Summer Land

They were a courageous new breed of settlers, seasoned by the Revolution and tempered by the fires of frontier wars, who struck out across a vast continent to win the West. From the Cumberland Gap and Ohio headwaters, they funneled through Kentucky, enduring the bloody massacres of avenging Cherokee and the threat of a Spanish tyranny that forbade them to cross the Mississippi. For somewhere ahead in the shadows of the setting sun was the land where they would forge a legend as powerful as their dreams. For Christopher Post, it was a dream of wealth and empire in the forbidden Spanish territories. For Luther Ferris and his wife Kate, it was a dream of taming a land where no white man had been before. For his sister Ellie, it was a dream of the man who would fulfill the promise of her womanhood at the end of the wilderness road, in a land of peace won by courage and blood, their Summerland .