158 The Winning of the West 



away. 66 In the same year a blockhouse was at- 

 tacked while the children were playing outside. The 

 Indians in their sudden rush killed one settler, 

 wounded four, and actually got inside the house; 

 yet three were killed or disabled, and they were 

 driven out by the despairing fury of the remaining 

 whites, the women fighting together with the men. 

 Then the savages instantly fled, but they had killed 

 and scalped, or carried off, ten of the children. Be 

 it remembered that these instances are taken at ran- 

 dom from among hundreds of others, extending 

 over a series of years longer than the average life. 

 The Indians warred with the odds immeasurably 

 in their favor. The Ohio was the boundary between 

 their remaining hunting - grounds and the lands 

 where the whites had settled. In Kentucky alone 

 this frontier was already seventy miles in length. 67 



66 McKee was the commander at the fort ; the blockhouse 

 was owned by Col. Andrew Donelly ; Hanlon and Prior were 

 the names of the two young men. This happened in May, 

 1778. For the anecdotes of personal prowess in this chapter 

 see De Haas, or else Kercheval, McClung, Doddridge, and 

 the fifty other annalists of those Western wars, who repeat 

 many of the same stories. All relate facts of undoubted au- 

 thenticity and wildly improbable tales, resting solely on 

 tradition, with exactly the same faith. The chronological 

 order of these anecdotes being unimportant, I have grouped 

 them here. It must always be remembered that both the 

 men and the incidents described are interesting chiefly as 

 examples; the old annalists give many hundreds of such 

 anecdotes, and there must have been thousands more that 

 they did not relate. 



61 Virginia State Papers, I, 437. Letter of Col. John Floyd. 

 The Kentuckians, he notices, trust militia more than they do 

 regulars. 



