In 1780 one of our pioneers who afterwards became our first governor, Colonel Isaac Shelby, was again in Kentucky locating lands that some time before he had marked out and improved, when he heard of the surrender of Charleston. A man with a soul so fired with patriotism could not be contented not to answer his country's call. He hurried home, secured volunteers, and did signal service in both North and South Carolina, and in Georgia. In a measure he overcame the defeat of Gates at Camden; by his momentous move, though not in supreme command, Colonel Shelby will ever be known as the hero of Kings Mountain, where the enemy surrendered after Ferguson with seventy-five officers and men had been killed.
This was at the darkest hour of the Revolution and has been called "the first link in the great chain of events in the South that established the independence of the United States." These conquests by Shelby in the South, coupled with those of Clark at Kaskaskia, Cahokia, and Vincennes, were as important in both immediate and future results as any that illumine the pages of the Revolution.
To view Kentucky in its primeval beauty and rugged grandeur; to talk face to face with Boone, Harrod, Todd, Cowan, and Kennedy, those hardy hunters who blazed the way and changed the uncertain trail to a broad thoroughfare through the western wilds; to experience the difficulties and encounter the dangers of those dreadful days--were experiences for one who would essay to write a history of the country, the times, and the people. Yet such were the advantages enjoyed by Kentucky's earliest historian, John Filson.
Born in Pennsylvania in 1747, given a common school and academic education, lured either by the spirit of adventure, the locating of lands, or the enthusiastic reports of the far-famed "second paradise" with its "happy climate and plentiful soil," Filson reached Lexington in 1782. Here he succeeded "Wildcat McKinney" as the second teacher in this "Athens of the West."
While engaged in teaching, Filson was securing information that was to give to the world, not only the first history of Kentucky, but the first authentic account of that vast, transmontane wilderness about which so many exciting experiences had been recounted.