the farmer had always a ready market and an ample price for his produce. This flourishing state of commerce and agriculture, diffused life and spirit into every rank and department of society. There was scarcely such a thing known, as a man laboring merely to support his family; no one was satisfied unless he was growing rich, and few were disappointed, except by their own improvidence. It would be useless to point out the great statesmen and lawyers, who have attained their present eminence from an obscure origin; or the wealthy merchants, farmers, and mechanics, who, from the most abject poverty, have risen to opulence. Our country is full of such examples; and they stand as monuments of those happy days, when industry was not only a sure but a rapid guide to wealth.

Under such circumstances, few persons were disposed to emigrate to a new country; and, although some were tempted by the great prospects of gain, which the fertile regions in the west were said to offer, many were discouraged by the unsettled state of the country, its reputed unhealthiness, and the vicinity of the Indian tribes.

To Europeans, this part of America offered no attractions; it was too remote, too insulated, too barbarous, and too entirely uncongenial with all their habits, tastes, and feelings.

The first settlers of this country, therefore, were men whose object was not gain, but who appeared to have been allured by the very difficulties which discouraged others. They were hardy, enterprising

men, fond of change, and familiar with fatigue, who seem to have thought with Fitz James

"If a path be dangerous known,

The danger's self is lure alone."

The manners and institutions of a new people are always curious-presenting the naked outlines of character, the first rudiments of civilization, and all the simple elements of society. In New England, the fathers contended successfully with the savage and the climate; they made laws, burned witches, prohibited kissing, and knocked their beer-barrels on the head for working on the Sabbath. They had many simple fashions and queer ways, which have vanished with their witches and their blue laws. They were not so military in their habits, as their prototypes in the west; because, though equally brave and enterprising, they were more industrious, more frugal, and less mercurial in their temperament. Religion was with them a powerful spring of action, and discouraged all wars except those of selfdefence. The social and moral virtues, the sciences and arts, were cherished and respected; and there were many roads to office and to eminence, which were safer and more certain, and not less honorable, than the bloody path of warlike achievement.

Kentucky was settled at a period when religious fanaticism had vanished, and when the principles of the revolution, then in full operation, had engendered liberal and original modes of thinking-when every man was a politician, a soldier, and a patriot, ready to make war or to make laws, to put his hand to the plough or to the helm of state, as circumstances

might require. They went to a wilderness, with all these new notions in their heads, full of ardor and full of projects, determined to add a new state to the family of republics, at all hazards. The rifle and the ax were incessantly employed. The savage was to be expelled; the panther, the wolf, and the bear to be exterminated; the forest to be razed; houses to be built; and when all this was accomplished, their labors were but commenced.

A frontier is often the retreat of loose individuals, who, if not familiar with crime, have very blunt per ceptions of virtue. The genuine woodsman, the real pioneer, are independent, brave, and upright; but as the jackal pursues the lion to devour his leavings, the footsteps of the sturdy hunter are closely pursued by miscreants destitute of his noble quali ties. These are the poorest and idlest of the human race —averse to labor, and impatient of the restraints of law and the courtesies of civilized society. Without the ardor, the activity, the love of sport, and patience of fatigue, which distinguish the bold backwoodsman, these are doomed to the forest by sheer laziness, and hunt for a bare subsistence; they are the "cankers of a calm world and a long peace," the helpless nobodies, who, in a country where none starve and few beg, sleep until hunger pinches, then stroll into the woods for a meal, and return again to their slumbers.

A still worse class also infested our borders-desperadoes flying from justice, suspected or convicted felons escaped from the grasp of the law, who sought safety in the depth of the forest, or in the infancy of civil

regulations. The horse-thief, the counterfeiter, and the robber, found here a secure retreat, or a new theatre for the perpetration of crime.

We have spoken, in another work, of two brothers named Harpe, who appeared in Kentucky about the year 1793, spreading death and terror wherever they went. Little else was known of them, but that they passed for brothers, and came from the borders of Virginia. They had three women with them, who were treated as their wives, and several children, with whom they traversed the mountainous and thinly settled parts of Virginia into Kentucky, marking their course with blood. Their history is wonderful, as well from the number and variety, as the incredible atrocity of their adventures.

Passing rapidly through the better settled parts of Kentucky, they proceeded to the country south of Green river, which at that time was just beginning to be inhabited.

Here they soon acquired a dreadful celebrity. Neither avarice, want, nor any of the usual inducements to the commission of crime, seemed to govern their conduct. A savage thirst for blood-a deep rooted malignity against human nature, could alone be discovered in their actions. They murdered every defenceless being that fell in their way, without distinction of age, sex, or color. In the night, they stole secretly to the cabin, slaughtered its inhabitants, and burned their dwelling-while the farmer who left his house by day, returned to witness the dying agonies of his wife and children, and the conflagration of his possessions. Plunder was not their ob

ject; travelers they robbed and murdered, but from the inhabitants they took only what would have been freely given to them, and no more than was immediately necessary to supply the wants of nature; they destroyed without having suffered injury, and without the prospect of gain. A negro boy, riding to a mill with a bag of corn, was seized by them, and his brains dashed out against a tree; but the horse which he rode, and the grain, were left unmolested. Females, children, and servants, no longer dared to stir abroad; unarmed men feared to encounter a Harpe; and the solitary hunter, as he trod the forest, looked around him with a watchful eye, and when he saw a stranger, picked his flint and stood on the defensive.

It seems incredible, that such atrocities could have been often repeated in a country famed for the hardihood and gallantry of its people; in Kentucky, the cradle of courage and the nurse of warriors. But that part of Kentucky, which was the scene of these barbarities, was then almost a wilderness, and the vigilance of the Harpes for a time insured impunity. The spoils of their dreadful warfare, furnished them with the means of violence and of escape. Mounted on fine horses, they plunged into the forest, eluded pursuit by frequently changing their course, and appeared, unexpectedly, to perpetrate new enormities, at points distant from those where they were supposed to lurk. On these occasions, they often left their wives and children behind them; and it is a fact honorable to the community, that vengeance for