Before the close of April, Colonel Henderson arrived with a reinforcement
of thirty men and a quantity of tools and ammunition. In the succeeding
months arrivals were numerous from various quarters and by different
routes. During the course of the year upwards of five hundred men from
the frontiers of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina went into
Kentucky, but the majority of them were not settlers. Some were merely
hunters but the greater number land speculators or “cabiners,” as they
were termed, who ran up a shanty on a piece of land as evidence of
occupation and returned to the colonies in the hope of selling the
tract.
At the close of the summer Boone brought in his family from the Clinch
Valley and his wife and daughters were, as he proudly declared, “the
first white women to stand on the banks of the Kentucky.” Shortly
afterwards, several other families came in, and there were before
the end of September four or five settlements, the principal being
Boonesborough and Harrodsburg, about fifty miles to the west of the
former place. Two or three hundred acres of corn had been planted,
fruit trees had been set, and horses, cattle and hogs had been
introduced.
The settlers were for the most part of Scotch-Irish extraction, sturdy,
patriotic men, attaching themselves to the soil with a tenacity that
nothing could shake. In the struggle to maintain their homes in the new
territory they greatly aided their countrymen in the Revolution, which
was just about to break out. Indeed, they guarded the western flank
of the colonies and even carried the war into the Crown dominions on
the north. Among those who came into Kentucky in this first year of
its settlement were a number whose names figure prominently in border
story and in the history of our western march--George Rogers Clark,
Simon Kenton, the Lewises, Benjamin Logan, James Harrod, John Todd, the
brothers McAfee, Bowman, Hite, Randolph, McClellan.
During the latter months of 1775 the Indians gave little trouble and
many settlers began to congratulate themselves upon the prospect of
occupying the land without serious opposition, but in the closing
days of the year several attacks were made on the whites at different
points. These were the signal for the hurried departure of the timid,
and of speculators, surveyors, and others who had no permanent
interests in the country, making it apparent that in time of stress the
tenure of the land would depend upon a few bold spirits.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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