ready at once to volunteer for the American service. A movement was instituted to establish a regiment of Hessian deserters, but the plan was not countenanced by Washington.

The exact number of Hessians who made the united colonies their home will never be known. They commonly located in the German settlements, being disliked as a rule by the English settlers, who harbored resentful feelings against them. They never settled in groups large enough to form separate colonies, and were therefore lost in the German population. We depend for information upon insufficient records, such as those of a traveling Rhinelander, who reports that he found many Hessians located in the city of Baltimore, where, he says, one third of the population was German.' In accordance with the tendency of locating with other earlier German settlers, a number of Hessians located at Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. Several of the Hessians were men of learning, such as Julius von Wangenheim, captain of yagers, who wrote a description of American trees and bushes (Göttingen, 1781), and Dr. Johann David Schöpf, military surgeon of Bayreuth, who made a careful study of plants useful in medicine.2

3

Eelking gives the names of twenty-eight officers and subalterns of the Brunswick auxiliary troops who remained in the United States at the close of the Revolutionary War,

1 Nachrichten und Erfahrungen über die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, gesammelt auf seiner Reise in den Jahren 1806 bis 1808. Von einem Rheinländer. (Frankfurt-am-Main, 1812.)

2 He traveled through the United States as far as Florida after the war, became acquainted with G. H. E. Mühlenberg, the botanist, who rendered some assistance to Schöpf in his work, published in Germany in 1787, entitled Materia Medica Americanis Septentrionalis Potissimum Regni Vegetabilis. Cf. Rosengarten, pp. 91-92.

In the work already cited, Die deutschen Hülfstruppen in Nord Amerika im Befreiungskriege, 1776-83.

or deserted previously, or who returned to America after having gone back to Europe with their companies.' Kapp furnishes a careful tabulation of the number of German auxiliary troops in the English service, giving the number that arrived in America and returned to Europe, as fol

Twelve thousand five hundred is therefore the careful estimate of the number of Hessian soldiers who remained in the United States, dead or alive. Certainly one half of the number can be counted as survivors and settlers within the precincts of the United States. If they were all like those of whom we have record, they made good citizens of their adopted country.

The list is reprinted in Der deutsche Pionier, vol. xv, pp. 285–287. 1 Kapp, Soldatenhandel (chap. xi), pp. 209–210.

CHAPTER XII

THE WINNING OF THE WEST

1. THE GERMAN SETTLERS IN KENTUCKY AND TENNESSEE

The early history of the Kentucky settlements. - Germans among the colonists from the Carolinas and the Valley of Virginia — Favorable location of the Germans for early colonization Migratory spirit — The question as to whether any particular national type was superior on the frontier-The frontier creates types - Many instances of Germans as hunters, trappers, and Indian fighters - The three classes of settlers - The Germans' share in the permanent settlement of the Blue Grass Region of Kentucky Statistics gathered from land-records and the United States Bureau of Pensions The Germans settled mainly in the central and western portions of the Blue Grass Region - Evidences of early settlements by Germans in Tennessee.

THE next four chapters will follow the progress of Western settlement from the period succeeding the Revolutionary War to the time when the frontier line disappeared from the map of the United States. The German immigrants of the nineteenth century, just as their predecessors of the eighteenth, followed the frontier line closely, aiding materially in the advance of American civilization to the westward, regardless of the hostility of savage races, or adverse conditions of soil and climate.

The settlement of the great Middle West, the present centre of population of the United States, proceeded through two channels: first, by way of the early settlements in Kentucky and Tennessee, and secondly, by way

of the Ohio River.' As the opening from the southwest came earlier, that will be considered first.

The early history of Kentucky is inseparably linked with the name of Daniel Boone." He was born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and migrated in his eighteenth

1 All roads from the Atlantic States converged upon two points, Fort Pitt (Pittsburg) and Cumberland Gap. There was a road from Philadelphia through the upper and central points of Pennsylvania, by way of Juniata Creek and Fort Ligonier to Pittsburg; another led out from Baltimore, passing Old Town, and Cumberland Fort on the Potomac River, and along Braddock's road to Redstone Old Fort (now Brownsville, Pennsylvania), on the Monongahela River, thence to Pittsburg. The distance from Philadelphia to Pittsburg was about three hundred and twenty miles. From the latter place the settlers boarded a flat-boat and floated down the Ohio River. But the dangers of the water route were so great that if the travelers had little baggage it was far better for them to take the road through the Valley of Virginia to Cumberland Gap. The distance from Fort Washington (now Cincinnati) to Philadelphia by this so-called "Wilderness Road" was almost eight hundred miles, but the traveler was protected for most of the distance, though led through wild country. A military order of 1792 calls this the most direct route between Fort Washington and Philadelphia, i. e., by way of Lexington and Crab Orchard (Kentucky); Cumberland Mountain, Powell Valley, Abingdon, Botetourt, Lexington (Virginia), and Staunton ; Martinsburg (West Virginia) and Hagerstown (Maryland); York and Lancaster (Pennsylvania). See Filson Club Publications, no. 2 (1886); Thomas Speed: The Wilderness Road; a description of the routes of travel by which the pioneers and early settlers first came to Kentucky, pp. 10 ff., 23 ff.

In 1792 the Wilderness Road was improved by private enterprise, the following German names appearing among the subscribers: Jacob Froman (who was the only one, besides Isaac Shelby, who subscribed so large an amount as three pounds), Peter Troutman, Isaac Hite and Abraham Hite, George M. Bedinger, George Muter, George Teagarden (Tiergarten ?). See Filson Club Publications, supra, pp. 48-49.

2 It was claimed for some time by writers on the Germans in the United States that Boone was of German origin. His birth in a county of Pennsylvania where there were many Germans, and the fact that he spoke Pennsylvania German fluently, seem to indicate more than mere acquaintance with Germans. The spelling of his name, ending in e, and resembling "Bohne," a frequent German name, seemed to give some further basis for the supposition. Biographers generally (e. g., Thwaites, Daniel Boone) give English ancestry. Cf. Der deutsche Pionier, vol. x, p. 273.

year to North Carolina, where for some years he lived as a hunter and farmer. About 1769, in company with several frontiersmen, he made a journey to the West for adventure and discovery, and returned after an absence of two years. He had visited the great hunting-grounds, lying between the Ohio on the north, and the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers on the south. That territory the Indians, both of the north and of the south, claimed as their own, but neither dared to have and to hold it. They called it Kan-tuck-kee, "the dark and bloody ground," for it was the scene of battle and bloodshed whenever rival hunters met. Into the struggle for possession of this No Man's Land, the white race soon forced an entrance, Boone's journey, in 1769, marking the beginning of the stubborn war of conquest. After his return, Boone determined to make a settlement in the rich country that he had seen. With his wife and children, and two of his brothers and their families, he migrated to Kentucky. On the way they met five other families and forty well-armed men,' who joined the company. Near the Cumberland Gap they were attacked by Indians, and driven back to the Clinch River, a tributary of the Tennessee.

Several years later the Transylvania Company was founded for the settlement of Kentucky, and Boone was chosen to lead the surveying party. They cut the Wilderness Trail, went far into the interior of Kentucky, and built a stockade fort, called Boonesborough. In 1775 Boone brought his wife, children, and friends, who had remained on the Clinch River, to the settlement on the Kentucky River, named in his honor. Other fortified stations, as Harrodsburg (1774), Logan's Fort, Bryant's

It is more than probable that some of these were pioneers of German descent.