The Wilderness road has never been a good one, and is no more than any other byroad through a rough country to-day. Sometimes the early travelers, who always went in companies for safety, would be too tired to go on until they had stopped to rest and to get cheer by singing hymns and saying prayers. But they made the best of it, for they knew that they were going to a fine country, which would repay them for their sufferings. [Illustration: FIG. 57. CORNFIELD NEAR CUMBERLAND GAP] Boone and five other men were once in camp by a stream, and were lucky enough to have with them the story of _Gulliver’s Travels_. One of the young men, who had been hearing the book read by the camp fire, came in one night bearing a couple of scalps that he had taken from a pair of savages. He told his friends that “he had been that day to Lulbegrud and had killed two Brobdingnags in their capital.” The stream near which it happened is still called Lulbegrud creek. These wilderness men made the best of things, and though they worked hard and fought often, they were a cheerful and happy company. They were not spoiled by having too many luxuries, and they did not think that the world owed them a living without any effort on their part. Beginning about the time of the Declaration of Independence, many people found the way to Kentucky by the Great Valley, the Cumberland Gap, and the Wilderness road. When fifteen years had gone by there were seventy thousand people in Kentucky, along the Ohio river. Not all had come by the gap, for some had sailed down the river; but they all helped to plant the new state. Moreover in fighting off the Indians from their own cabins and cornfields they had protected the frontiers of Virginia and others of the older states, so that Kentucky was a kind of advance guard beyond the mountains, and led the way for Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, and other great states in the West and South. Down in the heart of Kentucky, by the Ohio river, is a land long known as the Kentucky Blue Grass region. The “blue grass,” as it is called, grows luxuriantly here, as do grain and tobacco, for the soils, made by the wasting of limestone, are rich and fertile. Wherever the soil and climate are good, crops are large and the people thrive. They have enough to eat and plenty to sell, and thus they can have good homes, many comforts, books, and education. If the pioneers had had to settle in the high, rough, eastern parts of Kentucky, it would not have been worth while to suffer so much to get there; but they were on the way to the Blue Grass country. Even before the coming of the white man there were open lands which, perhaps by Indian fires, had lost their cover of trees. Such lands are often called prairies. These prairies, however, were not so flat as those of Illinois, and they were bordered by groves and forests. There were fine streams everywhere, and near by was the great Ohio, ready to serve as a highway toward Philadelphia or New Orleans.