The Winning of the West, Volume 1 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 351 pages of information about The Winning of the West, Volume 1.

The Winning of the West, Volume 1 eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 351 pages of information about The Winning of the West, Volume 1.

4.  Collins, II., 498.  Letter of Daniel Boon, April 1, 1775.  Collins has done good work for Kentucky history, having collected a perfect mass of materials of every sort.  But he does not discriminate between facts of undoubted authenticity, and tales resting on the idlest legend; so that he must be used with caution, and he is, of course, not to be trusted where he is biassed by the extreme rancor of his political prejudices.  Of the Kentucky historians, Marshall is by far the most brilliant, and Mann Butler the most trustworthy and impartial.  Both are much better than Collins.

5.  Benjamin Logan; there were many of the family in Kentucky.  It was a common name along the border; the Indian chief Logan had been named after one of the Pennsylvania branch.

6.  McAfee MSS.

7.  Boon’s letter.

8.  Richard Henderson’s “Journal of an Expedition to Cantucky in 1775” (Collins).

9.  April 5th.

10.  It is printed in the Filson Club publications; see “The Wilderness Road,” by Thomas Speed, Louisville, Ky., 1886; one of the best of an excellent series.

11.  It is not necessary to say that “corn” means maize; Americans do not use the word in the sense in which it is employed in Britain.

12.  McAfee MSS.  Some of the McAfees returned with Henderson.

13.  Boon’s letter, Henderson’s journal, Calk’s diary, McAfee’s autobiography all mention the way in which the early settlers began to swarm out of the country in April, 1775.  To judge from their accounts, if the movement had not been checked instantly the country would have been depopulated in a fortnight, exactly as in 1774.

14.  It must be remembered that the outrages of the Indians this year in Kentucky were totally unprovoked; they were on lands where they did not themselves dwell, and which had been regularly ceded to the whites by all the tribes—­Iroquois, Shawnees, Cherokees, etc.—­whom the whites could possibly consider as having any claim to them.  The wrath of the Kentuckians against all Indians is easily understood.

15.  When the block-house and palisade enclosed the farm of a single settler the “tun,” in its still earlier sense, was even more nearly reproduced.

16.  Four hundred acres were gained at the price of $2.50 per 100 acres, by merely building a cabin and raising a crop of corn; and every settler with such a “cabin right” had likewise a preemption right to 1,000 acres adjoining, for a cost that generally approached forty dollars a hundred.

17.  In Mr. Phelan’s scholarly “History of Tennessee,” pp. 202-204, etc., there is an admirably clear account of the way in which Tennessee institutions (like those of the rest of the Southwest) have been directly and without a break derived from English institutions; whereas many of those of New England are rather pre-Normanic revivals, curiously paralleled in England as it was before the Conquest.

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The Winning of the West, Volume 1 from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.