The Wilderness Trail

by H. Bedford-Jones

The Wilderness Trail

By H. BEDFORD-JONES

Author of
"Splendour of the Gods," "The Kasbah Gate," etc.

London: HURST & BLACKETT, LTD.
PATERNOSTER HOUSE, E.C.

THE WILDERNESS TRAIL

CHAPTER I

The year 1810 was more commonly known, at least in the Kentucky wilderness, as the thirty-fourth year of the Independence of the United States. Backwoods folk are simple folk, proud of what they and their fathers have done.

Although split with vexatious questions of Federal or Democrat, rent asunder by argument over the Great Conspiracy of Aaron Burr, and menaced always by the gathered allied hordes of Tecumthe across the Indiana border, the settlers in and around Louisville forgot all these things in the one supreme fact that this was the thirty-fourth year of the United States.

Law had come into the country, to the bitterness of many. Land-titles and sorry scoundrels had in combination ousted many a less famous man than Colonel Daniel Boone from his holdings. Whisky and lawless border-life, to say nothing of the more lawless river-ways, had ruined more than one good man both in morals and reputation. Some said the western country had gone to the dogs; others said that the dogs had all come to the western country. Both sayings were true, in a sense.