hats, made of native
fur, mink, coon, fox, wolf, and beaver. If exceptionally fine, and of
valuable fur, they cost five hundred dollars in paper money, which had
not at that time depreciated a quarter as much in outlying Kentucky as
at the seat of government. [Footnote: Marshall, p. 124.]

As soon as the great snow-drifts began to melt, and thereby to produce
freshets of unexampled height, the gaunt settlers struggled out to their
clearings, glad to leave the forts. They planted corn, and eagerly
watched the growth of the crop; and those who hungered after oatmeal or
wheaten bread planted other grains as well, and apple-seeds and
peach-stones. [Footnote: McAfee MSS.]

Many New Settlers Arrive in the Spring.

As soon as the spring of 1780 opened, the immigrants 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
stalled too late the previous fall, had been overtaken by the deep
snows, and forced to pass the winter in the iron-bound and desolate
valleys 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 unwieldly scows was fifty-five feet long, twelve
broad, and six deep, drawing three feet of water; [Footnote: Lettres
d'un Cultivateur Americain, St. John de Creve Coeur, Paris, 1787. p.
407. He visited Kentucky in 1784.] 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. [Footnote: MS. Journals of Rev. James Smith. Tours in
western country in 1785-1795 (in Col. Durrett's library).] Usually
several families came together, being bound by some tie of neighborhood
or purpose. 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
Reformed Church came to Kentucky bodily, to the number of fifty heads of
families, with their wives and children, their beasts of burden and
pasture, and their household goods; like most bands of new immigrants,
they suffered greatly from the Indians, much more than did the old
settlers. [Footnote: State Department MSS. No. 41, Vol. V., Memoria