just heard.[33]

By the end of 1775 the Americans had gained firm foothold in Kentucky.
Cabins had been built and clearings made; there were women and children
in the wooden forts, cattle grazed on the range, and two or three
hundred acres of corn had been sown and reaped. There were perhaps some
three hundred men in Kentucky, a hardy, resolute, strenuous band. They
stood shoulder to shoulder in the wilderness, far from all help,
surrounded by an overwhelming number of foes. Each day's work was
fraught with danger as they warred with the wild forces from which they
wrung their living. Around them on every side lowered the clouds of the
impending death struggle with the savage lords of the neighboring lands.

These backwoodsmen greatly resembled one another; their leaders were but
types of the rank and file, and did not differ so very widely from them;
yet two men stand out clearly from their fellows. Above the throng of
wood-choppers, game-hunters, and Indian fighters loom the sinewy figures
of Daniel Boon and George Rogers Clark.

1. The first permanent settlement was Harrodsburg, then called
Harrodstown, founded in 1774, but soon abandoned, and only permanently
occupied on March 18, 1775, a fortnight before Boon began the erection
of his fort.

2. The whole account of this treaty is taken from the Jefferson MSS.,
5th Series, Vol. VIII.; "a copy of the proceedings of the Virginia
Convention, from June 15 to November 19, 1777, in relation to the
Memorial of Richard Henderson, and others"; especially from the
depositions of James Robertson, Isaac Shelby, Charles Robertson,
Nathaniel Gist, and Thomas Price, who were all present. There is much
interesting matter aside from the treaty; Simon Girty makes depositions
as to Braddock's defeat and Bouquet's fight; Lewis, Croghan, and others
show the utter vagueness and conflict of the Indian titles to Kentucky,
etc., etc. Though the Cherokees spoke of the land as a "dark" or
"bloody" place or ground, it does not seem that by either of these terms
they referred to the actual meaning of the name Kentucky. One or two of
the witnesses tried to make out that the treaty was unfairly made; but
the bulk of the evidence is overwhelmingly the other way.

Haywood gives a long speech made by Oconostota against the treaty; but
this original report shows that Oconostota favored the treaty from the
outset, and that it was Dragging Canoe who spoke against it. Haywood
wrote fifty years aft