Thus Kentucky was saved from the career of ignoble dishonor to which she would have been doomed by the success of the disunion faction.  She was saved from the day of small things.  Her interests became those of a nation which was bound to succeed greatly or to fail greatly.  Her fate was linked for weal or for woe with the fate of the mighty Republic.

CHAPTER VI.

THE NORTHWEST TERRITORY; OHIO. 1787-1790.

    Individual Initiative of the Frontiersmen.

So far the work of the backwoodsmen in exploring, conquering, and holding the West had been work undertaken solely on individual initiative.  The nation as a whole had not directly shared in it.  The frontiersmen who chopped the first trails across the Alleghanies, who earliest wandered through the lonely western lands, and who first built stockaded hamlets on the banks of the Watauga, the Kentucky, and the Cumberland, acted each in consequence of his own restless eagerness for adventure and possible gain.  The nation neither encouraged them to undertake the enterprises on which they embarked, nor protected them for the first few years of uncertain foothold in the new-won country.  Only the backwoodsmen themselves felt the thirst for exploration of the unknown, the desire to try the untried, which drove them hither and thither through the dim wilderness.  The men who controlled the immediate destinies of the confederated commonwealths knew little of what lay in the forest-shrouded country beyond the mountains, until the backwoods explorers of their own motion penetrated its hidden and inmost fastnesses.  Singly or in groups, the daring hunters roved through the vast reaches of sombre woodland, and pitched their camps on the banks of rushing rivers, nameless and unknown.  In bands of varying size the hunter-settlers followed close behind, and built their cabins and block-houses here and there in the great forest land.  They elected their own military leaders, and waged war on their own account against their Indian foes.  They constructed their own governmental systems, on their own motion, without assistance or interference from the parent States, until the settlements were firmly established, and the work of civic organization well under way.

    Help Rendered by National Government.

Of course some help was ultimately given by the parent States; and the indirect assistance rendered by the nation had been great.  The West could neither have been won nor held by the frontiersmen, save for the backing given by the Thirteen States.  England and Spain would have made short work of the men whose advance into the lands of their Indian allies they viewed with such jealous hatred, had they not also been forced to deal with the generals and soldiers of the Continental army, and the statesmen and diplomats of the Continental Congress.  But the real work was done by the settlers themselves.  The distinguishing feature in the exploration, settlement, and up-building of Kentucky and Tennessee was the individual initiative of the backwoodsmen.