132 The Winning of the West 



planted other grains as well, and apple-seeds and 

 peach-stones. 24 



As soon as the spring of 1780 opened, the immi- 

 grants began to arrive more numerously than ever. 

 Some came over the Wilderness road ; among these 

 there were not a few haggard, half- famished beings, 

 who, having started too late the previous fall, had 

 been overtaken by the deep snows, and forced to 

 pass the winter in the iron-bound and desolate val- 

 leys of the Alleghanies, subsisting on the carcasses 

 of their stricken cattle, and seeing their weaker 

 friends starve or freeze before their eyes. Very 

 many came down the Ohio, in flat-boats. A good- 

 sized specimen of these huge unwieldy scows was 

 fifty-five feet long, twelve broad, and six deep, draw- 

 ing three feet of water 25 ; but the demand was greater 

 than the supply, and a couple of dozen people, with 

 half as many horses, and all their effects, might be 

 forced to embark on a flat-boat not twenty-four feet 

 in length. 26 Usually several families came together, 

 being bound by some tie of neighborhood or pur- 

 pose. Not infrequently this tie was religious, for in 

 the back settlements the few churches were almost 

 as much social as religious centres. Thus this spring, 

 a third of the congregation of a Low Dutch Re- 

 formed Church came to Kentucky bodily, to the 

 number of fifty heads of families, with their wives 



24 McAfee MSS. 



25 Lettres d'un Cultivateur Americain, St. John de Creve 

 Coeur, Paris, 1787, p. 407. He visited Kentucky in 1784. 



26 MS. Journals of Rev. James Smith. Tours in Western 

 country in 1785-1795 (in Col. Durrett's library). 



