JAMES HARROD, OF HARRODSBURa. 238 



the red man met, would have poorly become the voluptuous 

 court, and the bleak, wintry winds would scarce have put a 

 shirt on warm. 



There was no dodging here, the axe was first swung by 

 brawny arms, and then a shelter rose ; and, before no dainty 

 strength that fed on sylabubs, would those tall forests bow, 

 that bread might grow ! No shaky nerve, or eye dulled in 

 the sickly glare of show, could hold the heavy rifle in a vice- 

 like grasp, and guide it clear and sure as death's own arrow 

 flies. 



Here action was eloquence, with deeds for words, and the 

 glib and oily art of demagogues learns no such language; 

 the axe spoke louder than the honied phrase ; and forests, 

 thundering in their fall, rolled out the grandest sentences : 

 the rifle cracked the sharpest jokes, and staggering bufi'aloes 

 roared bathos best upon the bloody plain ! 



One of those men of nature, whose large brain and large 

 heart, hard hands and giant thews, best fitted them to cope in 

 mastery with such conditions, was James Harrod, the founder 

 of Harrodsburg, Kentucky, and one of the noblest of the 

 early companions of Boone. 



Harrod was one of those persons who make their appear- 

 ance in the world much as an oak tree comes into it : nobody 

 hears it grow, sees it grow, or knows that it is, and has a 

 being until suddenly a people look up and find themselves 

 sheltered beneath its boughs, and nourished by the nuts it 

 rains in benediction upon their heads. 



So little was known of the youth James Harrod, that the 

 histories of that time do not even name the colony from whence 

 he came, nor even the precise year in which he emigrated ; 

 they only know that he came early with Boone, was most 

 probably a Virginian, went back to that State and returned 

 to Kentucky in 1774; joined Colonel Lewis and his follow- 

 ers on the way, and was with them in the battle at the mouth 

 of the Kenhawa, and that in the next year he settled himself 



