18.  Boon’s deposition, July 29, 1795.

19.  Mann Butler, p. 31.

20.  Henderson’s Journal.  The beauty of the elm impressed him very greatly.  According to the list of names eighteen, not seventeen, members were elected; but apparently only seventeen took part in the proceedings.

21.  Henderson’s Journal.

22.  “Our game, the only support of life amongst many of us, and without which the country would be abandoned ere to-morrow.”  Henderson’s address.

23.  Journal of the Proceedings of the House of Delegates or Representatives of the Colony of Transylvania.

24.  Possibly in 1775, certainly in 1776; MS. autobiography of Rev. Wm. Hickman.  In Durrett’s library.

25.  “Life of Rev. Charles Nerinckx,” by Rev. Camillus P. Maes, Cincinnati, 1880, p. 67.

26.  Smyth, p. 330.

27.  Gov.  James T. Morehead’s “address” at Boonsborough, in 1840 (Frankfort, Ky., 1841).

28. Do., p. 51.  Mrs. Boon, Mrs. Denton, Mrs. McGarry, Mrs. Hogan; all were from the North Carolina backwoods; their ancestry is shown by their names.  They settled in Boonsborough and Harrodsburg.

29.  Like Logan he was born in Pennsylvania, of Presbyterian Irish stock.  He had received a good education.

30.  Morehead, p. 52.

31.  Shelby’s MS. autobiography, in Durrett’s Library at Louisville.

32.  These frontiersmen called a stream a “run,” “branch,” “creek,” or “fork,” but never a “brook,” as in the northeast.

33.  “History of Lexington,” G. W. Ranck, Cincinnati, 1872, p. 19.  The town was not permanently occupied till four years later.

CHAPTER XI.

IN THE CURRENT OF THE REVOLUTION—­THE SOUTHERN BACKWOODSMEN OVERWHELM THE CHEROKEES, 1776.

The great western drift of our people began almost at the moment when they became Americans, and ceased to be merely British colonists.  They crossed the great divide which sundered the springs of the seaboard rivers from the sources of the western waters about the time that American citizens first publicly acted as American freemen, knit together by common ties, and with interests no longer akin to those of the mother country.  The movement which was to make the future nation a continental power was begun immediately after the hitherto separate colonies had taken the first step towards solidification.  While the communities of the sea-coast were yet in a fever heat from the uprising against the stamp tax, the first explorers were toiling painfully to Kentucky, and the first settlers were building their palisaded hamlets on the banks of the Watauga.  The year that saw the first Continental Congress saw also the short, grim tragedy of Lord Dunmore’s war.  The early battles of the Revolution were fought while Boon’s comrades were laying the foundations of their commonwealth.