As if struck by a bolt from heaven, Charles Mynn Thruston fell unconscious to the floor.
Dr. O'Fallon was a young Irish gentleman of talent and learning. An intimate friend of the Governor of South Carolina, just before the Revolution he had come to visit America, but espousing the cause of the colonists, the Governor promptly clapped him into prison.
"Imprisoned O'Fallon!" The people of Charleston arose, liberated him, and drove the Governor to the British fleet in the harbour.
Dr. O'Fallon enlisted as a private soldier. But surgeons were needed,—he soon proved himself one of skill unexcelled in America. General Washington himself ordered him north, and made him Surgeon-General in his own army. Here he remained until the close of the war, and was thanked by Congress for his services.
And now he had visited Kentucky to assist in securing the navigation of the Mississippi, and met—Fanny. With the charming Fanny as his wife, Dr. O'Fallon rode many a mile in the woods, the first great doctor of Louisville.
Other emigrants were bringing other romances, and other tragedies. "Ohio! Ohio! We hear nothing but Ohio!" said the people of New England.
One rainy April morning the "Mayflower," a flatboat with a second Plymouth colony, turned into the Muskingum and founded a settlement.
"Marie, Marie Antoinette,—did she not use her influence in behalf of Franklin's mission to secure the acknowledgment of American independence? Let us name our settlement Marietta."
So were founded the cities of the French king and queen, Louisville and Marietta. A few months later, Kentuckians went over and started Cincinnati on the site of George Rogers Clark's old block-house.
Into the Ohio, people came suddenly and in swarms, "institutional Englishmen," bearing their household gods and shaping a state.