298 The Winning of the West 



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 morn 

 ing he went to a neighbor's, some miles 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. 4 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 travelers were killed on the 

 highroads near the towns even in the neighbor 

 hood of the very town where the constitutional con 

 vention was sitting. 



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 na 

 tion the frontiersmen have always been mainly na 

 tive 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 trans 

 formed the wilderness, so the wilderness in its turn 

 created and preserved the type of man who over- 



4 Draper MSS., Whitley MS. Narrative. 



