Page:Early western travels, 1748-1846 (1907 Volume 3).djvu/230

 They went so far as to fabricate false plans, in which they traced rivers favourable for mills and other uses; in this manner many ideal lots, from five hundred to a hundred thousand acres, were sold in Europe, and even in several great towns of the United States.

Till the year 1792, Kentucky formed a part of Virginia; but the distance from Richmond, the seat of government belonging to this state, being seven hundred miles from Lexinton, occasions the most serious inconveniences to the inhabitants, and their number rising considerably above that required to form an independent state, they were admitted into the union in the month of March following. The {161} state of Virginia, on giving up its pretensions to that country, consented to it only on certain conditions; it imposed on the convention at Kentucky an obligation to follow, in part, its code of laws, and particularly to keep up the slave-trade.

Prior to the year 1782, the number of inhabitants at Kentucky did not exceed three thousand; it was about a hundred thousand in 1790, and in the general verification made in 1800, it amounted to two hundred thousand. When I was at Lexinton in the month of August 1802, its population was estimated at two hundred thousand, including twenty thousand negro slaves. Thus, in this state, where there were not ten individuals at the age of twenty-five who were born there, the number of the inhabitants is now as considerable as in seven of the old states; and there are only four where the population is twice as numerous. This increase, already so rapid, would have been much more so had it not been for a particular circumstance that prevents emigrants from going there; I mean the difficulty of proving the right of property. Of all the states in the union it is that wherein the rights