h was all that
prevented the abandonment of Kentucky at this time; and when such was
the effect of a foray by small and scattered war parties of Indians from
tribes nominally at peace with us,[14] it can easily be imagined how
hopeless it would have been to have tried to settle the land had there
still been in existence a strong hostile confederacy such as that
presided over by Cornstalk. Beyond doubt the restless and vigorous
frontiersmen would ultimately have won their way into the coveted
western lands; yet had it not been for the battle of the Great Kanawha,
Boon and Henderson could not, in 1775, have planted their colony in
Kentucky; and had it not been for Boon and Henderson, it is most
unlikely that the land would have been settled at all until after the
Revolutionary war, when perhaps it might have been British soil. Boon
was essentially a type, and possesses his greatest interest for us
because he represents so well the characteristics as well as the
life-work of his fellow backwoodsmen; still, it is unfair not to bear in
mind also the leading part he played and the great services he rendered
to the nation.

The incomers soon recovered from the fright into which they had been
thrown by the totally unexpected Indian attack; but the revengeful anger
it excited in their breasts did not pass away. They came from a class
already embittered by long warfare with their forest foes; they hoarded
up their new wrongs in minds burdened with the memories of countless
other outrages; and it is small wonder that repeated and often
unprovoked treachery at last excited in them a fierce and indiscriminate
hostility to all the red-skinned race. They had come to settle on ground
to which, as far as it was possible, the Indian title had been by fair
treaty extinguished. They ousted no Indians from the lands they took;
they had had neither the chance nor the wish to themselves do wrong; in
their eyes the attack on the part of the Indians was as wanton as it was
cruel; and in all probability this view was correct, and their
assailants were actuated more by the desire for scalps and plunder than
by resentment at the occupation of hunting grounds to which they could
have had little claim. In fact, throughout the history of the discovery
and first settlement of Kentucky, the original outrages and murders were
committed by the Indians on the whites, and not by the whites on the
Indians. In the gloomy and ferocious wars that ensued, the w