er service when she needed him
no longer.

All that Clark had asked for himself was a commission in the Continental
Army. This was denied him, as it appears now, not through his own
errors, which had not at that time taken hold on him, but through the
influence of powerful enemies. It is said that both Spain and England,
seeing a great soldier without service for his sword, made him offers,
which he refused. As long as any acreage remained to him on which to
raise money, he continued to pay the debts he had contracted to finance
his expeditions, and in this course he had the assistance of his
youngest brother, William, to whom he assigned his Indiana grant.

His health impaired by hardship and exposure and his heart broken by
his country's indifference, Clark sank into alcoholic excesses. In
his sixtieth year, just six years before his death, and when he was a
helpless paralytic, he was granted a pension of four hundred dollars.
There is a ring of bitter irony in the words with which he accepted
the sword sent him by Virginia in his crippled old age: "When Virginia
needed a sword I gave her one." He died near Louisville on February 13,
1818.

Kentucky was admitted to the Union in 1792. But even before Kentucky
became a State her affairs, particularly as to land, were arranged,
let us say, on a practical business basis. Then it was discovered that
Daniel Boone had no legal claim to any foot of ground in Kentucky.
Daniel owned nothing but the clothes he wore; and for those--as well as
for much powder, lead, food, and such trifles--he was heavily in debt.

So, in 1788, Daniel Boone put the list of his debts in his wallet,
gathered his wife and his younger sons about him, and, shouldering his
hunter's rifle, once more turned towards the wilds. The country of the
Great Kanawha in West Virginia was still a wilderness, and a hunter and
trapper might, in some years, earn enough to pay his debts. For others,
now, the paths he had hewn and made safe; for Boone once more the
wilderness road.

Chapter VIII. Tennessee

Indian law, tradition, and even superstition had shaped the conditions
which the pioneers faced when they crossed the mountains. This savage
inheritance had decreed that Kentucky should be a dark and bloody
ground, fostering no life but that of four-footed beasts, its fertile
sod never to stir with the green push of the corn. And so the white men
who went into Kentucky to build and to plant went as warriors