f the title of
the southern Indians to the land lying south of the Kentucky river,
and north of the Tennessee.[4]

Boone was then placed at the head of a party of enterprising men, sent
to open a road from the Holstein settlement, through the wilderness,
to the Kentucky river, and to take possession of the company's
purchase. When within fifteen miles of the termination of their
journey, they were attacked by a body of northern Indians, who killed
two of Boone's comrades, and wounded two others.

Two days after, they were again attacked by them, and had two more of
their party killed and three wounded.[5] From this time they
experienced no farther molestation until they had arrived within the
limits of the purchase, and erected a fort, at a lick near the
southern bank of the Kentucky river--the site of the present town of
Boonesborough. Enfeebled by the loss sustained in the attacks made on
them by the Indians; and worn down by the continued labor of opening a
road through an almost impervious wilderness, it was some time before
they could so far complete the fort, so as to render it secure against
anticipated assaults of the savages, and justify a detachment being
sent from the garrison, to escort the family of Boone to his new
situation. When it was thus far completed, an office [143] was opened
for the sale of the company's land;[6] and Boone and some others
returned to Holstein, and from thence, guarded the family of Boone,
through the wilderness, to the newly erected fort. Mrs. Boone and her
daughter, are believed to be the first white females who ever stood on
the banks of the Kentucky river.[7]

[143] In 1775 Benjamin Logan, who had been with Lord Dunmore at Camp
Charlotte, visited Kentucky and selected a spot for his future
residence, near to the present village of Stamford, erected thereon a
fort; and in the following year moved his family thither.

These were the only settlements then begun to be made within the
limits of the now state of Kentucky. As the tide of emigration flowed
into the country, those three forts afforded an asylum, from the
Indian hostility to which the whites were incessantly subjected; and
never perhaps lived three men better qualified by nature and habit, to
resist that hostility, and preserve the settlers from captivity and
death, than James Harrod, Daniel Boone, and Benjamin Logan. Reared in
the lap of danger, and early inured to the hardships and sufferings of
a wilderness life,