neers; also, many of its rivers were navigable. There was another advantage. Only the Chickasaw Indians were really living in the country; the other tribes passed through it often on their raids but lived north or south, or beyond the Mississippi; so that the land was open to the white man if he could come and take possession of the forests and cultivate the rich plains that he would find. These fertile acres proved too tempting to resist when the farmers in Virginia found that they would have to farm on the slopes of the Alleghanies or go beyond these for new lands. As early as 1750 Indian traders had found passes through these mountains; and it was one of these Indian traders who guided Daniel Boone to the State that he helped to build up and that made him so famous.

The first Kentucky colony was founded in 1774; and the following year other footholds were taken and held; all earlier attempts had failed.

Boone was not the first there; but he came early enough to find plenty to do, and to do it.

Daniel Boone was born in Pennsylvania, in 1734. But when he was a young man he moved from there, and through the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia went to the banks of the Yadkin River in North Carolina. There he married; and it was not until May of 1769 that he began

his exploration of Kentucky. Several men went there in company with Boone.

But that winter Boone and a friend he was hunting with were captured by Indians. The Indians spoiled the camps and then set Boone and his companion free and told them they must never come there again, because they were trespassing upon Indian hunting grounds under treaties made with the Indians. This was true; but Boone did not know it, or care for it. The Boone family were Quakers; and Daniel's grandfather had come to Pennsylvania to be near William Penn. Daniel had always been used to Indians; in his childhood they had come to his father's house and had always been on friendly terms with the Boones; and Daniel knew them thoroughly. All his life he had great influence over them. They captured him several times; but they never hurt him. But he never saw again the other men of their party who had come to Kentucky with him.

After their release, as he was going through the woods with his companion, they met two men who called to them that they were white men and friends. One proved to be Daniel's younger brother, Squire Boone, come in search of Daniel.

The two men with the Boones were not long afterward killed. Then the two brothers were alone together in the vast woods. There they

spent the long winter. In the spring their ammunition ran low. As they had to depend upon hunting for food, and for skins which gave them what money they had, there was nothing to do but go to the settlements for more. And they must have more horses and other supplies. Daniel decided that one of them must go and one stay; and that he must be the one to stay. For three whole months he was there, "by myself," he afterward said, "without bread, salt or sugar, without company of my fellow-creatures, or even a horse or dog." But he was born to live in the woods, he loved them so, and he loved hunting. It is said of him: "He was wanting in no quality of wise woodcraft. He could outrun a dog or a deer; he could thread the woods without food day and night; he could find his way as easily as a panther could. Although a great athlete and a tireless warrior, he hated fighting and only fought for peace. In council and in war he was equally valuable. His advice was never rejected without disaster, nor followed but with advantage; and when the fighting once began there was not a rifle in Kentucky which could rival his."

Yet for all his skill and his love of great spaces about him, he was homesick in those long lonely months and was glad enough to see his brother again. After Squire's return the two

hunted for a year longer "in those lovely wilds." For they had to earn money by the skins of the animals they shot. Then they went back to the Yadkin River and brought their

families to Kentucky.

The first ancestor of Abraham Lincoln to reach America came to Hingham, Massachusetts, in 1638, and died there. His grandson removed to New Jersey, and from there to Pennsylvania, where he died in 1735. His appraisers called him "Mordecai Lincoln, Gentleman," so that he must have had property. To one of his sons he left land in New Jersey; and this son about 1750 went to Virginia. It was this son, Abraham Lincoln, the grandfather of our president, who went to Kentucky, partly because he wanted more land and partly because he was so interested in what he had heard from Boone about that country. For the Boones and the Lincolns were well acquainted; there had been marriages in the families; both were of Quaker origin. This ancestor of our president was quite well off, and when he sold his Virginia estates he bought land in Kentucky that would have made the family rich if they had kept it.

When he went there in 1780, the country was not quite so wild and uninhabited as it had been at Boone's coming. The people had begun to cultivate the land and they had built forts for

defence. For Kentucky was the border land between the northern and southern Indians who were at war with one another and was directly in the warpaths of these Indians. Also, in dealing with the Indians the white settlers did not regard the treaties made with them and sometimes were quite as treacherous and savage in warfare with them as the Indians themselves. Then, west of the Mississippi, and also north and south of Kentucky were the French who always got on well with the Indians and many a time roused them against the English settlers. The Indians loved their own lands as much as the white men did who came to crowd them out and take possession. There was enough land for both; but neither saw it so; and it was a time of savagery and horror.

In 1780 three hundred "large family boats" went down the Ohio River with people who settled in Kentucky; for that must have been an easier way of bringing families and household stuff than by land. In that same year the town of Louisville was incorporated; and the Virginia legislature-for then Kentucky was a part of Virginia, as we remember-endowed a college in that country, the origin of the University of Lexington.

In 1781 more people came; and after the war of the Revolution a good many soldiers went