DEVOTED ESPECIALLY TO THE HISTORY OF TENNESSEE AND ADJOINING STATES

PUBLISHED QUARTERLY BY THE PEABODY NORMAL
COLLEGE, AT NASHVILLE, TENN.

$3.00 PER ANNUM.

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Entered at the post office at Nashville, Tenn., as second-class matter.

[A paper read before the Tennessee Historical Society November 27, 1900,
by Gen. Gates P. Thruston.]

The pioneer settlement and colonization of the territory comprising the States of Kentucky and Tennessee form a unique chapter in American history. No parallel is offered in the founding of any other State of the Union.

Ohio and Indiana were mainly settled by the whites, under the protection of the military forces of the United States, or the volunteer troops from Kentucky, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Alabama and Mississippi were colonized and settled at a later period, and under the strong guardianship of the national government. In laying the foundations of the States of Kentucky and Tennessee, our sturdy and intrepid pioneers had only their strong arms and stout hearts to protect them, and thus they won the place of honor in carrying Anglo-Saxon civilization to the great West.

Led by Sevier, Robertson, Clark, Boone, and their associates, and later by Andrew Jackson, they not only won this beautiful section of the West, but they gave to the young republic the magnificient domain beyond, and to the north and south.

The first settlers of Kentucky and Tennessee came mainly from Virginia and North Carolina, the mother States, adjacent on the east, with a small share from Pennsylvania, Maryland, New Jersey and elsewhere. These pioneer settlements were intimately. associated. A considerable proportion of the Kentuckians came. through East Tennessee by way of Cumberland Gap.

In point of time, the Kentucky pioneers came first, and led the advance. As early as 1769 that famous hunter, Daniel Boone, blazed the "Boon trace" through the wilderness into central Kentucky. In 1773 he led five emigrant families and a strong party of men into this new section. In 1776 Isaac Shelby came to Kentucky and raised a crop of corn. In the year 1778, about two years before James Robertson came to the Cumberland country, there were some four or five hundred inhabitants in the beautiful central region of Kentucky, at Harrodstown, Boonsborough, and other centers of settlement. In 1780, the year Capt. Donalson and his adventurous party of voyagers came down the Tennessee river and around on the Cumberland to aid James Robertson in founding the village of Nashborough, three hundred family barges came down the Ohio River, through the Indian gauntlet of danger, to the falls of the Ohio, the site of the future metropolis of Kentucky. In the same year of the founding of Nashborough, George Rogers Clark, a young Virginia officer, by order of Governor Thomas Jefferson, of Virginia, erected a fort upon the eastern bank of the Mississippi River, far to the west of all the frontier settlements and without even asking the consent of the Chickasaws, the Indian claimants of that section. In the early seventeen-eighties the population of Kentucky increased much more rapidly than that of Tennessee.

It was from the stronger settlements in Kentucky, that in times of danger, James Robertson procured his supplies of ammunition to defend the settlers on the Cumberland. Nashborough and Louisville were founded in the same year, although the fine site of the latter had been surveyed and occupied at an earlier period. James Lane Allen in his recent novel, "The Reign of Law," recalls the fact that the cultivation of hemp was begun in Kentucky as early as the year 1782.

When the treaty with the Iroquois Indians was made by the English at Stanwix, New York, in 1763, and the treaty was made with the Cherokees by Henderson and his associates at Watauga in 1775, for the purchase of the fertile lands in Kentucky and on the Cumberland, the hunting rights claimed by the Shawnees, Miamis, Delawares and Mingos, the dangerous Indian tribes occupying the territory north of the Ohio river, were ignored, were not even considered. After their defeat by Governor Dunmore at Point Pleasant, Va., in 1774, these tribes agreed to surrender