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From The First American West: The Ohio River Valley, 1750-1820
The opening of the trans-Appalachian West launched one of the greatest land rushes in American history. Contrary to legend, however, most of the land was won not by hardy pioneers seeking a family farmstead but by wealthy individuals and powerful companies who quickly claimed possession of all the prime areas. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the population of Kentucky had swelled to more than 200,000. Many came over the Wilderness Road, the route first laid out by Daniel Boone for the Transylvania Company. But a majority of settlers avoided overland the passage and made their way to Kentucky by traveling down the Ohio River.
Land speculation was a big business in Kentucky in the eighteenth century, and the potential for making a quick fortune was unprecedented in American history. The rush of land claims and settler migrations came so quickly that they overwhelmed the limited skills of many poorly-trained frontier surveyors, including Daniel Boone, and the unscrupulous practices of buyers and sellers soon left Kentucky landholding in a legal jumble.
One out of every five Kentucky pioneers was an African American, and nearly all were slaves. Many migrated with the initial groups of European American settlers coming from Virginia and North Carolina, where law and custom recognized slavery as an accepted institution.
From The Kentucky Pioneers BY JOHN MASON BROWN. REPRINTED FROM HARPER’S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE.VOLUME LXX
THE traveller who stops for a day at the pleasant and picturesque little city of Frankfort, Kentucky, will be rewarded with the view of a landscape of surpassing loveliness. From the brow of a lofty hill, reached by a broad smooth turnpike that has replaced the ancient buffalo trace, he will look down upon the thriving town that fills the valley. A railway, crowded with busy trains, skirts the base of the eminence. To the right and the left extends the limpid blue Kentucky River, losing itself on either hand in graceful curves behind the wooded hills, and in the distance fields and pastures terminate the view. The observer stands at the grave of Daniel Boone. Here was the favorite resort of the famous pioneer of Kentucky, and here was he in 1845 interred. His bones were brought back to the State which he founded, and laid in this last resting-place. The outlook from his grave is toward the west, in keeping with the adventurous story of his life. The modest monument that marks the place is carved with scenes of pioneer life---the hunter's camp, the settler's cabin, the Indian combat; and around it the trees grow, secluding the spot from the military cemetery that lies beyond.
The story of Boone and the Kentucky pioneers has passed almost into the domain of romance. They are thought of and spoken of, when remembered, in a vague way as Indian fighters and hunters. They are scarcely ever credited with an idea or aspiration higher than the lust of the chase, or with a nobler quality than personal courage. It is too often forgotten how they framed, unassisted, the Constitution and policy of a State, how they conquered for their parent commonwealth, Virginia, the great Northwest Territory, and how they endured through unexampled trials the hardships of the frontier. ....
resources
- Kentucky Pioneers, Explorers, and Frontiersmen
- Kentucky Pioneers and Their Descendants
- This book was compiled by Ila Earle Fowler, for the Kentucky Society, Daughters of Colonial Wars. It was originally published in 1951. The book contains between 13 and 15 thousand names taken from Bibles, tombstones, obituaries, birth certificates, vital statistics, tax books, deeds, wills, marriage and census records, principally of the counties of Caldwell, Christian, Fleming, Hopkins, Jefferson, Livingston, Larue, Hardin, Fayette, Jessamine, Mason, Woodford, Calloway, Mercer, Bourbon and Franklin.
- "The True Discoverer of Kentucky". Not Daniel Boone, as is Generally Supposed, but an Irish Pioneer named James McBride.