although they had received the value of two thousand pounds sterling in goods for their lands, lost no opportunity of annoying the white intruders.
In spite of all these difficulties, Boonesborough was ready in 1774 for the reception of Mrs. Boone and her children, and in the ensuing year the infant settlement was reënforced by the arrival of three other families. The summer of 1775 also witnessed the establishment of many other stations, including that of Louisville, on the Ohio, which soon became a kind of rendezvous for hunters, and a harbor of refuge for emigrants seeking a suitable site for the building of their new homes in the wilderness. Gradually the forests of oak, maple, walnut, etc., of Ohio, the now well-cultivated agricultural districts of Kentucky, and the less fertile cretaceous regions of Tennessee, became dotted with the homes of settlers, each of which in time sent forth new pioneers yet further to the westward.
The conclusion of the war between Great Britain and her mighty colonies in 1783, which gave to English America a political constitution of its own, was succeeded by a tide of emigration across the Alleghanies, and all the best districts for settlement in Tennessee and Kentucky were rapidly filled. In 1788, the Ohio Company, from New England, formed a settlement of considerable size on the north-west of the river from which it took its name, and after a long, desultory struggle with the Wyandots, Delawares, Pottawatomies, Kickapoos, Piankashaws, Miamis, and other tribes occupying the surrounding districts, obtained a legal claim to their lands in 1795 by their purchase from the natives by the United States Government. The peaceable possession of these rich territories thus secured, they were soon portioned out into townships: city after city rose in the wilderness; and, to quote from a traveler who crossed the Alleghanies at the period of which we are writing, "Old America seemed to be breaking up and moving westward." Every state sent forth its bands of emigrants, and no traveler on the now well-worn tracts across the formidable mountain ridge, dividing the old homes from the new, could advance far without coming upon family groups pausing for the return of some father or brother who had seen his dear ones part of the way.
By the close of the 18th century, Ohio was also completely filled up by the settlements of the white men, while the natives, who had sold their birthright, slowly retreated before them into the present states of Illinois and Indiana. But yet again the same programme was gone through. The whites, to whom so much room had already been given, clamored for more;
