In the first
years they planted little corn and reaped less, for it may be
said that their rifles were never out of their hands. We have
seen how stations were built and abandoned until but two stood.
Untiring vigilance and ceaseless warfare were the price paid by
the first Kentuckians ere they turned the Indian's place of
desolation and death into a land productive and a living
habitation.
Herein lies the difference, slight apparently, yet significant,
between the first Kentucky and the first Tennessee* colonies.
Within the memory of the Indians only one tribe had ever
attempted to make their home in Kentucky--a tribe of the fighting
Shawanoes--and they had been terribly chastised for their
temerity. But Tennessee was the home of the Cherokees, and at
Chickasaw Bluffs (Memphis) began the southward trail to the
principal towns of the Chickasaws. By the red man's fiat, then,
human life might abide in Tennessee, though not in Kentucky, and
it followed that in seasons of peace the frontiersmen might
settle in Tennessee. So it was that as early as 1757, before the
great Cherokee war, a company of Virginians under Andrew Lewis
had, on an invitation from the Indians, erected Fort Loudon near
Great Telliko, the Cherokees' principal town, and that, after the
treaty of peace in 1761, Waddell and his rangers of North
Carolina had erected a fort on the Holston.
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