dangerous enterprises requiring discretion and intrepidity. He declined a major's commission and resigned the service December, 1779.*

In 1780 he came to Kentucky, probably accompanied by his kinsman, General William Hardin, who certainly came West that year. While in the State he entered large tracts of land in the names of and for his brothers, Mark and Martin, his brother-in-law, Benjamin Hardin (father of the subject of this biography), as well as for himself. In April, 1786, he removed his family to Kentucky. He was undoubtedly instrumental in the emigration of his kindred thither. It was that emigration which opened to the family the avenues of success, and part of all the fame that its members have won should be placed to his credit.

In this connection it is proper to refer to another who made the name known and honored by the pioneers, and feared by their enemies at that period. General William Hardin, an uncle of the subject of this work, was a native of Virginia, but afterward a citizen of Pennsylvania. Thence he emigrated to Kentucky. In one of his earliest visits he discovered the lands at Hardinsburg and vicinity, and there made a settlement. Block-houses and stockades were erected, and in 1782 he founded the town of Hardinsburg. In laying it off tradition has it, "his eye was his compass, his chain a grape-vine."†

General Hardin soon became known as a hunter and Indian fighter; he had a large frame, great activity, and strength. He was of dauntless courage and resolution-cool, calm, and self-possessed in face of danger. Skilled in all the details of border warfare, he was a natural leader, and gifted in the art of command. In warfare he acted on the principle that the only effectual way to subdue the red man was to kill him. The pioneers, on account of his warlike proclivities and especial hostility to the red man, dubbed him "Indian Bill." The Indians designated him "Big Bill" from his size.

The date of his birth is lost, but he was between thirty and forty years of age when he came to Kentucky. Some incidents related of him will illustrate the character of the man. One morning early, preparing for a hunt, he fired off his gun at the door of his cabin, and began cleaning it. An Indian, intending to take advantage of his defenseless condition, stepped from concealment behind the chimney, aimed his gun, exclaiming, "Hooh, Big Bill!" It was a fatal pause. Hardin knocked off the Indian's gun, and brained him with his own.

*Collins' History, Vol. II., page 315; Annals of the West by Perkins, pages 338-44, 350, 381.
† Letter from Jack Hardin, Esq.

UN

7

“INDIAN BILL" HARDIN'S ADVENTURES.

About 1782, Hardin, in command of about eighty men, engaged in an expedition against a newly-built Indian village on Saline creek, in the present limits of Illinois. The main body of the Indians, about one hundred in number, were encountered near the village, and an obstinate fight took place. At the first fire Hardin was disabled by a shot through the thighs, but disregarding this severe woundbeing unable to stand-he sat on a log during the engagement, giving orders and encouragement to his men, with the utmost coolness. After heavy loss on either side, the savages were repulsed. Hardin was transported by his surviving men to the south side of the Ohio, and, finding refuge at Fort Vienna, only recovered after long suffering. On another occasion, while on picket duty near the station, guarding those at work in a field, he was fired upon by Indians and severely wounded in the neck. Only by the assistance of an intrepid girl named McDonald was he enabled to escape his pursuers, and reach the block-house with his life. His ruling passion was hatred of the Indians. He hunted them as a sportsman hunts game. He lived until the country was freed from Indian depredation, and the larger game killed or driven off. He always carried his rifle, hunting-knife, and tomahawk.* His pioneer costume never varied-hunting-shirt, buckskin trousers, and moccasins. After the admission of Kentucky in the Union, he served in its Legislature. He died in old age, and sleeps in an unmarked and unknown grave, near the town he founded.

The causes that induced the emigration of the Hardin family to Kentucky are readily conjectured. The country generally, east of the Alleghenies, was impoverished by the Revolutionary war; a depreciated currency, prostrate trade, absence of markets, products without buyers, and buyers without money, was a distressful combination. Emigration has been the remedy among all people, from a period long antedating that when the children of Jacob fled from Goshen to the promised land, for unbearable, as well as lesser ills.

Accounts of General Hardin's adventures in the Far West (as it was then called) were repeated in the vicinity of his old Pennsylvania home. Colonel John Hardin had returned to tell of the country west of the Alleghenies; to his enterprising spirit there was a charm about the hills and valleys and forests and streams, aye, about its very dangers, that would have escaped the eye of one less intrepid. only the Hardins, but other Pennsylvanians, as well also, as their neighbors in Virginia, had their eyes turned hopefully to the West.

Not

* Mr. Collins' History and an address by Wallace Gruelle, Esq., have been freely used in this notice

of General Hardin.

In 1784, John Filson, a native of Pennsylvania, published his book, "The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucke," which circulated considerably in the Atlantic States. In this work the pleasing exaggerations of rumor received "black and white" confirmation. The author reveled in the beauty of forest and hill and stream and valley. A fertile soil was carpeted with a green sward of wild rye, clover, and buffalo grass. There were trees that supplied "excellent sugar;" the honey locust that made good beer; the coffee tree that bore a "pod in which was inclosed coffee;" and, lastly, a pawpaw tree which bore “a fine fruit much like a cucumber in shape and size, that tasted sweet." These rosy-colored arguments were of themselves irresistible. So it was, whatever the inducement, between 1786 and 1790 a generation of Hardins, with their wives and little ones, quit their homes on the Monongahela in quest of new ones in the distant "dark and bloody ground."

The following reference to the coming of the Hardins to Kentucky is from the pen of the late Mark Hardin, of Shelbyville, son of the patriotic Colonel John Hardin. It was written in 1869, when the writer was in extreme old age, and when, to use his own language

"Of the male members of the family, like Job's messenger, I am the only one left to make this note of events. These seven children," said he, referring to the offspring of Martin Hardin, of Fauquier, "Virginians by birth, all removed to Kentucky-the last of these, Martin, in 1787—and al! but Rosannah settled in the same neighborhood. John Hardin settled on Pleasant Run, a branch of Beech Fork, in April, 1786, then nearly east of what is now Springfield. From his residence a line west will take us to Springfield, about three miles. From his residence in a line inclining to south-west, about half a mile, Martin Hardin settled; same course, about three miles further, Lydia Wickliffe settled; same course, four miles further, Mark Hardin settled. These families settled on their own land-never removed or sold their dwellings, but left them to their heirs. Not one of them ever lost an acre of their land.

"This line of ten miles, reaching diagonally between Springfield and Lebanon, was occupied by the same Hardin family for more than sixty years. Martin Hardin, the youngest of them, died some twenty years since, in the ninety-second year of his age.

"When I last visited him, and we had talked over many of my boyhood and his manhood experiences in life, he said to me: Mark, I am now in the ninety-second year of my age. I suppose I am the oldest living man of the tribe, and I never knew a Hardin that was a liar.

"I never knew a Hardin that was a thief, I never knew a Hardin that was a coward, and your father was the noblest of them all.' The tears then ran down his cheeks as they had done for the fifty previous years whenever he spoke of his brother John after he was killed by the Indians in 1792. "An entire family there holding their possessions and rearing families will, of necessity, make an impression in the surrounding community.

"Of the younger brood I can say, whether of the name of Hardin or of any other name, I know that they are men-feel that they are men amongst the wisest and amongst the best.

"It will suit here to state that a few years since my granddaughter, Mrs. Bernoudy, in St. Louis, met with Bishop Spaulding, who was raised near Lebanon, Ky., and hearing that she was of this family, remarked that the Hardins were a strong-minded family, but obstinate.'

"Just here let me ask the question, if, in the providence of God, I have been given a strong mind to discern the truth, and integrity of purpose to maintain the right, may I not proudly wear the epithet of obstinacy? Bunyan would call it ‘valiant for the truth.' Thus viewed, we accept the soft impeachment as bringing with it no reproach. And, before I leave this branch of the subject, let me say to all of our lineage, whether a Hardin, a Wickliffe, a Helm, a McHenry, a Harwood, a Cofer, or any other name, remember what your old uncle, Martin Hardin, has said of them; and remember, also, that had it not been for the massacre of St. Bartholomew, we, the Hardin family, might now have been Frenchmen instead of Americans.

"In the year 1786, then a boy of four years of age, I was landed in the woods near a spring, some three miles east of where Springfield was afterward built. It was then the District of Kentucky, part of Virginia. Since then the Constitution of the United States was adopted, and has since been accounted of no binding force. Since then the constitution of the Presbyterian church has been adopted and violated. I had in early manhood sworn to support the one, and in mature middle age vowed allegiance to the other. I have, in good faith, endeavored to fulfill my obligations to each of them as God has given judgment and strength to do so. And now, in my eightyeighth year, to each one of you separately, and to all of us collectively, remember that each of us owes it to ourselves and to each other to maintain the character that has been transmitted to us. When there is a question of right, let us be obstinate in maintaining that right, and let us always be very obstinate in upholding the truth and prove our lineage true.'

CHAPTER II.

TH

BIRTH AND EARLY LIFE.

HE parents of Mr. Hardin were Benjamin, Sr., and Sarah Hardin. They were cousins and both natives of Virginia. The father of this Benjamin bore the same Christian name, and was of Huguenot descent. Mr. Hardin's father was a plain, quiet, sensible, honest man, not a little deferential to his wife. He was a typical backwoodsman, brave and hardy, with a strong inclination for Indian fighting— one of the ordinary employments of his day. After his marriage to Sarah Hardin (which occurred in Virginia), they removed northward and located, as it proved, within the limits of Pennsylvania, which was perhaps inadvertent. Here his children were born. In March, 1788, he removed with all his family (save a daughter who had married) to Kentucky, stopping in what was then Nelson, but in that part of which Washington county was subsequently created. His farm, where he settled on his arrival, where he lived (the cultivation of which was his lifelong pursuit), where he died, and where his ashes rest, was two miles from Springfield, adjacent to the public road from that place to Lebanon.

Sarah Hardin, the wife of Benjamin Hardin, Sr., was born in Fauquier county, Va., and there dwelt until she attained young womanhood. The following reference to her early life is from the pen of

another:

"In childhood she listened with thrilling heart to the stories of the Huguenots as recounted by her aged grandfather, Martin Hardin, who, a mere youth at the time, fled from France within a few days allowed for escape by the revocation of the edict of Nantes. In old age, on the borders of ninety, with head erect and clear blue eyes brightening and glowing, she told the story to her grandchildren, who asked no greater privilege than to stand by her knee and listen to the reminiscences of her youth-to stories of those revolutionary times that developed strong-hearted women as well as brave men; stories she had to tell of the war with the Indians; of Braddock's defeat; of how she stood with her father on the lawn in front of his house in Virginia watching the messenger of evil tidings go by reeling with. fatigue and haste as he urged on his nearly-exhausted horse, to her father's call drearily responding, without slacking his pace, The army is defeated.