Boone and Harrod and their compatriots assured the world of the splendid lands of Kentucky; Richard Henderson and his associates of the Transylvania Company proved the questionable fact that a settlement there could be made and be maintained. Boone's Road, opened for the Transylvania Company, made a way thither. The result was a marvelous westward movement that for timeliness, heroism and ultimate success is without a parallel in our annals. When the armies of the Revolutionary War are counted, that first army of twenty-five thousand men, women, and children which hurried over Boone's little path, through dark Powell's Valley, over the "high-swung gateway" of Cumberland Gap, and down through the laurel wildernesses to Crab Orchard, Danville, Lexington, and Louisville must not be forgotten. No army ever meant so much to the West; some did not mean more to the East. The author is greatly indebted for facts and figures to Thomas Speed's invaluable study _The Wilderness Road_, and to other Filson Club Publications, and for inspiration and suggestion to Mr. Allen's _The Blue Grass Region of Kentucky_. A. B. H. Marietta, Ohio, May 20, 1903. Boone's Wilderness Road _It is impossible to come upon this road without pausing, or to write of it without a tribute._ --JAMES LANE ALLEN. CHAPTER I THE PILGRIMS OF THE WEST 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.