each earnest professor, doing bold and fearless
missionary work, became the nucleus round which a little knot of true
believers gathered. Two or three of them made short visits to Kentucky
during the first few years of its existence. One, who went thither in
the early spring of 1776, kept a journal of his trip.[4] He travelled
over the Wilderness Road with eight other men. Three of them were
Baptists like himself, who prayed every night; and their companions,
though they did not take part in the praying, did not interrupt it.
Their journey through the melancholy and silent wilderness resembled in
its incidents the countless other similar journeys that were made at
that time and later.

They suffered from cold and hunger and lack of shelter; they became
footsore and weary, and worn out with driving the pack-horses. On the
top of the lonely Cumberland Mountains they came upon the wolf-eaten
remains of a previous traveller, who had recently been killed by
Indians. At another place they met four men returning--cowards, whose
hearts had failed them when in sight of the promised land. While on the
great Indian war-trail they killed a buffalo, and thenceforth lived on
its jerked meat. One night the wolves smelt the flesh, and came up to
the camp-fire; the strong hunting-dogs rushed out with clamorous barking
to drive them away, and the sudden alarm for a moment made the sleepy
wayfarers think that roving Indians had attacked them. When they reached
Crab Orchard their dangers were for the moment past; all travellers grew
to regard with affection the station by this little grove of wild
apple-trees. It is worthy of note that the early settlers loved to build
their homes near these natural orchards, moved by the fragrance and
beauty of the bloom in spring.[5]

The tired Baptist was not overpleased with Harrodstown, though he there
listened to the preaching of one of his own sect.[6] He remarked "a poor
town it was in those days," a couple of rows of smoky cabins, tenanted
by dirty women and ragged children, while the tall, unkempt frontiersmen
lounged about in greasy hunting-shirts, breech-clouts, leggings, and
moccasins. There was little or no corn until the crops were gathered,
and, like the rest, he had to learn to eat wild meat without salt. The
settlers,--as is always the case in frontier towns where the people are
wrapped up in their own pursuits and rivalries, and are obliged to talk
of one another for lack of outside int