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Forbes, with seven thousand men, left Carlisle, Penn., for the west. corps in advance, principally of Highland Scotch, under Major Grant, were, on the 13th of September, defeated in the vicinity of Fort Duquesne, on the site of Pittsburg. A short time after, the French and Indians made an unsuccessful attack upon the advanced guard, under Colonel Boquet.

In November the commandant of Fort Duquesne, unable to cope with the superior force approaching under Forbes, abandoned the fortress, and descended to New Orleans. On his route he erected Fort Massac, so called in honor of M. Massac, who superintended its construction. It was upon the Ohio, within forty miles of its mouth, and within the limits of Illinois. Forbes repaired Fort Duquesne, and changed its name to Fort Pitt, in honor of the English prime minister.

The English were now for the first time in possession of the Upper Ohio. In the spring they established several posts in that region, prominent among which was Fort Burd, or Redstone Old Fort, on the site of Brownsville.

Owing to the treachery of Governor Lyttleton, in 1760, by which twenty-two Cherokee chiefs on an embassy of peace were made prisoners at Fort George, on the Savannah, that nation flew to arms, and for a while desolated the frontiers of Virginia and the Carolinas. Fort Loudon, in East Tennessee, having been beseiged by the Indians, the garrison capitulated on the 7th of August, and on the day afterwards, while on the route to Fort George, were attacked and the greater part massacred. In the summer of 1761 Colonel Grant invaded their country, and compelled them to sue for peace. On the north the most brilliant success had attended the British arms. Ticonderoga, Crown Point, Fort Niagara, and Quebec were taken in 1759, and the next year Montreal fell, and with it all of Canada.

By the treaty of Paris, in 1763, France gave up her claim to New France and Canada, embracing all the country east of the Mississippi from its source to the Bayou Iberville. The remainder of her Mississippi possessions, embracing Louisiana west of the Mississippi, and the Island of Orleans, she soon after secretly ceded to Spain, which terminated the dominion of France on this continent, and her vast plans for empire.

At this period Lower Louisiana had become of considerable importance. The explorations of La Salle in Lower Mississippi country were renewed in 1697 by Lemoine D'Iberville, a brave French naval officer. Sailing with two vessels, he entered the Mississippi in March, 1698, by the Bayou Iberville. He built forts on the Bay of Biloxi, and at Mobile, both of which were deserted for the Island of Dauphine, which for years was the head-quarters of the colony. He also erected Fort Balize, at the mouth of the river, and fixed on the site of Fort Rosalie; which latter became the scene of a bloody Indian war.

After his death, in 1706, Louisiana was but little more than a wilderness; and a vain search for gold, and trading in furs, rather than the substantial pursuits of agriculture, allured the colonists, and much time was lost in journeys of discovery and in collecting furs among distant

tribes. Of the occupied lands, Biloxi was a barren sand, and the soil of the Isle of Dauphine poor. Bienville, the brother and successor of D'Iberville, was at the fort on the delta of the Mississippi, where he and his soldiers were liable to inundations, and held joint possession with mosquitoes, frogs, snakes, and alligators.

In 1712 Antoine de Crozat, an East India merchant, of vast wealth, purchased a grant of the entire country, with exclusive right of commerce for sixteen years. But in 1717, the speculation having resulted in his ruin, and to the injury of the colonists, he surrendered his privileges. Soon after, a number of other adventurers, under the name of the Mississippi Company, obtained from the French Government a charter which gave them all the rights of sovereignty, except the bare title, including a complete monopoly of the trade and the mines. Their expectations were chiefly from the mines; and on the strength of a former traveler, Nicolas Perrot, having discovered a copper mine in the valley of St. Peter's, the directors of the company assigned to the soil of Louisiana silver and gold, and to the mud of the Mississippi diamonds and pearls. The notorious Law, who then resided at Paris, was the secret agent of the company. To form its capital, its shares were sold at five hundred livres each; and such was the speculating mania of the times, that in a short time more than a hundred millions were realized. Although this proved ruinous to individuals, yet the colony was greatly benefited by the consequent emigration, and agriculture and commerce flourished.

In 1719 Renault, an agent of the Mississippi Company, left France with about two hundred miners and emigrants, to carry out the mining schemes of the company. He bought five hundred slaves at St. Domingo, to work the mines, which he conveyed to Illinois in 1720. He established himself a few miles above Kaskaskia, and founded there the village of St. Philip's. Extravagant expectations existed in France of his probable success in obtaining gold and silver. He sent out exploring parties in various sections of Illinois and Missouri. His explorations extended to the banks of the Ohio and Kentucky Rivers, and even to the Cumberland valley in Tennessee, where, at "French Lick," on the site of Nashville, the French established a trading post. Although Renault was wofully disappointed in not discovering extensive mines of gold or silver, yet he made various discoveries of lead; among which were the mines north of Potosi, and those on the St. Francois. He eventually turned his whole attention to the smelting of lead, of which he made considerable quantities and shipped to France. He remained in the country until 1744. Nothing of consequence was again done in mining until after the American revolution.

In 1718 Bienville laid out the town of New Orleans, on the plan of Rochefort, France. Some four years after, the bankruptcy of Law threw the colony into the greatest confusion, and occasioned wide-spread ruin in France, where speculation had been carried to an extreme unknown before.

The expenditures for Louisiana were consequently stopped; but the colony had now gained strength to struggle for herself. Louisiana was then divided into nine cantons, of which Arkansas and Illinois formed each one.

About this time the colony had considerable difficulty with the Indian tribes, and were involved in wars with the Chickasaws and the Natchez. This later named tribe were finally completely conquered. The remnant of them dispersed among other Indians, so that that once powerful people, as a distinct race, was entirely lost. Their name alone survives as that of a flourishing city. Tradition related singular stories of the Natchez. It was believed that they emigrated from Mexico, and were kindred to the Incas of Peru. The Natchez alone, of all the Indian tribes, had a consecrated temple, where a perpetual fire was maintained by appointed guardians. Near the temple, on an artificial mound, stood the dwelling of their chief, called the Great Sun, who was supposed to be descended from that luminary, and all around were grouped the dwellings of the tribe. His power was absolute; the dignity was hereditary, and transmitted exclusively through the female line, and the race of nobles was so distinct that usage had moulded language into the forms of reverence.

In 1732 the Mississippi Company relinquished their charter to the king, after holding possession fourteen years. At this period Louisiana had five thousand whites and twenty-five hundred blacks. Agriculture was improving in all the nine cantons, particularly in Illinois, which was considered the granary of the colony. Louisiana continued to advance until the war broke out with England in 1755, which resulted in the overthrow of the French dominion.

Immediately after the peace of 1763, all the old French forts in the west, as far as Green Bay, were repaired and garrisoned with British troops. Agents and surveyors, too, were making examinations of the finest lands east and northeast of the Ohio. Judging from the past, the Indians were satisfied that the British intended to possess the whole country. The celebrated Ottowa chief, Pontiac, burning with hatred against the English, in that year formed a general league with the western tribes, and by the middle of May all the western posts had fallen, or were closely besieged by the Indians, and the whole frontier, for almost a thousand miles, suffered from the merciless fury of savage warfare. Treaties of peace were made with different tribes of Indians in the year following, at Niagara, by Sir William Johnson; at Detroit or vicinity, by General Bradstreet; and in what is now Coshocton county, Ohio, by Colonel Boquet; at the German Flats, on the Mohawk, with the Six Nations and their confederates. By these treaties extensive tracts were ceded by the Indians, in New York and Pennsylvania, and south of Lake Erie.

Peace having been concluded, the excitable frontier population began to cross the mountains. Small settlements were formed on the main routes, extending north towards Fort Pitt and south to the bead waters of the Holston and Clinch, in the vicinity of southwestern Virginia. in 1766 a town was laid out in the vicinity of Fort Pitt. Military land warrants had been issued in great numbers, and a perfect mania for western land had taken possession of the people of the middle colonies. The treaty made by Sir William Johnson at Fort Stanwix, on the site of Utica, New York, in October, 1768, with the Six Nations and their confed

erates, and those of Hard Labor and Lochaber, made with the Cherokees, afforded a pretext under which the settlements were advanced. It was now falsely claimed that the Indian title was extinguished east and south of the Ohio, to an indefinite extent, and the spirit of emigration and speculation in land greatly increased. Among the land companies formed at this time was the "Mississippi Company," of which George Washington was an active member.

Up to this period very little was known by the English of the country south of the Ohio. In 1754 James M. Bride, with some others, had passed down the Ohio in canoes, and, landing at the mouth of the Kentucky River, marked the initials of their names, and the date, on the barks of trees. On their return, they were the first to give a particular account of the beauty and richness of the country to the inhabitants of the British settlements. No further notice seems to have been taken of Kentucky until the year 1767, when John Finlay, an Indian trader, with others, passed through a part of the rich lands of Kentucky, then called by the Indians "the Dark and Bloody Ground." Finlay, returning to North Carolina, fired the curiosity of his neighbors by the reports of the discoveries he had made. In consequence of this information, Colonel Daniel Boone, in company with Finlay, Stewart, Holden, Monay, and Cool, set out from their residence on the Yadkin, in North Carolina, May 1, 1769, and after a long and fatiguing march over a mountainous and pathless wilderness, arrived on the Red River. Here, from the top of an eminence, Boone and his companions first beheld a distant view of the beautiful lands of Kentucky. The plains and forests abounded with wild beasts of every kind; deer and elk were common; the buffalo were seen in herds, and the plains covered with the richest verdure. The glowing descriptions of these adventurers inflamed the imaginations of the borderers, and their own sterile hills and mountains beyond lost their charms when compared to the fertile plains of this newly-discovered Paradise in the West.

In 1770 Ebenezer Silas and Jonathan Zane settled Wheeling. In 1771, such was the rush of emigration to Western Pennsylvania and Western Virginia, in the region of Upper Ohio, that every kind of breadstuff became so scarce that, for several months, a great part of the population were obliged to subsist entirely on meats, roots, vegetables, and milk, to the entire exclusion of all breadstuffs; and hence that period was long after known as "the starving year." Settlers, enticed by the beauty of the Cherokee country, emigrated to East Tennessee, and hundreds of families also moved farther south, to the mild climate of West Florida, which at this period extended to the Mississippi. In the summer of 1773 Frankfort and Louisville, Kentucky, were laid out. The next year was signalized by "Dunmore's war," which temporarily

checked the settlements.

In the summer of 1774 several other parties of surveyors and hunters entered Kentucky, and James Harrod erected a dwelling, the first erected by whites in the country, on or near the site of Harrodsburg, around which afterwards arose Harrod Station." In the year 1775 Colonel Richard Henderson, a native of North Carolina, in behalf of himself and

hassociates, purchased of the Cherokees all the country laying between. the Cumberland River and Cumberland Mountains and Kentucky River, and south of the Ohio, which now comprises more than half of the State of Kentucky. The new country he named Transylvania. The first legislature sat at Boonesborough, and formed an independent government, on liberal and rational principles. Henderson was very active in granting lands to new settlers. The legislature of Virginia subsequently crushed his schemes; they claimed the sole right to purchase lands from the Indians, and declared his purchase null and void. But as some compensation for the services rendered in opening the wilderness, the legislature granted to the proprietors a tract of land, twelve miles square, on the Ohio, below the mouth of Green River.

In 1775 Daniel Boone, in the employment of Henderson, laid out the town and fort afterwards called Boonesborough. From this time Boonesborough and Harrodsburg became the nucleus and support of emigration and settlement in Kentucky. In May another fort was also built, which was under the command of Colonel Benjamin Logan, and named Logan's Fort. It stood on the site of Stanford, in Lincoln county, and became an important post.

In 1776 the jurisdiction of Virginia was formally extended over the colony of Transylvania, which was organized into a county named Kentucky, and the first court was held at Harrodsburg in the spring of 1777. At this time the war of the revolution was in full progress, and the early settlers of Kentucky were particularly exposed to the incursions of the Indian allies of Great Britain, a detailed account of which is elsewhere given in this volume. The early French settlements in the Illinois country, now being in possession of that power, formed important points around which the British assembled the Indians, and instigated them to murderous incursions against the pioneer population.

The year 1779 was marked, in Kentucky, by the passage of the Vir. ginia land laws. At this time there existed claims of various kinds to the western lands. Commissioners were appointed to examine and give judgment upon these various claims as they might be presented. These having been provided for, the residue of the rich lands of Kentucky were in the market. As a consequence of the passage of these laws, a vast number of emigrants crossed the mountains into Kentucky to locate land warrants; and in the the years 1779, 1780, and 1781, the great and absorbing topic in Kentucky was to enter, survey, and obtain patents for the richest lands, and this, too, in the face of all the horrors and dangers of an Indian war.

Although the main features of the Virginia land laws were just and liberal, yet a great defect existed in their not providing for a general survey of the country by the parent state, and its subdivision into sections and parts of sections. Each warrant holder being required to make his own survey, and having the privilege of locating according to his pleasure, interminable confusion arose from want of precision in the boundaries. In unskilful hands, entries, surveys, and patents were piled upon each other, overlapping and crossing in inextricable confusion; hence, when the country became densely populated, arose vexatious law.