John Filson

During colonial times, the frontier was still east of the Appalachian Mountains. Knowing that unexplored land lay to the west of this barrier, certain business interests employed guides to lead settlers into these unclaimed regions and develop the land. A lawyer, Richard Henderson, and the Transylvania Company hired one such guide, Daniel Boone, to cross the Appalachians and open up Kentucky and establish it as the fourteenth colony. Native Americans were known to inhabit the western lands and Boone negotiated a treaty with the Cherokees in which he bought 20 million acres of unseen land. Boone then led a party of settlers from Tennessee through the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachians and established the town of Boonesborough in Kentucky.

But the treaty with the Cherokees had left out other tribes living in the area like the warlike Shawnee. The Shawnee...