Such were the different classes of settlers who successively came into Kentucky, as into other western lands.  There were of course no sharp lines of cleavage between the classes.  They merged insensibly into one another, and the same individual might, at different times, stand in two or three.  As a rule the individuals composing the first two were crowded out by their successors, and, after doing the roughest of the pioneer work, moved westward with the frontier; but some families were of course continually turning into permanent abodes what were merely temporary halting places of the greater number.

    Change in Subjects of Interest.

With the change in population came the corresponding change in intellectual interests and in material pursuits.  The axe was the tool, and the rifle the weapon, of the early settlers; their business was to kill the wild beasts, to fight the savages, and to clear the soil; and the enthralling topics of conversation were the game and the Indians, and, as the settlements grew, the land itself.  As the farms became thick, and towns throve, and life became more complex, the chances for variety in work and thought increased likewise.  The men of law sprang into great prominence, owing in part to the interminable litigation over the land titles.  The more serious settlers took about as much interest in matters theological as in matters legal; and the congregations of the different churches were at times deeply stirred by quarrels over questions of church discipline and doctrine. [Footnote:  Durrett Collection; see various theological writings, e.g., “A Progress,” etc., by Adam Rankin, Pastor at Lexington.  Printed “at the Sign of the Buffalo,” Jan. 1, 1793.] Most of the books were either text-books of the simpler kinds or else theological.

Except when there was an Indian campaign, politics and the river commerce formed the two chief interests for all Kentuckians, but especially for the well-to-do.

    Features of the River Travel.

In spite of all the efforts of the Spanish officials the volume of trade on the Mississippi grew steadily.  Six or eight years after the close of the Revolution the vast stretches of brown water, swirling ceaselessly between the melancholy forests, were already furrowed everywhere by the keeled and keelless craft.  The hollowed log in which the Indian paddled; the same craft, the pirogue, only a little more carefully made, and on a little larger model, in which the creole trader carried his load of paints and whiskey and beads and bright cloths to trade for the peltries of the savage; the rude little scow in which some backwoods farmer drifted down stream with his cargo, the produce of his own toil; the keel boats which, with square-sails and oars, plied up as well as down the river; the flotilla of huge flat boats, the property of some rich merchant, laden deep with tobacco and flour, and manned by crews who were counted rough and lawless even in the rough and lawless backwoods—­all these, and others too, were familiar sights to every traveller who descended the Mississippi from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, [Footnote:  John Pope’s “Tour,” in 1790.  Printed at Richmond in 1792.] or who was led by business to journey from Louisville to St. Louis or to Natchez or New Madrid.