The Indian Wars, 1784-1787 101 



fondness for drink and litigation; besides, remarks 

 this Kentucky critic, "they soon took to the gun, 

 which is the ruin of everything." None of these 

 foreign-born elements were of any very great im 

 portance in the development of Kentucky; its des 

 tiny was shaped and controlled by its men of native 

 stock. 



In such a population there was of course much 

 loosening of the bands, social, political, moral, and 

 religious, which knit a society together. A great 

 many of the restraints of their old life were thrown 

 off, and there was much social adjustment and re 

 adjustment before their relations to one another 

 under the new conditions became definitely settled. 

 But there came early into the land many men of 

 high purpose and pure life whose influence upon 

 their fellows, though quiet, was very great. More 

 over, the clergyman and the school-teacher, the 

 two beings who had done so much for colonial civil 

 ization on the seaboard, were already becoming im 

 portant factors in the life of the frontier communi 

 ties. Austere Presbyterian ministers were people of 

 mark in many of the towns. The Baptist preachers 

 lived and worked exactly as did their flocks; their 

 dwellings were little cabins with dirt floors and, in 

 stead of bedsteads, skin-covered pole-bunks; they 

 cleared the ground, split rails, planted corn, and 

 raised hogs on equal terms with their parishioners. 18 

 After Methodism cut loose from its British con 

 nections in 1785, the time of its great advance be- 



18 "History of Kentucky Baptists," by J. H. Spencer. 



