The ever present terror and horror of those days, especially of the two years preceding this expedition, are vividly suggested by the quaint remark of an old woman who had lived through them, as recorded for us by a traveler. The most beautiful sight she had seen in Kentucky, she said, was a young man dying a natural death in his bed. Dead but unmarred by hatchet or scalping knife, he was so rare and comely a picture that the women of the post sat up all night looking at him.
But, we ask, what golden emoluments were showered by a grateful country on the men who thus held the land through those years of want and war, and saved an empire for the Union? What practical recognition was there of these brave and unselfish men who daily risked their lives and faced the stealth and cruelty lurking in the wilderness ways? There is meager eloquence in the records.
Here, for instance, is a letter from George Rogers Clark to the Governor of Virginia, dated May 27, 1783:
"Sir. Nothing but necessity could induce me to make the following request to Your Excellency, which is to grant me a small sum of money on account; as I can assure you, Sir, that I am exceedingly distressed for the want of necessary clothing etc and don't know any channel through which I could procure any except of the Executive. The State I believe will fall considerably in my debt.
Any supplies which Your Excellency favors me with might be deducted out of my accounts."*
* "Calendar of Virginia State Papers," vol. III, p. 487.
Clark had spent all his own substance and all else he could beg, borrow--or appropriate--in the conquest of Illinois and the defense of Kentucky. His only reward from Virginia was a grant of land from which he realized nothing, and dismissal from her service when she needed him no longer.
All that Clark had asked for himself was a commission in the Continental Army. This was denied him, as it appears now, not through his own errors, which had not at that time taken hold on him, but through the influence of powerful enemies. It is said that both Spain and England, seeing a great soldier without service for his sword, made him offers, which he refused. As long as any acreage remained to him on which to raise money, he continued to pay the debts he had contracted to finance his expeditions, and in this course he had the assistance of his youngest brother, William, to whom he assigned his Indiana grant.
His health impaired by hardship and exposure and his heart broken by his country's indifference, Clark sank into alcoholic excesses. In his sixtieth year, just six years before his death, and when he was a helpless paralytic, he was granted a pension of four hundred dollars. There is a ring of bitter irony in the words with which he accepted the sword sent him by Virginia in his crippled old age: "When Virginia needed a sword I gave her one." He died near Louisville on February 13, 1818.
Kentucky was admitted to the Union in 1792. But even before Kentucky became a State her affairs, particularly as to land, were arranged, let us say, on a practical business basis. Then it was discovered that Daniel Boone had no legal claim to any foot of ground in Kentucky. Daniel owned nothing but the clothes he wore; and for those--as well as for much powder, lead, food, and such trifles--he was heavily in debt.
So, in 1788, Daniel Boone put the list of his debts in his wallet, gathered his wife and his younger sons about him, and, shouldering his hunter's rifle, once more turned towards the wilds. The country of the Great Kanawha in West Virginia was still a wilderness, and a hunter and trapper might, in some years, earn enough to pay his debts. For others, now, the paths he had hewn and made safe; for Boone once more the wilderness road.
