Daniel Boone was an American pioneer and frontiersman whose exploits made him one of the first folk heroes of the United States. He became famous for his exploration and settlement of Kentucky, which was then beyond the western borders of the Thirteen Colonies. In 1775, Boone blazed the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap and into Kentucky, in the face of resistance from American Indians, for whom the area was a traditional hunting ground. He founded Boonesborough, one of the first English-speaking settlements west of the Appalachian Mountains. By the end of the 18th century, more than 200,000 people had entered Kentucky by following the route marked by Boone.
The Transylvania Colony, also referred to as the Transylvania Purchase, was a short-lived, extra-legal colony founded in early 1775 by North Carolina land speculator Richard Henderson, who formed and controlled the Transylvania Company. Henderson and his investors had reached an agreement to purchase a vast tract of Cherokee lands west of the southern and central Appalachian Mountains through the acceptance of the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals with most leading Cherokee chieftains then controlling these lands. In exchange for the land the tribes received goods worth, according to the estimates of some scholars, about 10,000 British pounds. To further complicate matters, this frontier land was also claimed by the Virginia Colony and a southern portion by Province of North Carolina.
The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 is a historical romance novel written by James Fenimore Cooper in 1826. It is the second book of the Leatherstocking Tales pentalogy and the best known to contemporary audiences. The Pathfinder, published 14 years later in 1840, is its sequel; its prequel, The Deerslayer, was published a year after The Pathfinder. The Last of the Mohicans is set in 1757, during the French and Indian War, when France and Great Britain battled for control of North America. During this war, both the French and the British used Native American allies, but the French were particularly dependent, as they were outnumbered in the Northeast frontier areas by the British. Specifically, the events of the novel are set immediately before, during, and after the Siege of Fort William Henry.
Lord Dunmore's War, also known as Dunmore's War, was a brief conflict in fall 1774 between the British Colony of Virginia and the Shawnee and Mingo in the trans-Appalachian region of the colony south of the Ohio River. Broadly, the war included events between May and October 1774. The governor of Virginia during the conflict was John Murray, 4th Earl of Dunmore, who in May 1774, asked the House of Burgesses to declare a state of war with the Indians and call out the Virginia militia.
James Robertson was an American explorer, soldier and Indian agent, and one of the founding fathers of what became the State of Tennessee. An early companion of explorer Daniel Boone, Robertson helped establish the Watauga Association in the early 1770s, and to defend Fort Watauga from an attack by Cherokee in 1776. In 1779, he co-founded what is now Nashville, and was instrumental in the settlement of Middle Tennessee. He served as a brigadier general in the Southwest Territory militia in the early 1790s, and as an Indian Commissioner in later life.
The Wilderness Road was one of two principal routes used by colonial and early national era settlers to reach Kentucky from the East. Although this road goes through the Cumberland Gap into southern Kentucky and northern Tennessee, the other is sometimes called the "Cumberland Road" because it started in Fort Cumberland in Maryland. Despite Kentucky Senator Henry Clay's advocacy of this route, early in the 19th century, the northern route was selected for the National Road, connecting near Washington, Pennsylvania into the Ohio Valley of northern Kentucky and Ohio.
The Leatherstocking Tales is a series of five novels by American writer James Fenimore Cooper, set in the eighteenth-century era of development in the primarily former Iroquois areas in central New York. Each novel features Natty Bumppo, a frontiersman known to European-American settlers as "Leatherstocking", "The Pathfinder", and "the trapper". Native Americans call him "Deerslayer", "La Longue Carabine", and "Hawkeye".
Blackfish, was a Native American leader, war chief of the Chillicothe band of the Shawnee tribe.
Karl Ferdinand Wimar, was a German-American painter who concentrated on Native Americans in the West and the great herds of buffalo.
Hanging Maw, or Uskwa'li-gu'ta in Cherokee, was the leading chief of the Overhill Cherokee from 1788 to 1794. They were located in present-day southeastern Tennessee. He became chief following the death of Old Tassel, and the abandonment of the traditional capital at Chota after raids by European Americans.
The siege of Boonesborough was a military engagement which took place in September 1778 during the American Revolutionary War. On September 7, Shawnee chief Blackfish, who was allied to the British, led an attack on the Kentucky settlement of Boonesborough. Months before the battle, Blackfish had captured and adopted Daniel Boone, the founder of Boonesborough. Boone escaped the Shawnees in time to lead the defense of the settlement. Blackfish's siege was unsuccessful and was lifted after eleven days. Boone was then court-martialed by fellow officers who suspected him of harboring Loyalist sympathies. He was acquitted, but soon left the settlement.
Richard Callaway was an American frontiersman, military officer, politician, and hunter who was one of the first white settlers in modern-day Kentucky. Born in Essex County, Virginia, Callaway joined Daniel Boone in 1775 in marking the Wilderness Road into central Kentucky, becoming one of the founders of Boonesborough, Kentucky. He took part in organizing the short-lived Transylvania Colony. In 1776, two of Callaway's daughters, along with Daniel Boone's Jemima, were abducted outside Boonesborough by Cherokee and Shawnee raiding party. Callaway led one of a group of settlers in the successful rescue of the girls. His nephew Flanders Callaway later married Jemima Boone. In April 1777, Callaway and John Todd were elected to the Virginia legislature as burgesses from Kentucky County, Virginia.
A longhunter was an 18th-century explorer and hunter who made expeditions into the American frontier for as much as six months at a time.
The Cherokee–American wars, also known as the Chickamauga Wars, were a series of raids, campaigns, ambushes, minor skirmishes, and several full-scale frontier battles in the Old Southwest from 1776 to 1794 between the Cherokee and American settlers on the frontier. Most of the events took place in the Upper South region. While the fighting stretched across the entire period, there were extended periods with little or no action.
"Indian Reserve" is a historical term for the largely uncolonized land in North America that was claimed by France, ceded to Great Britain through the Treaty of Paris (1763) at the end of the Seven Years' War—also known as the French and Indian War—and set aside for the First Nations in the Royal Proclamation of 1763. The British government had contemplated establishing an Indian barrier state in a portion of the reserve west of the Appalachian Mountains, bounded by the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and the Great Lakes. British officials aspired to establish such a state even after the region was assigned to the United States in the Treaty of Paris (1783) ending the American Revolutionary War, but abandoned their efforts in 1814 after losing military control of the region during the War of 1812.
Nathaniel "Natty" Bumppo is a fictional character and the protagonist of James Fenimore Cooper's pentalogy of novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales.
Rebecca Bryan Boone was an American pioneer and the wife of famed frontiersman Daniel Boone. She began her life in the Colony of Virginia (1606–1776), and at the age of ten moved with her grandparents and extended family to the wilderness of the Province of North Carolina. It was there that she met her future husband, Daniel Boone. Rebecca Boone raised ten of her own children and eight nephews and nieces that she and Daniel had adopted. Since Daniel was away for extended hunting and exploration trips, sometimes for several years at a time, Boone generally raised and protected their eighteen children by herself. Living in the frontier, and needing to be self-reliant, she was a healer, midwife, sharpshooter, gardener, tanner, and weaver. The family was subject to attacks by Native Americans as their land was encroached upon by white settlers and by bands of white men, called highwaymen, who attacked settlers. Several times she and her family left their home for shelter and protection in nearby forts and in one case lived several years in Culpeper County, Colony of Virginia, during the Anglo-Cherokee War.
James John Floyd (1750–1783) was an early settler of St. Matthews, Kentucky, and helped lay out Louisville. In Kentucky he served as a Colonel of the Kentucky Militia in which he participated in raids with George Rogers Clark and later became one of the first judges of Kentucky.
Squire Boone's Station, also known as Painted Stone Station, was an 18th-century settlement in Kentucky in the United States. It was established in late 1779 or in the spring of 1780 by Squire Boone, Daniel Boone's pioneer brother, on the Clear Fork of Brashear's Creek 2 miles (3.2 km) north of present-day Shelbyville. Its alternate name came from the creekside rock painted with Boone's name and the date of his visit in 1776 when he was first scouting and claiming the area. Squire Boone's Station was the first large settlement in present-day Shelby County and counted Capt. Robert Tyler among its residents.
Lura Harris Craighead (1858–1926) was an American author and parliamentarian of the American South. Actively involved with civic and club work, she served as president of the Alabama Federation of Women's Clubs.
