At a shooting match in St. Asaph's Station in Central Kentucky, twenty-two-year-old Esther Gill Fullen Whitley outperformed a company of frontiersmen and Cherokee braves. The reward for the winner was possession of all the lead in the targets, which filled Esther's hat. In the path of Daniel Boone's company, who blazed a trail west in 1775, she crossed the Cumberland Gap via the Wilderness Road, becoming the third woman to travel from the Shenandoah Valley into the frontier. Like most settlers, she learned to load and fire a flintlock rifie, which she aimed against hostile Shawnee, who sided with the British during the American Revolution. For her courage, historians acclaimed her the "First Lady of Wilderness Road."
A Virginian from Augusta County, Esther was born on May 10, 1755, to Jean Elizabeth Gill and Irishman William Francis Fullen, a veteran of the American Revolution. Already will educated, she married in 1775 at age sixteen. With her husband, Colonel William Chapman "Billy" Whitley, a farmer and Indian Scout, and toddler daughters Elizabeth and Isabella, in November 1775, Esther traveled on horseback along the 120-mile Boone Trace. The expedition, which included here sister-in-law Margaret Whitley, wife and surveyor and militiaman George Rogers Clark, met with snow and haiil on the thirty-three-day ride to Boonesborough, Kentucky.
While under attack at St. Asaph's Station in 1777, Esther joined her sister and sharpshooter Ann Manifee in melting metal into bullets, loading rifles, and firing at the enemy. To supply the stockade, she left its protection in milk cows and haul water. In 1794, the Whitleys replaced their first cabin with a 2,800 acre estate at Crab Orchard, Kentucky, incorporating the first brick residence west of the Allegheny Mountains, an escape passages from Indian raids, and a half-mile clay horse racing oval. To honor his wife, William had the initials EW inscribed on white brick on the back entrance. The couple produced nine more children, the last born when Ester was forty-seven years old.
