Finally, two burgesses were chosen to represent the county in the General Assembly of Virginia.[27] In later years Daniel Boon himself served as a Kentucky burgess in the Virginia Legislature;[28] a very different body from the little Transylvanian parliament in which he began his career as a law-maker.

The old backwoods hero led a strange life: varying his long wanderings and explorations, his endless campaigns against savage men and savage beasts, by serving as road-maker, town-builder, and commonwealth-founder, sometimes organizing the frontiersmen for foreign war, and again doing his share in devising the laws under which they were to live and prosper.
But the pioneers were speedily drawn into a life-and-death struggle which engrossed their whole attention to the exclusion of all merely civil matters; a struggle in which their land became in truth what the Indians called it--a dark and bloody ground, a land with blood-stained rivers.[29] It was impossible long to keep peace on the border between the ever-encroaching whites and their fickle and blood-thirsty foes.

The hard, reckless, often brutalized frontiersmen, greedy of land and embittered by the memories of untold injuries, regarded all Indians with sullen enmity, and could not be persuaded to distinguish between the good and the bad.[30] The central government was as powerless to restrain as to protect these far-off and unruly citizens.

On the other hand, the Indians were as treacherous as they were ferocious; Delawares, Shawnees, Wyandots, and all.[31] While deceiving the commandants of the posts by peaceful protestations, they would steadily continue their ravages and murders; and while it was easy to persuade a number of the chiefs and warriors of a tribe to enter into a treaty, it was impossible to make the remainder respect it.[32] The chiefs might be for peace, but the young braves were always for war, and could not be kept back.[33] In July, 1776, the Delawares, Shawnees, and Mingo chiefs assembled at Fort Pitt and declared for neutrality;[34] the Iroquois ambassadors, who were likewise present, haughtily announced that their tribes would permit neither the British nor the Americans to march an army through their territory.

They disclaimed any responsibility for what might be done by a few wayward young men; and requested the Delawares and Shawnees to do as they had promised, and to distribute the Iroquois "talk" among their people.