“In October, a party of emigrants were attacked near Scagg’s Creek, and six killed.  Mrs. McClure, with four children, ran into the woods, where she might have remained concealed, if it had not been for the cries of her infant, whom she could not make up her mind to abandon.  The Indians guided to her hiding-place by these cries, cruelly tomahawked the three oldest children, but made her prisoner with her remaining child.  Captain Whitley, with twenty-one men, intercepted the party on its return, and dispersed them, killing two, and wounding the same number.  The prisoners were rescued.  A few days after, another party of emigrants were attacked, and nine of them killed.  Captain Whitley again pursued the Indians.  On coming up with them, they took to flight.  Three were killed in the course of the pursuit; two by the gallant Captain himself.  Some other depredations were committed this year, but none of as much importance as those we have mentioned.”

These acts of hostility on the part of the Indians led to the adoption of measures for the defense of the Colony, to which we shall presently call the reader’s attention.

“Although,” says Perkins,[54] “Kentucky grew rapidly during the year 1784, the emigrants numbering twelve, and the whole population thirty thousand; although a friendly meeting was held by Thomas J. Dalton, with the Piankeshaws, at Vincennes, in April; and though trade was extending itself into the clearings and among the canebrakes—­Daniel Brodhead having opened his store at Louisville the previous year, and James Wilkinson having come to Lexington in February, as the leader of a large commercial company, formed in Philadelphia, still the cool and sagacious mind of Logan led him to prepare his fellow-citizens for trial and hardships.  He called, in the autumn of 1784, a meeting of the people at Danville, to take measures for defending the country, and at this meeting the whole subject of the position and danger of Kentucky was examined and discussed, and it was agreed that a convention should meet in December to adopt some measures for the security of the settlements in the wilderness.  Upon the 27th of that month it met, nor was it long before the idea became prominent that Kentucky must ask to be severed from Virginia, and left to her own guidance and control.  But as no such conception was general, when the delegates to this first convention were chosen, they deemed it best to appoint a second, to meet during the next May, at which was specially to be considered the topic most interesting to those who were called on to think and vote—­a complete separation from the parent State—­political independence.”

Several other conventions took place, in which the subject of a separation from Virginia was considered.  In 1786 the Legislature of Virginia enacted the necessary preliminary provisions for the separation and erection of Kentucky into an independent State, with the condition that Congress should receive it into the Union, which was finally effected in the year 1792.