USA > Kentucky > A history of Kentucky and Kentuckians; the leaders and representative men in commerce, industry and modern activities, Volume I > Part 14
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Virginia was lacking in appreciation of George Rogers Clark, who had won for her and the Union an empire, and he lived and died in comparative obscurity. His grave is near Louisville, and there are few, if any, who give to the foremost of military geniuses who
brought peace and happiness to the early set- tlers of that vicinity, even a careless thought. It is told that when Virginia, in the days of his poverty, sent him a sword in recognition of his great services, he broke it across his knee, exclaiming that "he had asked for bread and they had gave him a stone." George Rogers Clark had won a principality for his country and died poor and neglected. Such is the gratitude of Republics.
Daniel Boone, practically unlettered but not ignorant, risked his life a thousand times for the people of the new land. He made entries of the land he had helped to win from the savages, and because these were not technic- ally correct, he and those for whom he had acted as agent, were afterwards deprived of the fruits of his heroic efforts in behalf of the early settlers of our state. The intricate land laws, which were inherited from Virginia, were not understood by the old pioneer and he saw the fruits of his years of danger and pri- vation swept from him and his friends by the decisions of the courts and placed in the hands of those who had flocked to the new country when it was no longer dangerous to adventure thither. The grim old Indian fighter could calmly face danger, but would not brook in- justice. He broke up his home in Kentucky and removed to Virginia. There he became, subsequently, a member of the legislature and in what is now West Virginia, Boone county attests the esteem in which he was held by his new associates. From Virginia he pushed out to the then frontier of Missouri, "far from the haunts of men," where he could breathe freely and not feel the touch of mankind that might be unfriendly. He settled in what is now Cal- loway county, in that state, about seventy-five miles above the mouth of the Missouri river, where he led a quiet life, engaged mostly in hunting, until Sept. 20, 1820, when he died. His remains and those of his wife were subse- quently removed to Kentucky and re-interred in the State Cemetery at Frankfort, Septem-
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ber 13, 1845, where a modest and appropri- ate monument in their honor was erected. This monument, in the succeeding years was de- faced by relic hunters to such an extent that the good women of Kentucky in the recent past, have had it restored and it is now pro- tected from vandal hands by an iron railing.
Chester Harding, the portrait painter, who visited Boone shortly before the latter's death, for the purpose of painting his portrait, has left, in his autobiography, the following word picture of the old pioneer. "In June of this year, 1820, I made a trip of one hundred miles for the purpose of painting the portrait of Colonel Daniel Boone. I had much trouble in finding him. He was living some miles from the main road in one of the cabins of an old block-house, which was built for the pro- tection of the settlers against the massacres of the Indians. I found that the nearer I got to him the less was known of him. When within two miles of his house, I asked a man to tell me where Colonel Boone lived. He said he did not know such a man. 'Why, yes you do,' said his wife, 'it is that white-headed old man who lives on the bottom near the river ;' a good illustration of the proverb that a prophet is not without honor save in his own country. I found the object of my search en- gaged in cooking his dinner. He was lying on his back near the fire and had a long strip of venison wound around his ramrod and was busy turning it before a bush fire and using salt and pepper to season his meal. I at once told him the object of my visit. I found that he hardly knew what I meant. I explained the matter to him and he agreed to sit. He was nearly ninety years old and rather in- firm; his memory of passing events was much impaired, yet he would amuse me every day by anecdotes of his early life. I asked him one day, just after his description of one of his long hunts, if he ever got lost, having no compass. 'No,' said he, 'can't say as ever I was lost, but I was bewildered once for three Vol. I-6.
days.' (Those of good memory will recall that this statement of Boone's is related else- where in the preceding chapters.) He was as- tonished at seeing his likeness. He had a very large progeny. A grand-daughter had eighteen children, all at home near the old man's cabin ; they were even more astonished at the picture than the old man himself."
There is a common belief among those who have thought enough about it to have any opinion at all, that Boone was wholly illiter- ate; knew nothing even of reading, and, in proof of this, cite the fact that he employed a system of orthography wholly unknown to polite literature. They adopt as true the apochryphal statements of newspapers that beech trees are occasionally found bearing still upon their smooth bark the inscription, "D. Boone, cilled a bar." Killing bears was so much a matter of course with pioneers in a new country that it is difficut to imagine Boone stopping to blazon forth upon a beech tree evi- dences of his prowess, where there were none others than himself to see the record. It is quite within the range of possibilities that he was far more interested in seeing that no In- dian "cilled D. Boone" than that the world should know that he had killed a bear.
Boone was not illiterate; his letters hitherto quoted herein prove that fact; his spelling may have been and probably was not in ac- cord with the accepted standards of today, but that it was a further departure therefrom than that of our latter day spelling reformers can- not be admitted. Boone was a surveyor of lands and illiterates cannot make surveys nor correctly report their results.
In a sketch entitled, "The Settlement of Kentucky," written by Col. J. Stoddard John- ston and published in 1908, that accomplished gentleman says: "It was not until 1769 that the step was taken which proved to be the forerunner of the permanent settlement of Kentucky, when Daniel Boone, with five com- panions, came through Cumberland Gap to
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the valley of Red River, a tributary of the Kentucky, and built a cabin on a creek which they called Lulbegrud, which forms the east- ern boundary of Clark county, and passed some time in hunting and exploring the adja- cent territory. That they were not illiterate or obscure men, is shown, not only from the fact that the descendants of several of them were afterwards conspicuous for their capac- ity and public services, but from the circum- stance of the naming of the creek upon which they located their camp, which appears as such on the map of Filson of 1784, as also, upon those of the present day. There is no page of American history more full of romance than this incident. The name was evidently adopted from Dean Swift's 'Gulliver's Travels,' first published in 1726, in which it is spelled Lor- bulgrud, and designated by the author in the text as the capital of Brobdingnag, which, he says, was in California, and that it was sit- uated in the interior 3,000 miles from the Pa- cific coast. It was long a puzzle to me how these crude hunters came to select it and it was not solved until the following deposition of Daniel Boone was found in comparatively recent years, of record in the county clerk's office of Clark county, of which Winchester is the county seat :
'Deposition of Daniel Boone; from original in Deposition Book No. I, page 156, Clark county, Kentucky :
The deposition of Daniel Boone, being of lawful age, taken before us, the subscribing Commission- ers, the 15th of September, 1796, being first duly sworn, deposeth and sayeth that in the year 1770, "I encamped on Red river, with five other men, and we had with us for our amusement the 'History of Lemuel Gulliver's Travels,' wherein he gave an ac- count of his young Master Grumdelick carrying him on a market day to a town called Lulbegrud. A young man of the company called Alexander Neely came to camp one night and told us he had been to Lulheg- rud and had killed two Brobdignags at the capital. And further deponent sayeth not.
(Signed) "D. BOONE."
"A singular coincidence in the case is that
the creek to which this name was given is just about 3,000 miles from the Pacific coast, which Swift indicates as the distance thence of the capital of Brobdingnag.
"An additional item of interest in this con- nection is that the identical copy of Swift's works which afforded amusement to these pioneers entombed in the forest and cane- brakes of Kentucky, and liable to be at any time subject to the attack of Indians, which later proved fatal to most of them, is to be found in the library of Col. R. T. Durrett of Louisville, in an excellent state of preserva- tion. It consists of two duodecimo volumes bound in calf and illustrated with numerous excellent copperplate engravings, and bears the following title: 'The Works of Dr. Jona- than Swift, Dean of St. Patrick's, accurately revised in twelve volumes; adorned with cop- perplates with some account of the Author's life and notes historical. By John Hawkes- worth, LL. D., London. Printed for C. Bathurst, T. Osborne, W. Bowyer, J. Hinton, W. Strahan, B. Collins, J. Rivington, R. Bald- win, L. Davis. C. Reymers and L. Dodsley, 1756.'"
From the number of names given above for whom "Swift's Travels" were printed one may imagine that the publishing business was in 1756, as in 1910, a possibly hazardous one and that these gentlemen named above desired, so far as they might, to divide the responsi- bility among a number, thus lessening the financial pressure upon each in the event of a failure. But that is apart from Boone's de- position and Lulbegrud creek. The latter still sends its placid waters on their course under the same curious but almost classic name in Clark county, and the little volumes repose in Colonel Durrett's library, mute testimonials to the correctness of Daniel Boone's deposi- tion.
A comrade of Boone, Clark and the other pioneers who blazed the way for civilization in Kentucky, was Simon Kenton, and it may
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be of interest to note here that three counties of the State are honored by the names of these three brave men. Kenton was truly a Scotch- Irishman, his father being an Irishman and his mother a Scottish lady. He was born in Fauquier county, Virginia, April 13, 1755. Owing to the poverty of his parents, he se- cured but little education, but this fact did not prevent his playing a manly part in the struggles of the early settlers of Kentucky to redeem that fertile country from the savages and make it a fitting home for the thousands who were to come after him. Though he could spell no better, perhaps, than Daniel Boone, he was a precocious youth and like so many before and since his day, he was at six- teen deeply in love with a young woman of his vicinity. Unfortunately for Kenton, fortun- ately, perhaps, for Kentucky, the course of true love did not run smoothly for him, and he suffered the mortification of seeing a rival win the object of his affections. Men were rather primitive in those early days and Ken- ton, driven to despair by his failure to win the object of his affections, forced a quarrel and a fight upon his rival whom he left dying, as he supposed, at the end of the conflict. He fled horrified, to the wilderness of Kentucky, which he reached after much difficulty. Once again among his fellowmen, and fearing the awful hand of avenging justice, he changed his name to Simon Butler. Before reaching Kentucky to which he did not immediately come, he met and became acquainted with Simon Girty, who was afterwards to become the wickedest and most blood-thirsty rene- gade who ever led the Indians against the whites.
At Fort Pitt, Kenton fell in with John Strader and George Yeager, with whom he journeyed southward as far as the mouth of the Kentucky river, returning later to the Kanawha where they fished and hunted until the spring of 1773, when Yeager was killed by the Indians while lying in camp with his
companions. Kenton and Strader, almost in a state of nudity, fled to the forest, where they wandered in a starving condition for six days, at the end of which time they reached the Ohio river, where they met a party of hunters from whom they received food and other assistance. In 1773, Kenton joined a party, en route to the surveying camp of the Bullitt party. Finding this finally deserted, they concluded that the Indians had murdered the surveyors, and returned to Virginia with Kenton as guide. Kenton subsequently re- turned to Kentucky and became a scout and guide of inestimable value to those conduct- ing expeditions against the Indians, or going out to meet marauding parties of the latter. During the Miami Indian war, which covered the period of his second return from Ken- tucky, he had acted as a spy for Lord Dun- more and General Lewis, performing active and useful service. Receiving an honorable discharge, he came back to his old camp on the Big Sandy river in Kentucky, where he fell in with one Thomas Williams, and. to- gether, the two journeyed to a point near what is now Washington in Mason county, where they built a camp, cleared up ground and planted corn which they had received in exchange for furs sold to a French trader. The claim is made and probably correctly, that as a result of this planting Kenton and Williams ate the first roasting ears ever grown and eaten in Kentucky by white men.
While performing an act of service to un- fortunate men who had lost their possessions by the overturning of their canoe, the camp of Kenton and Williams was plundered by In- dians who captured with it a hunter named Hendricks, whom they burned at the stake after the pleasant savage custom of the day. Later, in company with Michael Stoner, Ken- ton quitted this camp and proceeded to Hink- son's station in what is now Bourbon county.
Subsequently Kenton, known to his asso- ciates as Butler, learned that the rival whom
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he thought he had killed in Virginia, was not killed after all, but was very much alive and living happily with the young wife who had been the cause of the difficulty which had driven Kenton into exile. Kenton continued his useful services to the people until there was no longer any danger from the Indians. Like Daniel Boone, he made entries of land, but these two pioneers and genuine fighting men, knew more about Indian warfare than of the intricacies of the land laws of their day, and subsequently saw much of the land they had entered and which they supposed was their own, pass into the hands of others, leav- ing them nearly as poor, in all save experi- ence, as when they first came into the prime- val wilds.
Judge Lucius P. Little in his "Life of Ben Hardin," says that in 1825 Kenton came to Frankfort while the legislature was in session. "Seventy years old, poor, in tattered gar- ments, mounted on a poor horse, the old pio- neer entered the state capital, a stranger. He came seeking from the state that he had as- sisted so largely in reclaiming from the In- dians, a release of some of his mountain lands from taxes. While wandering about the streets, a desolate, lonely old man, General Fletcher, the representative from Montgomery county, met and knew him. He lost no time in having him decently clothed and kindly entertained. Kenton quickly became the ob- ject of great and hearty attention. He was taken to the capital while the legislature was in session, placed in the speaker's chair and introduced as the second greatest adventurer of the west to a crowded assembly of legis- lators, judges, officers of government and cit- izens. The simple-hearted old man called it 'the proudest day of his life.' His lands, it is needless to say, were released."
It is not within the proposed scope of this work to give a complete resume of the attacks by the Indians upon the Kentucky outposts
and the defense against them. It is the rather proposed to move on rapidly to the events con- nected with the later history of the state. So many were the incursions of small parties of Indians into the new settlements that an inti- mate relation of the incidents of each would carry this story far beyond the bounds set for it.
It has been stated elsewhere that a state- ment had been sent to the Governor of Vir- ginia, that Colonel Clark was neglecting the in- terior stations and concentrating his forces for the defense of Louisville alone. This was an error, perhaps excusable, as the pioneers were unequal to understanding the combinations in the mind of Clark. They defended stations singly and bravely; he proposed not only to defend them with equal bravery, but to carry the war into the enemy's country and strike them blows of such severity that they would not again have the temerity to come within reach of the rifles of the Kentuckians. The pioneers fought detachments; Clark, a born soldier, fought the source of those detach- ments and so disintegrated them that they hesitated in their weakness to again risk them- selves within the range of the riflemen of Kentucky.
Before concluding the story of the inter- mittent attacks by straggling Indians on the Kentucky settlements a reference must be made to any attack made by the Indians upon a party led by Col. John Floyd in Jefferson county, sixteen miles from Louisville. So se- rious had become the Indian attacks that Squire Boone, who had established a station upon Clear Creek in Shelby county, deter- mined to abandon it and to remove to Bear- grass near Louisville. While en route they were attacked by the Indians and dispersed with considerable loss on Long Run, eighteen miles from Louisville. Colonel Floyd, hear- ing of the disaster, hastily collected thirty men to pursue the Indians who, he supposed. would promptly retreat. His party was di-
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vided into two bodies, one commanded by him- self; the other by Capt. John Holden. The Indians had not retreated as Floyd expected, but had remained near the scene of their out- rage upon Boone's party. They led Floyd into an ambuscade of two hundred or more and killed, wounded and scalped more than half of the command, the latter bravely holding their ground until they were driven back by the tomahawk, and forced to retreat. Per- haps ten only of the Indians were killed. Colonel Floyd, while retreating on foot and nearly exhausted, was met by Capt. Samuel Wells, with whom he was not on friendly terms. Wells promptly dismounted, assisted Floyd to mount his horse alongside of which he ran, holding Floyd in the saddle. It seems wholly unnecessary to state, as others have done that from that day Colonel Floyd and Captain Holden were friends.
The author may be pardoned for a personal reference at this point. The scene of Floyd's defeat is in full view of the spot on which he was born ; on that unfortunate field stands to- day a monument erected by the state of Ken- tucky in honor of the brave men who fell in that battle. During the War between the States, this same author fought over the ground on which the forces of Floyd had met their savage enemies, but in this contest it was not the whites aaginst the reds, but the "grays" against the "blues;" and the writer while in the ranks of the former, could look into the open doors of his boyhood home. only
a short distance away, and see, also, shells bursting over the ball-grounds of the school he had attended but a year before. It was a little bit hotter than any other ball game in which he had ever contested on those grounds and when the umpire called the game, on ac- count of darkness, there was no protest from either the "Blues" or the "Grays." The score was nothing to nothing at the end of the ninth inning, and when the umpire so de- clared there seemed to be no one who was dis- posed to dispute his decision.
That the Indian depredations in Kentucky should be considered as having ended because they are to be no longer referred to herein, is not correct. They came many times after- wards, and did many deeds of violence, but their power had been broken, and their deeds were not of so serious a character as before. They never again held Kentucky in their grasp, and this narrative must hurry forward on the theory that no Indian will disturb or make us afraid. There are hundreds of fami- lies in the state today whose forefathers met and overcome the difficult problems of the early settlement of the state and who are en- titled to have recognition in any history of the commonwealth. That the author of this work leaves out of consideration in that respect, his own people, who dared Indian depredations and helped to make the state, must be a part of his explanation for passing on to other incidents connected with the earliest history of Kentucky.
CHAPTER XVI.
VIRGINIA'S GIFT TO THE UNION -- CUTTING OFF OF WEST VIRGINIA-DANVILLE CONVENTION AND STATEHOOD -- FIRST KENTUCKY ASSEMBLY-PETITIONING VIRGINIA FOR STATE- HOOD -- ASSEMBLYMEN FROM FOUR COUNTIES-"COMMITTEE OF THE WHOLE" REPORTS- OF YESTERDAY, YET OF TODAY-ADDRESS TO VIRGINIA LEGISLATURE-BEARERS OF THE ADDRESS.
In 1781, Virginia, the splendid old Mother of States, offered to the acceptance of the Congress all the Northwest territory embraced within her charter, most of which had been won from the English and Indians by the genius of Clark, one of her vigorous sons, who, to the enthusiasm of the pioneer, united the genius of the soldier. This offer was ac- cepted in 1784 when a formal deed of trans- fer was made and recorded. Marshall, in his history, says of this transfer :
"Thus, while emperors, kings and poten- tates of the earth fight, devastate and conquer for territory and dominion, the great state of Virginia peacefully and unconstrained made a gratuitous donation to the common stock of the Union of a country over which she had proposed to erect ten new states, as future members of the Confederation. And to her honor be it remembered, that the favorable change which took place in the state of public affairs from a doubtful contest to acknowl- edged independence, tainted not the purity of her motive, shook not the firmness of her pur- pose nor varied the object of her policy. She conceded the right of dominion while Ken- tucky remained her most remote frontier and the Ohio, instead of the Mississippi, her north- western boundary. She had magnified herself and secured her place in the Union on which
she relied, as on her own arm, for its protec- tion and durability."
Reference has been made herein to the ex- tent of territory given by Virginia to the Union and it may well be cited here in partic- ularity. Kentucky, the first-born and best beloved child of the Old Dominion, comprises about forty thousand square miles.
Smith, in his interesting and unusually cor- rect history of the state, thus states the extent of the other territory ceded by Virginia to the General Government :
States Square Miles.
Ohio
39,964
Indiana 33,809
Illinois 55,414
Michigan
56,45I
Wisconsin
53,924
Minnesota, east of the Mississippi 26,000
Total
265,562
Reduced to acres, this immense territory amounts to 109,959.680 acres, from sales of which the General Government has received over one hundred million dollars. Only Ken- tucky had been reserved; the remainder had been unreservedly donated to the Government.
And what was the reward Virginia received for the granting of this princely domain? In
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the midst of war, when her fair fields re- sounded not to the step of the peaceful hus- bandman, but to the tread of the war-horse and the march of armed men, when she lay prostrate, the proud old state was robbed, by the Cæsarian process, of her mountains and her vales, and the pseudo state of West Vir- ginia set up as a component part of the Fed- eral Union. This rude process of forming a new state has been so long acceded to that it is not worth while now to discuss it further than to express the hope that no more states will be added to the Union by such a process. West Virginia is a prosperous state; a next door and much respected neighbor of Ken- tucky, but one may be pardoned for an ex- pression of the belief that if she were Virginia instead of West Virginia she might be more beloved.
That the author, who was a Confederate soldier, and who may therefore be thought to write with a prejudice from which he has as honestly sought to divorce himself as he has from intruding his personality in this work, may excuse himself from the charge of feel- ing in this respect, he reproduces here what Mr. Blaine said in "Twenty Years in Con- gress" of the measure which robbed the Mother of Kentucky of so fair a portion of her domain :
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