The fact that the Baptist preachers were men exactly similar to their fellows in all their habits of life, not only gave them a good standing at once, but likewise enabled them very early to visit the farthest settlements, travelling precisely like other backwoodsmen; and once there, each preacher, each earnest professor, doing bold and fearless missionary work, became the nucleus round which a little knot of true believers gathered.  Two or three of them made short visits to Kentucky during the first few years of its existence.  One, who went thither in the early spring of 1776, kept a journal of his trip.[4] He travelled over the Wilderness Road with eight other men.  Three of them were Baptists like himself, who prayed every night; and their companions, though they did not take part in the praying, did not interrupt it.  Their journey through the melancholy and silent wilderness resembled in its incidents the countless other similar journeys that were made at that time and later.

They suffered from cold and hunger and lack of shelter; they became footsore and weary, and worn out with driving the pack-horses.  On the top of the lonely Cumberland Mountains they came upon the wolf-eaten remains of a previous traveller, who had recently been killed by Indians.  At another place they met four men returning—­cowards, whose hearts had failed them when in sight of the promised land.  While on the great Indian war-trail they killed a buffalo, and thenceforth lived on its jerked meat.  One night the wolves smelt the flesh, and came up to the camp-fire; the strong hunting-dogs rushed out with clamorous barking to drive them away, and the sudden alarm for a moment made the sleepy wayfarers think that roving Indians had attacked them.  When they reached Crab Orchard their dangers were for the moment past; all travellers grew to regard with affection the station by this little grove of wild apple-trees.  It is worthy of note that the early settlers loved to build their homes near these natural orchards, moved by the fragrance and beauty of the bloom in spring.[5]

The tired Baptist was not overpleased with Harrodstown, though he there listened to the preaching of one of his own sect.[6] He remarked “a poor town it was in those days,” a couple of rows of smoky cabins, tenanted by dirty women and ragged children, while the tall, unkempt frontiersmen lounged about in greasy hunting-shirts, breech-clouts, leggings, and moccasins.  There was little or no corn until the crops were gathered, and, like the rest, he had to learn to eat wild meat without salt.  The settlers,—­as is always the case in frontier towns where the people are wrapped up in their own pursuits and rivalries, and are obliged to talk of one another for lack of outside interests,—­were divided by bickering, gossiping jealousies; and at this time they were quarrelling as to whether the Virginian cabin-rights or Henderson’s land-grants would prove valid.  As usual, the zealous Baptist preacher found that the women were