The youth of our state may feel that because Kentucky was not one of the original Thirteen Colonies to make the heroic struggle for freedom, that she played no part in establishing and extending our national government.

During this period, remote as was this part of Virginia from the centers of civilization, every road blazed, every settlement made, every victory over the red savage, had a far-reaching effect, not alone for the state in embryo, but for the national government.

Had not the pioneers of Kentucky, with the heroism of the Romans of old, subdued the savages, stopped their depredations, and secured to the mother state of Virginia that vast tract out of which have been carved Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, the power of England, to-day, might cut our continent in two.

Kentuckians waited not for opportunity but made it.

At the battle of Point Pleasant, in October, 1774, where the noted "Cornstalk" met defeat, there were with General Andrew Lewis men whose name and fame furnish much of Kentucky history. There were Harrod, the Shelbys, the Boones, and other intrepid leaders who afterwards brought out from chaos our infant commonwealth.

The effect of this battle was more than local. It gave peace to the frontiersmen at the time the colonies were beginning the crucial contest with England and for a while prevented that barbaric warfare waged by the British and Indians united. So severe was the slaughter, it is said, that blood was found on each tree behind which the Indians and pioneers were posted.

In 1780 one of our pioneers who afterwards became our first governor, Colonel Isaac Shelby, was again in Kentucky locating lands that some time before he had marked out and improved, when he heard of the surrender of Charleston. A man with a soul so fired with patriotism could not be contented not to answer his country's call. He hurried home, secured volunteers, and did signal service in both North and South Carolina, and in Georgia. In a measure he overcame the defeat of Gates at Camden; by his momentous move, though not in supreme command, Colonel Shelby will ever be known as the hero of Kings Mountain, where the enemy surrendered after Ferguson with seventy-five officers and men had been killed.

This was at the darkest hour of the Revolution and has been called "the first link in the great chain of events in the South that established the independence of the United States." These conquests by Shelby in the South, coupled with those of Clark at Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Vincennes, were as important in both immediate and future results as any that illumine the pages of the Revolution.