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14 possession of the land with the Indians. They were hunters and pioneer farmers, not intent upon founding large industrial communities, but fond of the wild, adventurous, lonesome, unrestrained life of the frontiersman. Ten years after Daniel Boone's first settlement, Kentucky was said to contain less than two hundred white inhabitants. But then immigration began to flow in rapidly, so that in 1790, when the first federal census was taken, Kentucky had a population of 73,600, — of whom 61,000 were white. About one half of the whites and three fourths of the slaves had come from Virginia, the rest mostly from North Carolina and Maryland, with a sprinkling of Pennsylvanians. At the period when Henry Clay arrived in Kentucky, in 1797, the population exceeded 180,000, about one fifth of whom were slaves, — the later immigrants having come from the same quarter as the earlier.

The original stock consisted of the hardiest race of backwoodsmen. The forests of Kentucky were literally wrested from the Indians by constant fighting. The question whether the aborigines had any right to the soil seems to have been utterly foreign to the pioneer's mind. He wanted the land, and to him it was a matter of course that the Indian must leave it. The first settlements planted in the virgin forest were fortified with stockades and block-houses, which the inmates, not seldom for months at a time, could not leave without danger of falling into an Indian ambush and