100
in many cases were massacred, and in
some cases were led off into a captivity
worse, if possible, than death. Through
Western Pennsylvania, Virginia and
the Carolinas, thousands of lives were
lost upon the frontier, many of the
early settlements were broken up and
a considerable proportion of the fron-
tier population was driven back upon
the seaboard. The British policy in
this regard did not inure to the advan-
tage of the royal cause. The murder
of Jane McRae in Northern New York
aroused the frontiersmen of that region,
sent companies of recruits into the
American army and powerfully contrib-
uted to the discomfiture and capture
of Burgoyne. Everywhere the atroci-
ties of Britain's savage allies aroused
the determined and united hostility of
the forceful and formidable Scotch-
Irish frontiersmen, who proved their
prowess in the Illinois country, at
King's Mountain and the Cowpens.
The storm of Indian warfare fell with peculiar severity on the scatter- ed settlements in Kentucky. At that time there was living in Kentucky a young man, twenty-five years of age, named George Rogers Clark. He had been born in Albemarle County, Vir- ginia, about seventy miles from Char- lottesville. Although his home and his early associations were with the old cavalier stock dominant in tidewater Virginia, he, himself, was sprung from a family which had emigrated from southwestern Scotland, a small section of country to whose liberty-loving in- stincts the world owes a heavy debt of gratitude. From this region had sprung the patriots whom Wallace led to vic- tory at Sterling Bridge and with whom Bruce had conquered at Bannockbum. This country had furnished the first martyrs to the Scottish Reformation. In it men had signed the covenant with blood drawn from their own veins. This region had largely recruited Les- lie's army in the rising against Charles the First, which obliged him to call the' Long Parliament.
From southwestern Scotland had em- igrated the Irish settlers whose hero- ism at Londonderry and whose valor at the Boyne gave its death blow to the despotic house of Stuart, and whose
descendants were now under Clark to win the great Northwest to the cause of liberty.
Clark had first gone to Kentucky in 1775 and had from that time on been deeply interested in the welfare of the infant settlements. He had returned to Virginia late in 1775 and had gone again to Kentucky in 1776. With the Anglo-Saxon's instinct for civil govern- ment, he had early realized the ne- cessity of an organized government in the Kentucky settlements, had gather- ed the settlers together, proceeded to organize the district as a county in the colony of Virginia, and had pro- cured the election of himself and Ga- briel Jones as members of the Virginia Assembly ; armed with a petition sign- ed by eighty-seven settlers of the re- gion, he started eastward in 1776 to present his petition and apply for a seat in the Virginia Legislature. When he reached Williamsburg, then the capital of the colony, he found the Legislature had adjourned. With much difficulty he succeeded in securing ^ supply of gun powder for the settlers and re- turned with it down the Ohio, Jones, his companion, losing his life at the hands of the Indians on the return trip.
Clark observed that the only way to protect Kentucky from the Indian in- cursions was to carry the war into Af- rica. He conceived the idea of attack- ing the British posts in the North- west country and driving the British back upon Canada. This, he believed, would enable the Americans to turn one tribe of Indians against another and thus secure a breathing space for the pioneers' settlements, whose very existence was threatened by this Indian warfare. Clark, moreover, was ardent- ly attached to the Revolutionary cause and he saw that the success of his ex- pedition would (in the event of a suc- cessful termination of the Revolution) in all probability mean the winning of the great Northwest for the American Republic.
In 1777 he returned to Virginia and made known his plans to Patrick Hen- ry, then governor of the State. Clark's plans powerfully appealed to the en- thusiastic, imaginative temperament of
