adjourned to
the Dutch Reformed Meeting-house six miles off. The first grand jury
empanelled presented nine persons for selling liquor without license,
eight for adultery and fornication, and the clerk of Lincoln County for
not keeping a table of fees; besides several for smaller offences.
[Footnote: Marshall, I., 159.] A log court-house and a log jail were
immediately built.

Manufactories of salt were started at the licks, where it was sold at
from three to five silver dollars a bushel. [Footnote: McAfee MSS.] This
was not only used by the settlers for themselves, but for their stock,
which ranged freely in the woods; to provide for the latter a tree was
chopped down and the salt placed in notches or small troughs cut in the
trunk, making it what was called a lick-log. Large grist-mills were
erected at some of the stations; wheat crops were raised; and small
distilleries were built. The gigantic system of river commerce of the
Mississippi had been begun the preceding year by one Jacob Yoder, who
loaded a flat-boat at the Old Redstone Fort, on the Monongahela, and
drifted down to New Orleans, where he sold his goods, and returned to
the Falls of the Ohio by a roundabout course leading through Havana,
Philadelphia, and Pittsburg. Several regular schools were started. There
were already meeting-houses of the Baptist and Dutch Reformed
congregations, the preachers spending the week-days in clearing and
tilling the fields, splitting rails, and raising hogs; in 1783 a
permanent Presbyterian minister arrived, and a log church was speedily
built for him. The sport-loving Kentuckians this year laid out a race
track at Shallowford Station. It was a straight quarter of a mile
course, within two hundred yards of the stockade; at its farther end was
a canebrake, wherein an Indian once lay hid and shot a rider, who was
pulling up his horse at the close of a race. There was still but one
ferry, that over the Kentucky River at Boonsborough; the price of
ferriage was three shillings for either man or horse. The surveying was
still chiefly done by hunters, and much of it was in consequence very
loose indeed. [Footnote: McAfee MSS. Marshall, Collins, Brown's
pamphlets.]

The first retail store Kentucky had seen since Henderson's, at
Boonsborough, was closed in 1775, was established this year at the
Falls; the goods were brought in wagons from Philadelphia to Pittsburg,
and thence down the Ohio in flat-boats. The game had been all kil