Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 6).djvu/161

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KENTUCKY IN THE REVOLUTION
161

secured. Hamilton immediately began to plan the invasion of Pennsylvania and the conquest of Pittsburg. The campaign was condemned by his superiors in the East, and was forgotten by its originator—when the news of a bold invasion of his own territory by a Virginian army suddenly reached his ears.

The Transylvania Company came silently but suddenly to an end when the Kentuckians elected George Rogers Clark and Gabriel John Jones members of the Virginian assembly, for the assembly erected the county of Kentucky out of the land purchased by Henderson at Fort Watauga in 1775. Upon bringing this about, Clark, a native of Virginia and a hero of Dunmore's War, returned to Kentucky nourishing greater plans. With clear eyes he saw that the increasing affiliation of Indian and British interests meant that England, even though she might be unsuccessful in the East, could keep up an interminable and disastrous warfare "along the rear of the colonies," as long as she held forts on the northern edge of the Black Forest. Clark sent spies northward, who gained informa-