was another attraction of
the early time,--the great Blue Lick sulphur spring; here, in a
valley surrounded by wooded hills, formerly congregated great herds
of buffalo and deer, which licked the salty earth, and hunters soon
learned that this was a royal ground for game. The Battle of the Blue
Lick (1782) will ever be famous in the annals of Kentucky.

The Ohio was a mighty waterway into the continental interior, in
the olden days of Limestone. Its only compeer was the so-called
"Wilderness Road," overland through Cumberland Gap--the successor
of "Boone's trail," just as Braddock's Road was the outgrowth of
"Nemacolin's path." Until several years after the Revolutionary War,
the country north of the Ohio was still Indian land, and settlement
was restricted to the region south of the river; so that practically
all West-going roads from the coast colonies centered either on Fort
Pitt or Redstone, or on Cumberland Gap. On the out-going trip, the
Wilderness Road was the more toilsome of the two, but it was safer,
for the Ohio's banks were beset with thieving and often murdering
savages. In returning east, many who had descended the river preferred
going overland through the Gap, to painfully pulling up stream through
the shallows, with the danger of Indians many times greater than when
gliding down the deep current. The distance over the two routes from
Philadelphia, was nearly equal, when the windings of the river were
taken into account; but the Carolinians and the Georgians found
Boone's Wilderness Road the shorter of the two, in their migrations
to the promised land of "Ol' Kaintuck." And we should not overlook the
fact, that of much importance was still a third route, up the James
and down the Great Kanawha; a route whose advantage to Virginia,
Washington early saw, and tried in vain to have improved by a canal
connecting the two rivers.[B]

Even before the opening of the Revolution, the Ohio was the path of
a considerable emigration. We have seen Washington going down to the
Great Kanawha with his surveying party, in 1770, and finding that
settlers were hurrying into the country for a hundred miles below Fort
Pitt. By the close of the Revolution, the Ohio was a familiar stream.
Pittsburg, from a small trading hamlet and fording-place, had grown
by 1785 to have a thousand inhabitants, chiefly supported by
boat-building and the Kentucky carrying trade; and boat-yards were
common up both the Monongahela and the Youghi