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 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 ques-