In all the histories of frontier life mention is made of the forts and the protection they offered in time of savage warfare.  These forts were used as homes for the settlers, who often lived for weeks inside the walls.

Forts constructed entirely of wood without the aid of a nail or spike (for the good reason that these things could not be had) may seem insignificant in these days of great nasal and military garrisons.  However, they answered the purpose at that time and served to protect many an infant settlement from the savage attacks of Indian tribes.  During a siege of Fort Henry, which had occurred about a year previous, the settlers would have lost scarcely a man had they kept to the fort.  But Captain Ogle, at that time in charge of the garrison, had led a company out in search of the Indians.  Nearly all of his men were killed, several only making their way to the fort.

On the day following Major McColloch’s arrival at Fort Henry, the settlers had been called in from their spring plowing and other labors, and were now busily engaged in moving their stock and the things they wished to save from the destructive torch of the redskin.  The women had their hands full with the children, the cleaning of rifles and moulding of bullets, and the thousand and one things the sterner tasks of their husbands had left them.  Major McColloch, Jonathan and Silas Zane, early in the day, had taken different directions along the river to keep a sharp lookout for signs of the enemy.  Colonel Zane intended to stay in his oven house and defend it, so he had not moved anything to the fort excepting his horses and cattle.  Old Sam, the negro, was hauling loads of hay inside the stockade.  Captain Boggs had detailed several scouts to watch the roads and one of these was the young man, Clarke, who had accompanied the Major from Fort Pitt.

The appearance of Alfred Clarke, despite the fact that he wore the regulation hunting garb, indicated a young man to whom the hard work and privation of the settler were unaccustomed things.  So thought the pioneers who noticed his graceful walk, his fair skin and smooth hands.  Yet those who carefully studied his clearcut features were favorably impressed; the women, by the direct, honest gaze of his blue eyes and the absence of ungentle lines in his face; the men, by the good nature, and that indefinable something by which a man marks another as true steel.

He brought nothing with him from Fort Pitt except his horse, a black-coated, fine limbed thoroughbred, which he frankly confessed was all he could call his own.  When asking Colonel Zane to give him a position in the garrison he said he was a Virginian and had been educated in Philadelphia; that after his father died his mother married again, and this, together with a natural love of adventure, had induced him to run away and seek his fortune with the hardy pioneer and the cunning savage of the border.  Beyond a few months’ service under General Clark he knew