r Sevier, when he saw that he was baffled he suddenly
became a Federalist and an advocate of a strong Central Government; and
this, doubtless, not because of love for Federalism, but to show his
hostility to North Carolina, which had at first refused to enter the new
Union. [Footnote: _Columbian Magazine,_ Aug. 27, 1788, vol. ii., 542.]
This particular move was fairly comic in its abrupt unexpectedness.

An Independent Frontier State.

Thus the last spark of independent life flickered out in Franklin
proper. The people who had settled on the Indian borders were left
without government, North Carolina regarding them as trespassers on the
Indian territory. [Footnote: Haywood, 195.] They accordingly met and
organized a rude governmental machine, on the model of the Commonwealth
of Franklin; and the wild little state existed as a separate and
independent republic until the new Federal Government included it in the
territory south of the Ohio. [Footnote: In my first two volumes I have
discussed, once for all, the worth of Gilmore's "histories" of Sevier
and Robertson and their times. It is unnecessary further to consider a
single statement they contain.]

CHAPTER V.

KENTUCKY'S STRUGGLE FOR STATEHOOD. 1784-1790.

While the social condition of the communities on the Cumberland and the
Tennessee had changed very slowly, in Kentucky the changes had been
rapid.

Colonel Fleming's Journal.

Col. William Fleming, one of the heroes of the battle of the Great
Kanawha, and a man of note on the border, visited Kentucky on surveying
business in the winter of 1779-80. His journal shows the state of the
new settlements as seen by an unusually competent observer; for he was
an intelligent, well-bred, thinking man. Away from the immediate
neighborhood of the few scattered log hamlets, he found the wilderness
absolutely virgin. The easiest way to penetrate the forest was to follow
the "buffalo paths," which the settlers usually adopted for their own
bridle trails, and finally cut out and made into roads. Game swarmed.
There were multitudes of swans, geese, and ducks on the river; turkeys
and the small furred beasts, such as coons, abounded. Big game was
almost as plentiful. Colonel Fleming shot, for the subsistence of
himself and his party, many buffalo, bear, and deer, and some elk. His
attention was drawn by the great flocks of parroquets, which appeared
even in winter, and by the big, boldly colored, ivory-billed
w