Fleming was much struck by the misery of the settlers.  At the Falls they were sickly, suffering with fever and ague; many of the children were dying.  Boonsboro and Harrodsburg were very dirty, the inhabitants were sickly, and the offal and dead beasts lay about, poisoning the air and the water.  During the winter no more corn could be procured than was enough to furnish an occasional hoe-cake.  The people sickened on a steady diet of buffalo-bull beef, cured in smoke without salt, and prepared for the table by boiling.  The buffalo was the stand-by of the settlers; they used his flesh as their common food, and his robe for covering; they made moccasins of his hide and fiddle-strings of his sinews, and combs of his horns.  They spun his winter coat into yarn, and out of it they made coarse cloth, like wool.  They made a harsh linen from the bark of the rotted nettles.  They got sugar from the maples.  There were then, Fleming estimated, about three thousand souls in Kentucky.  The Indians were everywhere, and all men lived in mortal terror of their lives; no settlement was free from the dread of the savages. [Footnote:  Draper MSS., Colonel Wm. Fleming, “MS. Journal in Kentucky,” Nov. 12, 1779, to May 27, 1780.]

    Immense and Rapid Changes.

Half a dozen years later all this was changed.  The settlers had fairly swarmed into the Kentucky country, and the population was so dense that the true frontiersmen, the real pioneers, were already wandering off to Illinois and elsewhere every man of them desiring to live on his own land, by his own labor, and scorning to work for wages.  The unexampled growth had wrought many changes; not the least was the way in which it lessened the importance of the first hunter-settlers and hunter-soldiers.  The great herds of game had been woefully thinned, and certain species, as the buffalo, practically destroyed.  The killing of game was no longer the chief industry, and the flesh and hides of wild beasts were no longer the staples of food and clothing.  The settlers already raised crops so large that they were anxious to export the surplus.  They no longer clustered together in palisaded hamlets.  They had cut out trails and roads in every direction from one to another of the many settlements.  The scattered clearings on which they generally lived dotted the forest everywhere, and the towns, each with its straggling array of log cabins, and its occasional frame houses, did not differ materially from those in the remote parts of Pennsylvania and Virginia.  The gentry were building handsome houses, and their amusements and occupations were those of the up-country planters of the seaboard.

    The Indian Ravages.