The method of surveying then in vogue upon the Western frontier was of the crudest, although it must be acknowledged that any system more formal might, at that stage of our country's growth, have prevented rapid settlement. Each settler or land speculator was practically his own surveyor. With a compass and a chain, a few hours' work would suffice to mark the boundaries of a thousand-acre tract. There were as yet no adequate maps of the country, and claims overlapped each other in the most bewildering manner. A speculator who "ran out" a hundred thousand acres might, without knowing it, include in his domain a half-dozen claims previously surveyed by modest settlers who wanted but a hundred acres each. A man who paid the land-office fees might "patent" any land he pleased and have it recorded, the colony, and later the State, only guaranteeing such entries as covered land not already patented. This overlapping, conscious or unconscious, at last became so perplexing that thousands of vexatious lawsuits followed, some of which are still unsettled; and even to-day in Kentucky there are lands whose ownership is actually unknown, which pay no taxes and support only squatters who can not be turned out--possibly some of it, lying between patented tracts, by chance has never been entered at all. Nobody can now say. Thus it was that we find our friend Daniel Boone quickly transformed from a wilderness hunter into a frontier surveyor. Before Henderson's arrival he had laid off the town site into lots of two acres each. These were now drawn at a public lottery; while those who wished larger tracts within the neighborhood were able to obtain them by promising to plant a crop of corn and pay to the Transylvania Company a quit-rent of two English shillings for each hundred acres. [Illustration: A SURVEY NOTE BY BOONE. Reduced facsimile from his field-books in possession of Wisconsin State Historical Society.] There were now four settlements in the Transylvania grant: Boonesborough; Harrodsburg, fifty miles west, with about a hundred men; Boiling Spring, some six or seven miles from Harrodsburg; and St. Asaph. The crown lands to the north and east of the Kentucky, obtained by the Fort Stanwix treaty, contained two small settlements; forty miles north of Boonesborough was Hinkson's, later known as Ruddell's Station, where were about nineteen persons; lower down the Kentucky, also on the north side, was Willis Lee's settlement, near the present Frankfort; and ranging at will through the crown lands were several small parties of "land-jobbers," surveyors, and explorers, laying off the claims of militia officers who had fought in the Indian wars, and here and there building cabins to indicate possession.