In spite of the purchase of land from the Indian, in spite of all the treaties of peace, the cunning warrior persisted in attack upon the white men, in massacre of women and children, in capture of hunter and trapper. Daniel Boone and his men had to safeguard their families and the future of their company. They set about building a fort. As for Boone, he felt himself "an instrument ordained to settle the wilderness." No hardship was too great, no sorrow too deep to deter him in his mission of "pioneering and subduing the wilderness for the habitation of civilized men." After two years of hardship and toil a fort was built on the banks of the Kentucky River. It consisted of cabins of roughhewn logs surrounded by a stockade. Over this crude fort, in one cabin of which Boone and Rebecca lived with their family, a flag was raised on May 23, 1775. It marked a new and independent nation called Transylvania. Only a week after the flag-raising in Kentucky the people of Mecklenburg, which had been established only eleven years, made another step toward independence. On May 31, 1775, the Mecklenburg Resolutions were adopted in North Carolina. In the meantime the Revolution had begun and mountain men were first to join Washington against the British in the forces of Morgan's Riflemen and Nelson's Riflemen. Their skill with firearms, their fearlessness, made them invaluable to Washington. "It was their quality of cool courage and personal independence," said Raine, "that won the battles of Kings Mountain and Cowpens and drove Lord Cornwallis to his surrender at Yorktown." Each movement toward independence in Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and North Carolina had been under the leadership of mountain men and the accomplishment of their several declarations paved the way for the more widespread Continental Declaration of Independence at Philadelphia, July 4, 1776. It echoed around the world, but Daniel Boone, that young rebel, didn't even hear of it until the following August. Whereupon the fearless hunter with the abandon of a happy lad danced a jig around the bonfire inside the stockade. It could have been an Elizabethan jig, ironically enough, for the Boones were English. Daniel tossed his coonskin cap into the air again and again and let out a war whoop that brought the terrified Rebecca hurrying to the cabin door, a whoop that pierced the silence of the forest beyond. By the time the Declaration was signed the mountain people constituted one sixth of the settlement of the United States.