The career of Franklin gave the clearest glimpse of what might have been; for it showed the gradual breaking down of law and order, the rise of factions ready to appeal to arms for success, the bitter broils with neighboring States, the reckless readiness to provoke war with the Indians, unheeding their rights or the woes such wars caused other frontier communities, and finally the entire willingness of the leaders to seek foreign aid when their cause was declining.  Had not the Constitution been adopted, and a more perfect union been thus called into being, the history of the state of Franklin would have been repeated in fifty communities from the Alleghanies to the Pacific coast; only these little states, instead of dying in the bud, would have gone through a rank flowering period of bloody and aimless revolutions, of silly and ferocious warfare against their neighbors, and of degrading alliance with the foreigner.  From these and a hundred other woes the West no less than the East was saved by the knitting together of the States into a Nation.

This knitting process passed through its first and most critical stage, in the West, during the period intervening between the close of the war for independence, and the year which saw the organization of the Southwest into a territory ruled under the laws, and by the agent, of the National Government.  During this time no step was taken towards settling the question of boundary lines with our British and Spanish neighbors; that remained as it had been, the Americans never abandoning claims which they had not yet the power to enforce, and which their antagonists declined to yield.  Neither were the Indian wars settled; on the contrary, they had become steadily more serious, though for the first time a definite solution was promised by the active interference of the National Government.  But a vast change had been made by the inflow of population; and an even vaster by the growing solidarity of the western settlements with one another, and with the Central Government.  The settlement of the Northwest, so different in some of its characteristics from the settlement of the Southwest, had begun.  Kentucky was about to become a State of the Union.  The territories north and south of it were organized as part of the domain of the United States.  The West was no longer a mere wilderness dotted with cabins and hamlets, whose backwoods builders were held by but the loosest tie of allegiance to any government, even their own.  It had become an integral part of the mighty American Republic.

THE END OF VOL.  III.

INDEX.

    Allen, Ethan, separatist leader;
      relations with British authorities. 
    Army, regular, relations of officers to Kentuckians;
      friction with frontiersmen;
      distrust of militia;
      failure to understand how to fight Indians;
      shortcomings of;
      superiority to