of the first hunter-settlers and
hunter-soldiers. The great herds of game had been woefully thinned, and
certain species, as the buffalo, practically destroyed. The killing of
game was no longer the chief industry, and the flesh and hides of wild
beasts were no longer the staples of food and clothing. The settlers
already raised crops so large that they were anxious to export the
surplus. They no longer clustered together in palisaded hamlets. They
had cut out trails and roads in every direction from one to another of
the many settlements. The scattered clearings on which they generally
lived dotted the forest everywhere, and the towns, each with its
straggling array of log cabins, and its occasional frame houses, did not
differ materially from those in the remote parts of Pennsylvania and
Virginia. The gentry were building handsome houses, and their amusements
and occupations were those of the up-country planters of the seaboard.

The Indian Ravages.

The Indians were still a scourge to the settlements [Footnote: State
Department MSS., No. 151, p. 259, Report of Secretary of War, July 10,
1787; also, No. 60, p. 277.]; but, though they caused much loss of life,
there was not the slightest danger of their imperilling the existence of
the settlements as a whole, or even or any considerable town or group of
clearings. Kentucky was no longer all a frontier. In the thickly peopled
districts life was reasonably safe, though the frontier proper was
harried and the remote farms jeopardized and occasionally abandoned,
[Footnote: Virginia State Papers, iv., 149, State Department MSS., No.
56, p. 271.] while the river route and the wilderness road were beset by
the savages. Where the country was at all well settled, the Indians did
not attack in formidable war bands, like those that had assailed the
forted villages in the early years of their existence; they skulked
through the woods by twos and threes, and pounced only upon the helpless
or the unsuspecting.

Nevertheless, if the warfare was not dangerous to the life and growth of
the Commonwealth, it was fraught with undreamed-of woe and hardship to
individual settlers and their families. On the outlying farms no man
could tell when the blow would fall. Thus, in one backwoodsman's written
reminiscences, there is a brief mention of a settler named Israel Hart,
who, during one May night, in 1787, suffered much from a toothache. In
the morning he went to a neighbor's, some mil