This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1900 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XXIII "the Rear-guard Of The Revolution" At the same time that frontiersmen were helping the cause of the sea-board colonies, they were engaged upon an enterprise daring and strenuous enough to have, of itself, furnished an outiet for less plentiful energies. It gives one a fresh conception of the strength of this young giant of the West when one sees the people of the East building a nation, raising an army, fighting a revolution; and knows that at the same time, to the westward, the same nationality was passing the barrier of the wilderness, struggling with stealthy Indians and British soldiers, and conquering from both their possessions in the Mississippi Valley. Among these pioneers of Kentucky and Tennessee, these pathfinders of the Wilderness Trace, and backwoodsmen led by Clark into " the Illinois country," there were many Germans. In fact, it would be strange were it otherwise, for "the West" of those days was reached through the Shenandoah Valley, and its hunters, pioneers, and permanent settlers came from the Valley of Virginia and the mountains of the Carolinas--both sections containing many men of Teutonic race. Among the men who early wandered over Kentucky and Tennessee, before any permanent settlement was attempted, we find the names of George Jager, Michael Stoner, Caspar Mansker, Isaac and Abram Hite, and John and Abraham Bowman. It was Jager who first fired the imagination of Simon Kenton by a description of the wonderfully rich country of " the cane brakes'--Kentucky. Jager had been taken prisoner by the Indians when a child, and had spent years living in their villages and hunting with them; on many of these expeditions he had been upon buffalo hunts in Kentucky, and he described the richness of the country...