es away through the forest,
to have his tooth pulled, and when he returned he found his wife and his
five children dead and cut to pieces. [Footnote: Draper MSS., Whitely
MS. Narrative.] Incidents of this kind are related in every contemporary
account of Kentucky; and though they commonly occurred in the thinly
peopled districts, this was not always the case. Teamsters and
travellers were killed on the highroads near the towns--even in the
neighborhood of the very town where the constitutional convention was
sitting.

Shifting of the Frontiersmen.

In all new-settled regions in the United States, so long as there was a
frontier at all, the changes in the pioneer population proceeded in a
certain definite order, and Kentucky furnished an example of the
process. Throughout our history as a nation the frontiersmen have always
been mainly native Americans, and those of European birth have been
speedily beaten into the usual frontier type by the wild forces against
which they waged unending war. As the frontiersmen conquered and
transformed the wilderness, so the wilderness in its turn created and
preserved the type of man who overcame it. Nowhere else on the continent
has so sharply defined and distinctively American a type been produced
as on the frontier, and a single generation has always been more than
enough for its production. The influence of the wild country upon the
man is almost as great as the effect of the man upon the country. The
frontiersman destroys the wilderness, and yet its destruction means his
own. He passes away before the coming of the very civilization whose
advance guard he has been. Nevertheless, much of his blood remains, and
his striking characteristics have great weight in shaping the
development of the land. The varying peculiarities of the different
groups of men who have pushed the frontier westward at different times
and places remain stamped with greater or less clearness on the people
of the communities that grow up in the frontier's stead. [Footnote:
Frederick Jackson Turner: "The Significance of the Frontier in American
History." A suggestive pamphlet, published by the State Historical
Society of Wisconsin.]

Succession of Types on Frontier.

In Kentucky, as in Tennessee and the western portions of the seaboard
States, and as later in the great West, different types of settlers
appeared successively on the frontier. The hunter or trapper came first.
Sometimes he combined wit