threatened the extinction of Virginia's great colonial movement into the southern half of this black forest of the West.
We have refrained from using the name Kentucky long enough, perhaps, to accomplish the purpose of impressing upon the reader's mind the part Virginia and the Virginians played in the creation of the earliest settlement in the West, first known as the county, then the state, of Kentucky. As Professor Shaler has said: "She owes to Virginia the most of the people she received during the half century when her society was taking shape: her institutions, be they good or evil, her ideals of life, her place in the nation's history, are all as immediately derived from her great Mother Virginia as are an individual man's from the mother who bore him."
The name Kentucky, Kentuckgin, Kantucky, Kentucke, Caintuck, as it was variously spelled, may have been derived from an Iroquois word Ken-ta-kee, which means "among the meadows." When, in the olden days, only the long, painted canoes of the Iroquois could be moored in safety
