Now that so many settlers had moved to Kentucky, the old hero found that country too crowded to suit him, so he and his family moved to a wilder region on the Missouri River, “to find elbow room,” he said. After hundreds of thrilling adventures and narrow escapes, the Indian hunter died in bed, with his wife and three of his children around him. A friend who was near him in his latter days said of Daniel Boone: “Never was old age more green nor gray hairs more graceful.”
GEORGE ROGERS CLARK, THE YOUNG HERO WITH A GREAT IDEA
SOON after the beginning of the War for Independence, George Rogers Clark, a tall, broad-shouldered, red-haired, blue-eyed young man of twenty-four, left his home in Virginia and went over the mountains to join the settlers in Kentucky. He had already had some adventures in the wilderness along the Ohio River, hunting wild game and fighting wilder Indians. Not long after Clark’s arrival, the pioneers joined together and sent him and another man back to Virginia to see if they could have Kentucky adopted as a county of that state. Virginia had just been declared one of the thirteen United States. Clark and his companion were also to try to get the legislature to grant them money enough to buy gunpowder, which was now the greatest need of the Kentucky settlers in fighting the Indians.
When the two young delegates, in coonskin caps and leather leggings, arrived at the Virginia capital they found to their dismay that the legislators of the new state had just adjourned and gone home. Patrick Henry, the fiery orator who had shouted in that very capitol building, “Give me liberty or give me death!” was now governor of Virginia. The young men from Kentucky went and told him they must not go back without that powder; so Governor Henry got them five hundred pounds, and arranged to make it all right when the State legislature should meet again. Clark succeeded also in having Kentucky made a county of Virginia.
While the battles of the Revolution were being fought along the Atlantic coast, there was a terrible state of affairs in the great valley of the Ohio. Henry Hamilton, the British governor at Detroit, then in charge of the forts and trading posts on the Wabash and Mississippi rivers, was doing one thing that made the settlers’ blood boil wherever they heard of it. He had hired all the Indians he could to fight on the British side by furnishing them with scalping-knives and paying them a bounty, or money prize, on every scalp they brought in to prove that they had killed an American man, woman, or child. The savages went everywhere on the warpath, murdering as many people as they could to earn as much bounty money as possible.