petition to the Governor[24] and Council--the
Legislature having adjourned. Clark also asked for five hundred-weight
of gunpowder, of which the Kentucky settlement stood in sore and
pressing need. This the Council at first refused to give; whereupon
Clark informed them that if the country was not worth defending, it was
not worth claiming, making it plain that if the request was not granted,
and if Kentucky was forced to assume the burdens of independence, she
would likewise assume its privileges. After this plain statement the
Council yielded. Clark took the powder down the Ohio River, and got it
safely through to Kentucky; though a party sent under John Todd to
convey it overland from the Limestone Creek was met at the Licking and
defeated by the Indians, Clark's fellow delegate being among the killed.

Before returning Clark had attended the fall meeting of the Virginia
Legislature, and in spite of the opposition of Henderson, who was
likewise present, he procured the admission of Kentucky as a separate
county, with boundaries corresponding to those of the present State.
Early in the ensuing year, 1777, the county was accordingly organized;
Harrodstown, or Harrodsburg, as it was now beginning to be called, was
made the county seat, having by this time supplanted Boonsborough in
importance. The court was composed of the six or eight men whom the
governor of Virginia had commissioned as justices of the peace; they
were empowered to meet monthly to transact necessary business, and had a
sheriff and clerk.[25] These took care of the internal concerns of the
settlers. To provide for their defence a county lieutenant was created,
with the rank of colonel,[26] who forthwith organized a militia
regiment, placing all the citizens, whether permanent residents or not,
into companies and battalions. Finally, two burgesses were chosen to
represent the county in the General Assembly of Virginia.[27] In later
years Daniel Boon himself served as a Kentucky burgess in the Virginia
Legislature;[28] a very different body from the little Transylvanian
parliament in which he began his career as a law-maker. The old
backwoods hero led a strange life: varying his long wanderings and
explorations, his endless campaigns against savage men and savage
beasts, by serving as road-maker, town-builder, and commonwealth-founder,
sometimes organizing the frontiersmen for foreign war, and again doing
his share in devising the laws under which they we