few who could raise money to buy some of it, retired again to their slovenly “claims” south of the Ohio—and a flood-tide of newcomers came after them to bring a new era they could never have brought, and, incidentally, leave to posterity repulsive pictures of them. It hath been said: “Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree; and it shall be to the Lord for a name, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.” The West was a land of brier and thorn, and men as rough as briers and thorns were needed to strike the first swift hard blows. The squatter in the West played an important part and should not be remembered solely by the pictures drawn of his filth, lawlessness, and laziness. The Cleaveland of 1798 was a paradise beside the Cleveland of 1810. Was it not Caleb Atwater who said that “not one young man, whose family was rich, and of very high standing in the Eastern States, has succeeded in Ohio?” A little later in this narrative we shall read of one “Abraham hanks” who went, an unknown pioneer, with Daniel Boone through Cumberland Gap at the very van of all the western immigration! Atwater was not referring to his grandson—the immortal son of Nancy Hanks. Theodore Roosevelt in the following words has emphasized the debt our country owes to this class of early citizens: “Nevertheless this very ferocity was not only inevitable, but it was in a certain sense proper; or at least, even if many of its manifestations were blamable, the spirit that lay behind them was right. The backwoodsmen were no sentimentalists; they were grim, hard, matter-of-fact men, engaged all their lives long in an unending struggle with hostile forces, both human and natural; men who in this struggle had acquired many unamiable qualities, but who had learned likewise to appreciate at their full value the inestimable virtues of courage and common-sense. The crisis [Revolution] demanded that they should be both strong and good; but, above all things, it demanded that they should be strong. Weakness would have ruined them. It was needful that justice should stand before mercy; and they could no longer have held their homes, had they not put down their foes, of every kind with an iron hand.”

With these uncouth border families moved another class of men known as land speculators. The schemes of these fortune hunters and of the many great companies of which they were the representatives would fill a moderate volume and can only be hinted at here. As we have noted, a company was organized very early to speculate in western lands, called the Ohio Company. It received from the king of England a grant of land between the Monongahela and Great Kanawha Rivers, but failed to fulfil the required conditions and the Charter reverted to the Crown. From that day to the breaking out of the Revolutionary War numerous land companies secured by one means or another a claim to certain lands and many sought such claims but never secured them. It will be necessary to refer to one of these companies later in the course of our narrative.

Near the front in this race for the rich meadows between the Ohio and Tennessee were bounty-land claimants. One of Virginia’s most effective pleas for the great territory which had come into her possession was that she might reward her soldiers of the French and Indian wars. While as a people she had known less of Indian warfare than some of the colonies, Virginia had been liberal in sending troops northward to defend the frontier. And these Virginians had made a name for themselves at Braddock’s defeat and elsewhere. Washington was always insistent that the claims of these old veterans of the bloody border war be redeemed in good lands, and it must be remembered ever with pride that as late as 1770, only six years before he became commander-in-chief of the armies of the United States at Cambridge, and but two years after the signing of the Stanwix treaty, he made the difficult journey to the Ohio River and down that river in a canoe to Virginia’s new empire on the Great Kanawha, where surveys of bounty lands for his heroes of Fort Necessity were first made. Additional surveys were soon made along the Ohio and Licking Rivers.

Explorers, hunters, squatters, speculators, and bounty-land claimants—this was the heterogeneous population that was surging westward to the land of which Boone wrote. But not all came down the old thoroughfare between the Allegheny and Blue Ridge Mountains and through Cumberland Gap. Many followed northward the rough trails which descended the New and Monongahela Rivers, while many went northwesterly over Braddock’s overgrown twelve-foot road or along the winding narrow track of Forbes’s Road through the Pennsylvania Glades to the little frontier fortress, Fort Pitt. From the time Bouquet relieved this beleaguered garrison until the Stanwix treaty, Pittsburg, as the town was now known, had been growing. One year after that treaty (1769) the manor of Pittsburg was surveyed, the survey embracing five thousand seven hundred and sixty-six acres. Upon the signing of the Stanwix treaty, Pittsburg became an important point and was claimed by both Pennsylvania and Virginia. About it sprang up villages and from it down the Ohio and up the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers settlements spread. What was loosely known as the “Monongahela Country”—the territory between the Monongahela and Ohio Rivers—became quite populous.

Here, high up along the Ohio River, the Virginians learned how to fight the red man, if they had never known before. The decade succeeding Pontiac’s war, though nominally a peaceful one, was, nevertheless, one long and bitter duel between the Indians north of the Ohio and the Virginians who were coming “in shoals” to its southern bank. It has been estimated that the total loss of life within that decade was as great as the total loss in the open war—Dunmore’s War—which soon broke out and which momentarily threatened the extinction of Virginia’s great colonial movement into the southern half of this black forest of the West.

We have refrained from using the name Kentucky long enough, perhaps, to accomplish the purpose of impressing upon the reader’s mind the part Virginia and the Virginians played in the creation of the earliest settlement in the West, first known as the county, then the state, of Kentucky. As Professor Shaler has said: “She owes to Virginia the most of the people she received during the half century when her society was taking shape: her institutions, be they good or evil, her ideals of life, her place in the nation’s history, are all as immediately derived from her great Mother Virginia as are an individual man’s from the mother who bore him.”

The name Kentucky, Kentuckgin, Kantucky, Kentucke, Caintuck, as it was variously spelled, may have been derived from an Iroquois word Ken-ta-kee, which means “among the meadows.” When, in the olden days, only the long, painted canoes of the Iroquois could be moored in safety in the shades of the woodland meadows south of the Oyo, the name Ken-ta-kee was first heard—a name which has come down to us so pregnant with pride and power. The Catawba River, which gained its name, perhaps, from the famous war-path which followed it toward the land of the Catawbas in the south, was first known as the Louisa River (named by Walker in honor of the wife of the “Bloody Duke” of Cumberland), and afterwards as the Kentucky River.

After the treaty at the close of Dunmore’s War, Virginia had two quit-claim deeds to her western empire: one from the Iroquois, who boasted their possession of it, and one from the Shawanese, who had disputed the settlement. There was yet another claimant to deal with, the Cherokees of the South. In the year following the battle of Point Pleasant (1774) a land company headed by Colonel Richard Henderson purchased from the Cherokees the land between the Ohio, Kentucky, and Cumberland Rivers. This purchase was achieved at Fort Watauga through the agency of Daniel Boone. This private purchase from the Indians was afterward annulled by both Virginia and North Carolina, but so far as the Indian claims to Kentucky were concerned it had passed into the possession of the white man. Every inch of soil had been fairly obtained from each and every claimant who had made it a “dark and bloody ground” through their battles for it, since the earliest period of recorded history. But at the time of the Cherokee purchase, an old Indian chief said to Boone: “Brother, we have given you a fine land, but I believe you will have much trouble in settling it.” Perhaps the Cherokees knew what Shawanese quit-claim deeds were worth!

After making this purchase for Colonel Henderson, Boone engaged to mark out a road through Cumberland Gap to the center of the newly acquired territory. Following the old trail through the Gap, Boone’s Road ended at a new settlement at the mouth of Otter Creek on the Kentucky River named Boonesborough, in his honor. Fort Boonesborough was completed July 14, 1775. Colonel Logan and party came westward through the Gap at the same time but diverged from Boone’s Road on Rockcastle Creek, and opened the more important branch of the road toward Louisville by way of Crab Orchard and Danville, and erected Fort Logan one mile west of Standford, in what is now Lincoln County, Kentucky. Harrod’s, Logan’s, and Boone’s forts were the important early “stations” in the West. To them the thousands wended their tedious way over the “Wilderness Road,” as both branches (Logan’s and Boone’s) were fitly called, or down the Ohio from Pittsburg. And along these lines of western movement cabins and clearings made their rapid appearance despite the era of bloodshed which began almost simultaneously with the opening of the Revolutionary War in the East.

Such were the pilgrims of the West. It is interesting to note that these leaders of civilization in the West were true Americans—American born and American bred. It is remarkable that the discoverers of the American central West were either French or American. For the work of exploring this hinterland, England scarcely furnished a man; she can write no names opposite those of BrulÉ, Cartier, Champlain, Du Lhuth, Hennepin, Joliet, Marquette, and La Salle. Nearly all that England knew of the interior she learned from the French. Her great explorers were maritime explorers and her conquest of New France was effected by water. But while the West could not have for its first colonists the counterpart of the hardy, irresistible race who first came to the Atlantic seaboard, it did have the next best thing—the direct descendants of them. It was a race of Americanized Britons who pressed from Virginia into the West. Hardly a name among them but was pure Norman or Saxon. Of the twenty-five members of the Political Club at Danville, Kentucky, which discussed with ability the Federal Constitution, all but two were descendants of colonists from Great Britain and Ireland. Of forty-five members of the convention which framed Kentucky’s first constitution, only three could claim European ancestry. Of the seven hundred members of the Filson Club, the representative historical society of Kentucky today, there are not more than twenty who are not either English, Scotch, Welsh, or Irish. The blood of the mother country flowed in purer strain in no portion of the continent at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War than in the Virginian settlement of Kentucky. That the blood was true to its fighting traditions is proved by the Revolutionary pension rolls. In 1840 there were nine hundred Revolutionary soldiers receiving pensions in Kentucky. This race gave to the West its real heroes—the Gists, Walkers, Boones, Clarks, Todds, Shelbys, Kentons, Logans, Lewises, Crawfords, Gibsons, and St. Clairs. In frontier cabins they were bred to a free life in a free land—worthy successors to Washington and his school, worthy men to subdue and rule the empire of which they began the conquest before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. In the form of these sturdy colonizers the American republic stretched its arm across the Appalachian mountain system and took in its grasp the richest river valley in the world at the end of Boone’s Wilderness Road. That arm was never withdrawn, that grasp never relinquished. The leaven of old Virginia leavened the whole lump.

Thus may be outlined briefly the era of expansion in which Boone’s Road played an all-important part. In the succeeding chapters the phases of this historic movement are reviewed as the meager data now obtainable can permit.