family rich if they had retained it. The county records show him to
have been the possessor of a domain of some seventeen hundred acres.
There is still in existence [Transcriber's Note: Lengthy footnote
relocated to chapter end.] the original warrant, dated March 4, 1780,
for four hundred acres of land, for which the pioneer had paid "into
the publick Treasury one hundred and sixty pounds current money," and
a copy of the surveyor's certificate, giving the metes and bounds of
the property on Floyd's Fork, which remained for many years in the
hands of Mordecai Lincoln, the pioneer's eldest son and heir. The name
was misspelled "Linkhorn" by a blunder of the clerk in the
land-office, and the error was perpetuated in the subsequent record.

Kentucky had been for many years the country of romance and fable for
Virginians. Twenty years before Governor Spotswood had crossed the
Alleghanies and returned to establish in a Williamsburg tavern that
fantastic order of nobility which he called the Knights of The Golden
Horseshoe, [Footnote: Their motto was _Sic jurat transcendere
montes_.] and, with a worldly wisdom which was scarcely consistent
with these medieval affectations, to press upon the attention of the
British Government the building of a line of frontier forts to guard
the Ohio River from the French. Many years after him the greatest of
all Virginians crossed the mountains again, and became heavily
interested in those schemes of emigration which filled the minds of
many of the leading men in America until they were driven out by
graver cares and more imperative duties. Washington had acquired
claims and patents to the amount of thirty or forty thousand acres of
land in the West; Benjamin Franklin and the Lees were also large
owners of these speculative titles. They formed, it is true, rather an
airy and unsubstantial sort of possession, the same ground being often
claimed by a dozen different persons or companies under various grants