from the crown or from legislatures, or through purchase by
adventurers from Indian councils. But about the time of which we are
speaking the spirit of emigration had reached the lower strata of
colonial society, and a steady stream of pioneers began pouring over
the passes of the mountains into the green and fertile valleys of
Kentucky and Tennessee. They selected their homes in the most eligible
spots to which chance or the report of earlier explorers directed
them, with little knowledge or care as to the rightful ownership of
the land, and too often cleared their corner of the wilderness for the
benefit of others. Even Boone, to whose courage, forest lore, and
singular intuitions of savage character the State of Kentucky owed
more than to any other man, was deprived in his old age of his hard-
earned homestead through his ignorance of legal forms, and removed to
Missouri to repeat in that new territory his labors and his
misfortunes.

[Illustration: FAC-SIMILE FROM THE FIELD BOOK OF DANIEL BOONE. This
record of the Lincoln Claim on Licking River is from the original in
posession of Lyman C. Draper, Madison, Wis.]

[Sidenote: 1780.]

The period at which Lincoln came West was one of note in the history
of Kentucky. The labors of Henderson and the Transylvania Company had
begun to bear fruit in extensive plantations and a connected system of
forts. The land laws of Kentucky had reduced to something like order
the chaos of conflicting claims arising from the various grants and
the different preemption customs under which settlers occupied their
property. The victory of Boone at Boonesboro' against the Shawnees,
and the capture of Kaskaskia and Vincennes by the brilliant audacity