“After having waited twenty-two days at Pittsburgh I took advantage of the first boat which started for Louisville. It was 55 feet long, 12 wide and 6 deep, drawing 3 feet of water. On its deck had been built a low cabin, but very neat, divided into several compartments, and on the forecastle the cattle and horses were kept in a stable. It was loaded with bricks, boards, planks, bars of iron, coal, instruments of husbandry, dismounted wagons, anvils, bellows, dry goods, brandy, flour, biscuit, lard, salt meat, etc. These articles came in part from the country in the vicinity of Pittsburgh and from Indiana. (The Indiana here referred to was a section of Virginia lying east of the Alleghanies.) I observed the larger part of the passengers were young men who came from nearly all of the middle (coast) states; pleasant, contented, full of buoyant hopes; having with them money coming from the sale of their old farms, or from the share received from their parents. They were going to Kentucky to engage in business, to work at their trades and to acquire and establish new homes. What a singular but happy restlessness, that which is constantly urging us all to become better off than we are and which drives us from one end of a continent to the other. In the evening after laying up, the more skillful hunters would go to the land to shoot wild turkeys, which you are aware wait for the last rays of the sun to fade away before going to roost in the tops of the highest trees.” When the settler fixed upon his location he appropriated a four hundred acre boundary, the settler’s allowance; and taking possession, held it by what was then known as the “Tomahawk Claim;” that is, he blazed his boundary lines with a tomahawk and hacked his initials on the corner trees. He then built a log cabin and felled a few trees to give notice to the world that the blazed boundary was appropriated. His appropriation was usually respected, mainly from custom and sentiment; though the right, if questioned, was usually defended by the rifle. In the mid-summer of 1787 the Campbells with Mrs. McDonald, the Clarks, and the Fairfaxes, having sold their plantations, emigrated overland by the Wilderness Trail to Kentucky. Their experiences were much the same as the many who had preceded them; except as they had Indian guides, Oliuachica and two Mingo braves, they were in little danger of attack from the Indians. What was then known as the Wilderness Road extended from the last settlements on the east side of the Alleghanies, over the mountain on to the headwaters of Clinch River, down that river valley, thence across the mountain into Powell’s Valley, thence with the valley to Cumberland Gap and thence through the Gap into the District of Kentucky.