Memorial Inscription.

In Honor of

THE WOMEN OF BRYAN'S STATION,

Who, on the 16th of August, 1782, faced a Savage Host in Ambush, And, with a Heroic Courage and a Sublime

Self-Sacrifice

That will remain forever illustrious,

Obtained from

THIS SPRING

The Water that made possible the successful

Defense of that Station.

This Memorial was erected by the

LEXINGTON CHAPTER OF THE DAUGHTERS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION.

August 16th, 1896.

The Women of ancient Sparta pointed out the Heroic way-
The Women of Pioneer Kentucky trod it.

THE OHIO VALLEY IN THE REVOLUTION.

An Address delivered by Samuel M. Wilson before the Ohio Society of Sons of the Revolution, at the Queen City Club, Cincinnati, Ohio, on October 19, 1908.

The Flying-Camp and the Minute-Man

Have had their meed of praise;

To the Pioneer and Backwoodsman

We'll pledge these laurel bays!

Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Ohio and Kentucky Societies of Sons of the Revolution:

In obedience to the very kind and cordial invitation lately extended by this magnificent Society of the Queen City, we have come, a half-score of Kentuckians, to join with you tonight in commemorating an event which virtually terminated the Revolutionary War "with the seal of Independence." On the seventeenth of last June, in the heart of the Blue Grass, it was our rare pleasure to have you as our guests in celebrating the anniversary of the first important battle of that same momentous struggle. As the Battle of Bunker Hill marked its beginning, so the Surrender at Yorktown marks its close. Within the compass of the six years, which separated these two cardinal events, is embraced nearly everything of importance that transpired during the war. We are familiar with the doings of Washington and his generals, with the campaigns of the Colonial Militia and the Continental Line, and with the sacrifices and suffering and the heroic service of unnumbered patriots who withstood the enemy along the Atlantic coast and throughout the regions watered by streams, which flow eastwardly into that ocean. But in the one hundred and twenty-five years which have sped by since peace with Great Britain was proclaimed, what attention have the sons and grandsons of sires, who acted their heroic and gallant part in the great contest, paid to the progress of the war in the West, and to the fierce death-struggle

there carried on between friends and adherents of the Colonies and the submissive subjects and servants of the British Crown? Believing that this sphere of action has been too much neglected, that it will bear a closer study and is everyway worthy of your interest and your admiration, I invite your attention for a few moments to-night while I attempt to speak briefly of "The Ohio Valley in the Revolution."

At the bare mention of so broad a theme, do not, I pray you, begin to run over in your minds the length and breadth and spaciousness, or compute the acreage or bound by parallels of latitude and longitude that magnificent imperial domain which modern cartography has named "the Ohio Valley." Far be it from me to so abuse your patience or so pervert the purposes of this festive hour as to seek to stun or stagger you with the tonnage of the text, to weary and bewilder you with unmeaning details, or to traverse countless leagues of the earth's surface in the brief quarter of an hour at my disposal. The geographer and the statistician can better serve you in that role.

The true boundaries of the Ohio Valley were almost as unknown in the time of the Revolution as the interior of the Dark Continent before Livingston and Stanley penetrated and mapped its secret recesses. It was for the most part terra incognita, and Finley and Boone and Kenton in Kentucky and Clark and Todd and Bowman and their brothers-in-arms on this side of the river, were explorers and discoverers, quite as much as they were simple invaders of a disputed territory, in their persistent warfare with untamed Nature and in their determined conquest of the native human occupants of the soil.

From Fort Pitt and Lake Erie on the north to the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi on the south, and from the Allegheny and connected ranges of mountains on the east to the central watershed of the Father of Waters on the west, this ill-defined and unsurveyed region, roughly speaking and without taking the landmarks too literally, constituted the Ohio Valley which, in merest outline, I would have you recall to your minds to-night. It was a theatre of practically limitless extent, the actors were comparatively few, but on this stage was enacted one of the mightiest and most thrilling dramas ever vouchsafed to the human race.

1