296 The Winning of the West 



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 esti 

 mated, 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. 1 



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 un 

 exampled growth had wrought many changes; not 

 the least was the way in which it lessened the im 

 portance of the first hunter-settlers and hunter-sol 

 diers. The great herds of game had been wofully 

 thinned, and certain species of the buffalo prac 

 tically 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 ham 

 lets. They had cut out trails and roads in every 

 direction from one to another of the many settle- 



1 Draper MSS., Colonel Wm. Fleming, "MS. Journal in 

 Kentucky," Nov. 12, 1779, to May 27, 1780. 



