Soon after the beginning of the War for Independence, George Rogers Clark, a tall, broad-shouldered, red-haired, blue-eyed young man of twenty-four, left his home in Virginia and went over the mountains to join the settlers in Kentucky. He had already had some adventures in the wilderness along the Ohio River, hunting wild game and fighting wilder Indians. Not long after Clark’s arrival, the pioneers joined together and sent him and another man back to Virginia to see if they could have Kentucky adopted as a county of that state. Virginia had just been declared one of the thirteen United States. Clark and his companion were also to try to get the legislature to grant them money enough to buy gunpowder, which was now the greatest need of the Kentucky settlers in fighting the Indians. When the two young delegates, in coonskin caps and leather leggings, arrived at the Virginia capital they found to their dismay that the legislators of the new state had just adjourned and gone home. Patrick Henry, the fiery orator who had shouted in that very capitol building, “Give me liberty or give me death!” was now governor of Virginia. The young men from Kentucky went and told him they must not go back without that powder; so Governor Henry got them five hundred pounds, and arranged to make it all right when the State legislature should meet again. Clark succeeded also in having Kentucky made a county of Virginia. [Illustration: COLONEL GEORGE ROGERS CLARK.] While the battles of the Revolution were being fought along the Atlantic coast, there was a terrible state of affairs in the great valley of the Ohio. Henry Hamilton, the British governor at Detroit, then in charge of the forts and trading posts on the Wabash and Mississippi rivers, was doing one thing that made the settlers’ blood boil wherever they heard of it. He had hired all the Indians he could to fight on the British side by furnishing them with scalping-knives and paying them a bounty, or money prize, on every scalp they brought in to prove that they had killed an American man, woman, or child. The savages went everywhere on the warpath, murdering as many people as they could to earn as much bounty money as possible. In the midst of this horrible warfare a bright idea came to George Rogers Clark, but he kept it to himself. He sent two men across the Ohio and up the Mississippi and Wabash rivers to see what was going on at the British trading-posts there. The word they brought back made the young man start at once for Virginia--this time alone. He called again on Governor Patrick Henry and on his old neighbor, Thomas Jefferson. Both of those great patriots approved his plan and charged him on no account to let it leak out before he was ready to act, for fear some wily Indian or dishonest Frenchman might give warning and spoil it all.