This letter shows plainly how the best informed man in Kentucky regarded the situation. What it meant to the American Colonies during the Revolution to have a brave band of pioneers in Kentucky at that crucial epoch, is an important chapter in the history of Boone's Road. It is interesting to note that the leaders of civilization in the West were true Americans--American born and American bred. It was a race of Americanized Britons who pressed from Virginia to the West. Hardly a name among them but was pure Norman or Saxon. Of the twenty-five members of the Political Club at Danville, Kentucky, which discussed with ability the Federal Constitution, all but two were descendants of colonists from Great Britain and Ireland. Of forty-five members of the convention which framed Kentucky's first constitution, only three could claim Continental ancestry. This race gave to the West its real heroes. In frontier cabins they were bred to a free life in a free land--worthy successors to Washington and his school, worthy men to subdue and rule the empire of which they began the conquest. In the form of these sturdy colonizers the American republic stretched its arm across the Appalachian Mountain system and took in its grasp the richest river valley in the world at the end of Boone's Wilderness Road. Yet the road itself was only what Boone made it--a blazed footpath westward. It was but the merest footpath from 1774 to 1792, while thousands floundered over its uncertain track to lay the rude foundations of civilization in the land to which it led. There was probably not a more desperate pioneer road in America than this. The mountains to be crossed, the rivers and swamps to be encountered, were as difficult as any on Braddock's Road; and Boone's Road was very much longer. A vivid description of what a journey over it meant in the year 1779 has been left by Chief-Justice Robertson in an address given half a century ago: