Doby had seen some of Filson's drawings of the surrounding trails. Particularly was he entranced by the map of Kentucky. "Every time I look at that dotted line of the great Clark War Road stretching alongside the Kentucky River away into the wilderness, I want to go down it." His thoughts kept coming back to his grievance like a cat to an empty house. "There is no good reason why a boy shouldn't travel that road any more than there is an excuse for a boy not having a dog." He felt dreadfully sorry for himself. "Perhaps if I had a dog--a fine tracking-hound or a fierce watch-dog--the scouts might need the dog and take me along with it. But I haven't one thing that they want and I can't go." Up the road of Doby's desire, while it was yet a trail, had come the Indians to the broad plateau of the knob. Long before Filson's time these savages had seen the value of such a lookout. They made it a stopping-place because it could so well be guarded against surprise. Their signal-fires upon it could be seen by all surrounding tribes. Even a smoke message could warn three valleys. "'Twas such a safe place," thought Doby, whimsically, "that the Miamis had to fight all the time to keep it from other Indians who also wanted to be secure upon it. Constant battles here have given it the name of the 'Miami slaughter-house.'" George Rogers Clark, the Virginian, a Revolutionary hero, who came across Kentucky hot on the track of the Miamis, used the savage trail to such quick and victorious service against the British, making it part of his route to his renowned conquest of the Northwest, that it had taken his name. He built a sturdy little blockhouse for a fort and supply station on the knob in 1780 as a half-way station between his Kentucky outposts and the forts on the Wabash and the Great Lakes. And there it still stood, like one of Clark's chunky soldiers who was said to sink deeper into the ground every time the enemy charged him and who had no intention of giving up, no matter how many times he was licked. Cincinnati was founded by Revolutionary soldiers who were paid for their services by grants of land in this neighborhood. Two companies of regular troops in Fort Washington guarded them as they returned to the plow and used their trusty swords to make their little pigs into famous Queen City sausages. Doby munched on a sweet, lumpy souvenir of his visit to the sugar-factory as he gazed at the glass factory, the furniture-factory, the cotton and hemp spinning and weaving mills, the flour-mills, the tanneries, all the big city buildings where the newly invented steam-engine was beginning to make for the pioneers all the things that they had been obliged to do for themselves by hand. "Ma will be glad to hear of the machine that can make cloth as fast as I wear it out," and the boy examined the inside of his much-used knife-pocket at a patch which needed a patch itself, although it was already a patch upon another patch.