The bulk of those fleeing, however, were simply frightened out of the country. There seems no reason to doubt[13] that the establishment of the strong, well-backed settlement of Boonsborough was all that prevented the abandonment of Kentucky at this time; and when such was the effect of a foray by small and scattered war parties of Indians from tribes nominally at peace with us,[14] it can easily be imagined how hopeless it would have been to have tried to settle the land had there still been in existence a strong hostile confederacy such as that presided over by Cornstalk. Beyond doubt the restless and vigorous frontiersmen would ultimately have won their way into the coveted western lands; yet had it not been for the battle of the Great Kanawha, Boon and Henderson could not, in 1775, have planted their colony in Kentucky; and had it not been for Boon and Henderson, it is most unlikely that the land would have been settled at all until after the Revolutionary war, when perhaps it might have been British soil. Boon was essentially a type, and possesses his greatest interest for us because he represents so well the characteristics as well as the life-work of his fellow backwoodsmen; still, it is unfair not to bear in mind also the leading part he played and the great services he rendered to the nation.
The incomers soon recovered from the fright into which they had been thrown by the totally unexpected Indian attack; but the revengeful anger it excited in their breasts did not pass away. They came from a class already embittered by long warfare with their forest foes; they hoarded up their new wrongs in minds burdened with the memories of countless other outrages; and it is small wonder that repeated and often unprovoked treachery at last excited in them a fierce and indiscriminate hostility to all the red-skinned race. They had come to settle on ground to which, as far as it was possible, the Indian title had been by fair treaty extinguished. They ousted no Indians from the lands they took; they had had neither the chance nor the wish to themselves do wrong; in their eyes the attack on the part of the Indians was as wanton as it was cruel; and in all probability this view was correct, and their assailants were actuated more by the desire for scalps and plunder than by resentment at the occupation of hunting grounds to which they could have had little claim. In fact, throughout the history of the discovery and first settlement of Kentucky, the original outrages and murders were committed by the Indians on the whites, and not by the whites on the Indians. In the gloomy and ferocious wars that ensued, the wrongs done by each side were many and great.