The way home by the Kentucky was a long road for weary and
wounded men with hunger gnawing under their belts. We know who
swung out along the trail to provide for that little band,
"dressed in deerskins colored black, and his hair plaited and
bobbed up." It was Daniel Boone--now, by popular demand, Captain
Boone--just "discharged from Service," since the valley forts
needed him no longer. Once more only a hunter, he went his way
over Walden Mountain--past his son's grave marking the place
where HE had been turned back--to serve the men who had opened
the gates.
Chapter VII. The Dark And Bloody Ground
With the coming of spring Daniel Boone's desire, so long
cherished and deferred, to make a way for his neighbors through
the wilderness was to be fulfilled at last. But ere his ax could
slash the thickets from the homeseekers' path, more than two
hundred settlers had entered Kentucky by the northern waterways.
Eighty or more of these settled at Harrodsburg, where Harrod was
laying out his town on a generous plan, with "in-lots" of half an
acre and "out-lots" of larger size. Among those associated with
Harrod was George Rogers Clark, who had surveyed claims for
himself during the year before the war.
While over two hundred colonists were picking out home sites
wherever their pleasure or prudence dictated, a gigantic land
promotion scheme--involving the very tracts where they were
sowing their first corn--was being set afoot in North Carolina by
a body of men who figure in the early history of Kentucky as the
Transylvania Company.
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