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.