rench and Indians
south of Pittsburgh.

They found Kain-tuck-ee to be all that fancy painted. So four years
later, in September, 1773, the two Boone brothers, Daniel and Squire,
with their families and five other families and a total of forty men,
started out to open the way in earnest. But before they had crossed
the Gap, on October 10 their rear was attacked by the Shawnees and
Cherokees. It was a sad day for Daniel Boone--his oldest son, James
Boone, aged seventeen, was killed, and five others.

They had been on the road only fourteen days. So, to save the women
and children they turned homeward.

But Kentucky was not forgotten. Nothing stops Americans when their
faces are set westward, and the long trail beckons.

The next year Daniel Boone and party went into Kentucky again. They
found James Harrod of Virginia building Harrodsburg, south of the
Kentucky River in central Kentucky. He had come in from the north;
Daniel Boone and companion Michael Stoner from the east.

This James Harrod was a man of valor. At sixteen years of age he was a
young soldier in the French and Indian War. He loved the scout trail,
and grew up to be one of the best sign-readers among all the "Long
Hunters of Kentucky." He was tall, silent, swarthy--as dark as the
Indians whom he tracked. They called him the "Lone Long Knife." When
he was fifty years of age, or in 1792, he left his wife and daughter,
on his last journey through the forests. After that February day he
never appeared again, nor did word of him come back.

But in 1774 he had founded Harrodsburg--or Harrod's Fort, as it was
known. Daniel Boone visited with him and his thirty. A company was
formed of North Carolina and Virginia settlers, who by treaty with the
Cherokees purchased all southern Kentucky. In March of the next year,
1775, Daniel Boone led thirty men who with their hatchets blazed a
bridle-trail of two hundred miles, from southwestern Virginia across
Cumberland Gap and on into the northwest clear to the Kentucky River.
"Boone's Trace" and the "Wilderness Road" was the name of the path.

April 1 they commenced Boone's Fort of Boonesborough, on the south bank
of the Kentucky eighteen miles southeast of present Lexington. Then
there came the women, in September: for Boonesborough, Daniel Boone's
wife Rebecca and their daughters; for Harrod's, Mrs. Hugh McGary, Mrs.
Hogan and Mrs. Denton. These were the first white women in Kentucky.

There came,