"And Floyd surveyor-in-chief," returned Clark.
"An' thee, boy, shall be my chief guard," said Daniel Boone, laying his kindly hand on the lad's broad shoulder. "An' I—am the people." The Boones were Quakers, the father of Daniel was intimate with Penn; his uncle James came to America as Penn's private secretary; sometimes the old hunter dropped into their speech.
But people were coming. One Richard Henderson, at a treaty in the hill towns of the Cherokees, had just paid ten thousand pounds for the privilege of settling Kentucky. Boone left before the treaty was signed and a kindly old Cherokee chieftain took him by the hand in farewell.
"Brother," he said, "we have given you a fine land, but I believe you will have much trouble in settling it."
They were at hand. Through the Cumberland Gap, as through a rift in a Holland dyke, a rivulet of settlers came trickling down the newly cut Wilderness Road.
Under the green old trees a mighty drama was unfolding, a Homeric song, the epic of a nation, as they piled up the bullet-proof cabins of Boonsboro. This rude fortification could not have withstood the smallest battery, but so long as the Indians had no cannon this wooden fort was as impregnable as the walls of a castle.
In a few weeks other forts, Harrodsburg and Logansport, dotted the canebrakes, and the startled buffalo stampeded for the salt licks.
In September Boone brought out his wife and daughters, the first white women that ever trod Kentucky soil.
"Ugh! ugh! ugh!"
A hundred Shawnees from their summer hunt in the southern hills came trailing home along the Warrior's Path, the Indian highway north and south, from Cumberland Gap to the Scioto.