Thus we may briefly suggest the benefits which the older colonies received from the earliest settlers in Kentucky--and but for Boone's Road made by the Transylvania Company, it is exceedingly doubtful, as Boone wrote, whether the settlement of Kentucky would have been successfully inaugurated as early as 1774. At any rate Boone's Road brought into Kentucky thousands of pioneers who probably would have refused to move westward by the Ohio River route. As for the benefit Kentucky itself received from Boone's Road, that is self-evident. Taking everything into consideration, no distinct movement of population in America, before or since, can compare in magnitude with the burst of immigration through Cumberland Gap between 1775 and 1790. Never on this continent was a population of seventy thousand people located, within fifteen years of the day the first cabins were erected, at an equal distance from the existing frontier line. It is difficult to frame the facts of this remarkable phenomenon in language that will convey the full meaning. If the brave pioneers from Connecticut who founded the Northwest Territory at Marietta, Ohio, in 1788, had gone on to Kentucky, they would have found themselves, within twelve years, in as populous a state as that they left in New England. The Stanwix Treaty and Boone's Road largely answer the question why Kentucky contained more than one-half as many inhabitants as Massachusetts, twenty-five years after its first settlement was made; and why it was admitted into the Union four years before Tennessee, ten years before Ohio, twenty-four years before Indiana, twenty-six years before Illinois (bounded by the Ohio and Mississippi and Lake Michigan), and twenty-eight years before Maine. Between 1790 and 1800 the population of Kentucky jumped from 70,000 to 220,000, only one-third less than proud Maryland, and five times that of Ohio. In the census of 1790 Kentucky stood fourteenth in a grouping of sixteen states and territories, while in 1800 it stood ninth. In 1790 it exceeded the population of Rhode Island, Delaware and Tennessee. In 1800 it exceeded New Jersey, New Hampshire, Georgia, Vermont, Maine, Tennessee, Rhode Island, and Delaware. In this year it had one hundred and sixty thousand more inhabitants than Indiana Territory, Mississippi Territory, and Ohio Territory combined. In the decade mentioned, New York State increased in population two hundred and fifty thousand; far-away Kentucky increased one hundred and forty-seven thousand.