We have refrained from using the name Kentucky long enough, perhaps, to accomplish the purpose of impressing upon the reader’s mind the part Virginia and the Virginians played in the creation of the earliest settlement in the West, first known as the county, then the state, of Kentucky. As Professor Shaler has said: “She owes to Virginia the most of the people she received during the half century when her society was taking shape: her institutions, be they good or evil, her ideals of life, her place in the nation’s history, are all as immediately derived from her great Mother Virginia as are an individual man’s from the mother who bore him.”
The name Kentucky, Kentuckgin, Kantucky, Kentucke, Caintuck, as it was variously spelled, may have been derived from an Iroquois word Ken-ta-kee, which means “among the meadows.” When, in the olden days, only the long, painted canoes of the Iroquois could be moored in safety in the shades of the woodland meadows south of the Oyo, the name Ken-ta-kee was first heard—a name which has come down to us so pregnant with pride and power. The Catawba River, which gained its name, perhaps, from the famous war-path which followed it toward the land of the Catawbas in the south, was first known as the Louisa River (named by Walker in honor of the wife of the “Bloody Duke” of Cumberland), and afterwards as the Kentucky River.
After the treaty at the close of Dunmore’s War, Virginia had two quit-claim deeds to her western empire: one from the Iroquois, who boasted their possession of it, and one from the Shawanese, who had disputed the settlement. There was yet another claimant to deal with, the Cherokees of the South. In the year following the battle of Point Pleasant (1774) a land company headed by Colonel Richard Henderson purchased from the Cherokees the land between the Ohio, Kentucky, and Cumberland Rivers. This purchase was achieved at Fort Watauga through the agency of Daniel Boone. This private purchase from the Indians was afterward annulled by both Virginia and North Carolina, but so far as the Indian claims to Kentucky were concerned it had passed into the possession of the white man. Every inch of soil had been fairly obtained from each and every claimant who had made it a “dark and bloody ground” through their battles for it, since the earliest period of recorded history. But at the time of the Cherokee purchase, an old Indian chief said to Boone: “Brother, we have given you a fine land, but I believe you will have much trouble in settling it.” Perhaps the Cherokees knew what Shawanese quit-claim deeds were worth!
After making this purchase for Colonel Henderson, Boone engaged to mark out a road through Cumberland Gap to the center of the newly acquired territory. Following the old trail through the Gap, Boone’s Road ended at a new settlement at the mouth of Otter Creek on the Kentucky River named Boonesborough, in his honor. Fort Boonesborough was completed July 14, 1775. Colonel Logan and party came westward through the Gap at the same time but diverged from Boone’s Road on Rockcastle Creek, and opened the more important branch of the road toward Louisville by way of Crab Orchard and Danville, and erected Fort Logan one mile west of Standford, in what is now Lincoln County, Kentucky. Harrod’s, Logan’s, and Boone’s forts were the important early “stations” in the West. To them the thousands wended their tedious way over the “Wilderness Road,” as both branches (Logan’s and Boone’s) were fitly called, or down the Ohio from Pittsburg. And along these lines of western movement cabins and clearings made their rapid appearance despite the era of bloodshed which began almost simultaneously with the opening of the Revolutionary War in the East.
Such were the pilgrims of the West. It is interesting to note that these leaders of civilization in the West were true Americans—American born and American bred. It is remarkable that the discoverers of the American central West were either French or American. For the work of exploring this hinterland, England scarcely furnished a man; she can write no names opposite those of Brulé, Cartier, Champlain, Du Lhuth, Hennepin, Joliet, Marquette, and La Salle. Nearly all that England knew of the interior she learned from the French. Her great explorers were maritime explorers and her conquest of New France was effected by water. But while the West could not have for its first colonists the counterpart of the hardy, irresistible race who first came to the Atlantic seaboard, it did have the next best thing—the direct descendants of them. It was a race of Americanized Britons who pressed from Virginia into 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 European ancestry. Of the seven hundred members of the Filson Club, the representative historical society of Kentucky today, there are not more than twenty who are not either English, Scotch, Welsh, or Irish. The blood of the mother country flowed in purer strain in no portion of the continent at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War than in the Virginian settlement of Kentucky. That the blood was true to its fighting traditions is proved by the Revolutionary pension rolls. In 1840 there were nine hundred Revolutionary soldiers receiving pensions in Kentucky. This race gave to the West its real heroes—the Gists, Walkers, Boones, Clarks, Todds, Shelbys, Kentons, Logans, Lewises, Crawfords, Gibsons, and St. Clairs. 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 before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. 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. That arm was never withdrawn, that grasp never relinquished. The leaven of old Virginia leavened the whole lump.
Thus may be outlined briefly the era of expansion in which Boone’s Road played an all-important part. In the succeeding chapters the phases of this historic movement are reviewed as the meager data now obtainable can permit.