oodpeckers--birds which have long drawn back to the most remote swamps
of the hot Gulf-coast, fleeing before man precisely as the buffalo and
elk have fled.

Like all similar parties he suffered annoyance from the horses straying.
He lost much time in hunting up the strayed beasts, and frequently had
to pay the settlers for helping find them. There were no luxuries to be
had for any money, and even such common necessaries as corn and salt
were scarce and dear. Half a peck of salt cost a little less than eight
pounds, and a bushel of corn the same. The surveying party, when not in
the woods, stayed at the cabins of the more prominent settlers, and had
to pay well for board and lodging, and for washing too.

Kentucky during the Revolution.

Fleming was much struck by the misery of the settlers. At the Falls they
were sickly, suffering with fever and ague; many of the children were
dying. Boonsboro and Harrodsburg were very dirty, the inhabitants were
sickly, and the offal and dead beasts lay about, poisoning the air and
the water. During the winter no more corn could be procured than was
enough to furnish an occasional hoe-cake. The people sickened on a
steady diet of buffalo-bull beef, cured in smoke without salt, and
prepared for the table by boiling. The buffalo was the stand-by of the
settlers; they used his flesh as their common food, and his robe for
covering; they made moccasins of his hide and fiddle-strings of his
sinews, and combs of his horns. They spun his winter coat into yarn, and
out of it they made coarse cloth, like wool. They made a harsh linen
from the bark of the rotted nettles. They got sugar from the maples.
There were then, Fleming estimated, about three thousand souls in
Kentucky. The Indians were everywhere, and all men lived in mortal
terror of their lives; no settlement was free from the dread of the
savages. [Footnote: Draper MSS., Colonel Wm. Fleming, "MS. Journal in
Kentucky," Nov. 12, 1779, to May 27, 1780.]

Immense and Rapid Changes.

Half a dozen years later all this was changed. The settlers had fairly
swarmed into the Kentucky country, and the population was so dense that
the true frontiersmen, the real pioneers, were already wandering off to
Illinois and elsewhere every man of them desiring to live on his own
land, by his own labor, and scorning to work for wages. The unexampled
growth had wrought many changes; not the least was the way in which it
lessened the importance