The Conquest: The True Story of Lewis and Clark

  IV

  _THE WILDERNESS ROAD_

  Daniel Boone threw back his head and laughed silently.

  For a hundred miles in the barrier ridge of the Alleghanies there isbut a single depression, Cumberland Gap, where the Cumberland riverbreaks through, with just room enough for the stream and a bridlepath. Through this Gap as through a door Boone passed into thebeautiful Kentucky, and there, by the dark and rushing water of Dick'sRiver, George Rogers Clark and John Floyd were encamped.

  The young men leaped to their feet and strode toward the tall, gauntwoodsman, who, axe in hand, had been vigorously hewing right and lefta path for the pioneers.

  "They are coming,--Boone's trace must be ready. Can you help?" Booneremoved his coonskin cap and wiped his perspiring face with a buckskinhandkerchief. His forehead was high, fine-skinned, and white.

  "That is our business,--to settle the country," answered the youngsurveyors, and through the timber, straight as the bird flies overrivers and hills, they helped Boone with the Wilderness Road.

  It was in April of 1775. Kentucky gleamed with the dazzling dogwood asif snows had fallen on the forests. As their axes rang in the primevalstillness, another rover stepped out of the sycamore shadows. It wasSimon Kenton, a fair-haired boy of nineteen, with laughing blue eyesthat fascinated every beholder.

  "Any more of ye?" inquired Boone, peering into the distance behindhim.

  "None. I am alone. I come from my corn-patch on the creek. Are yougoing to build?"

  "Yes, when I reach a certain spring, and a bee-tree on the KentuckyRiver."

  "Let us see," remarked Floyd. "We may meet Indians. I nominate MajorClark generalissimo of the frontier."

  "And Floyd surveyor-in-chief," returned Clark.

  "An' thee, boy, shall be my chief guard," said Daniel Boone, layinghis kindly hand on the lad's broad shoulder. "An' I--_am the people_."The Boones were Quakers, the father of Daniel was intimate with Penn;his uncle James came to America as Penn's private secretary; sometimesthe old hunter dropped into their speech.

  But people were coming. One Richard Henderson, at a treaty in the hilltowns of the Cherokees, had just paid ten thousand pounds for theprivilege of settling Kentucky. Boone left before the treaty wassigned and a kindly old Cherokee chieftain took him by the hand infarewell.

  "Brother," he said, "we have given you a fine land, but I believe youwill have much trouble in settling it."

  They were at hand. Through the Cumberland Gap, as through a rift in aHolland dyke, a rivulet of settlers came trickling down the newly cutWilderness Road.

  Under the green old trees a mighty drama was unfolding, a Homericsong, the epic of a nation, as they piled up the bullet-proof cabinsof Boonsboro. This rude fortification could not have withstood thesmallest battery, but so long as the Indians had no cannon this woodenfort was as impregnable as the walls of a castle.

  In a few weeks other forts, Harrodsburg and Logansport, dotted thecanebrakes, and the startled buffalo stampeded for the salt licks.

  In September Boone brought out his wife and daughters, the first whitewomen that ever trod Kentucky soil.

  "Ugh! ugh! ugh!"

  A hundred Shawnees from their summer hunt in the southern hills cametrailing home along the Warrior's Path, the Indian highway north andsouth, from Cumberland Gap to the Scioto.

  "Ugh! ugh! ugh!"

  They pause and point to the innumerable trackings of men and beastsinto their beloved hunting grounds. Astonishment expands everyfeature. They creep along and trace the road. They see thesettlements. It cannot be mistaken, the white man has invaded theirsacred arcanum.

  Amazement gives place to wrath. Every look, every gesture bespeaks thered man's resolve.

  "We will defend our country to the last; we will give it up only withour lives."

  Forthwith a runner flies over the hills to Johnson Hall on the Mohawk.Sir William is dead, dead endeavouring to unravel the perplexities ofthe Dunmore war, but his son, Sir Guy, meets the complaining Shawnees.

  "The Cherokees sold Kentucky? That cannot be. Kentucky belongs to theKing. My father bought it for him at Fort Stanwix, of the Iroquois.The Cherokees have no right to sell Kentucky. Go in and take theland." And so, around their campfires, and at the lake forts of theBritish, the Shawnee-Iroquois planned to recover Kentucky.