In these days a Kentucky force, led by the hero George Rogers Clark, captured the French forts on the Illinois, won over their garrisons, and marched on the fortress of Vincennes through flooded lands, up to their necks in water, starving, half drowned. They captured the wicked Hamilton and led him away in chains. Toward the end of the war once more a British force of Frenchmen and Indians raided Kentucky, besieging Logan’s fort, and but for the valor of the women, that sorely stricken garrison would have perished. For when the tanks were empty the women took their buckets and marched out of the gates, laughing and singing, right among the ambushed Indians, got their supply of water from the spring, and returned unhurt because they showed no fear. With the reliefs to the rescue rode Daniel Boone and his son Israel, then aged twenty-three. At sight of reinforcements the enemy bolted, hotly pursued to the banks of Licking River. Boone implored his people not to cross into the certainty of an ambush, but the Kentuckians took no notice, charging through the river and up a ridge between two bushed ravines. From both flanks the Wyandots charged with tomahawks, while the Shawnees raked the horsemen with a galling fire, and there was pitiless hewing down of the broken flying settlers. Last in that flight came Boone, bearing in his arms his mortally wounded son, overtaken, cut off, almost surrounded before he struck off from the path, leaping from rock to rock. As he swam the river Israel died, but the father carried his body on into the shelter of the forest. With the ending of the war of the Revolution, the United States spread gradually westward, and to the close of his long life old Daniel Boone was ever at the front of their advance, taking his rest at last beyond the Mississippi. To-day his patient and heroic spirit inspires all boys, leads every frontiersman, commands the pioneers upon the warrior trails, the ax-hewn paths, the wilderness roads of marching empire. XLI A. D. 1813 ANDREW JACKSON The Nations were playing a ball game: “Catch!” said France, throwing the ball to Spain, who muffed it. “Quick!” cried Napoleon, “or England will get it--catch!” “Caught!” said the first American republic, and her prize was the valley of the Mississippi. Soon afterward the United States in the name of freedom joined Napoleon the Despot at war with Great Britain; and the old lion had a wild beast fight against a world-at-arms. In our search for great adventure let us turn to the warmest corner of that world-wide struggle, poor Spanish Florida.