of George Rogers Clark, had brought the region prominently to the
attention of the Atlantic States, and had turned in that direction the
restless and roving spirits which are always found in communities at
periods when great emigrations are a need of civilization. Up to this
time few persons had crossed the mountains except hunters, trappers,
and explorers--men who came merely to kill game, and possibly Indians,
or to spy out the fertility of the land for the purpose of
speculation. But in 1780 and 1781 a large number of families took up
their line of march, and in the latter year a considerable contingent
of women joined the little army of pioneers, impelled by an instinct
which they themselves probably but half comprehended. The country was
to be peopled, and there was no other way of peopling it but by the
sacrifice of many lives and fortunes; and the history of every country
shows that these are never lacking when they are wanted. The number of
those who came at about the same time with the pioneer Lincoln was
sufficient to lay the basis of a sort of social order. Early in the
year 1780 three hundred "large family boats" arrived at the Falls of
the Ohio, where the land had been surveyed by Captain Bullitt seven
years before, and in May the Legislature of Virginia passed a law for
the incorporation of the town of Louisville, then containing some six
hundred inhabitants. At the same session a law was passed confiscating
the property of certain British subjects for the endowment of an
institution of learning in Kentucky, "it being the interest of this
commonwealth," to quote the language of the philosophic Legislature,
"always to encourage and promote every design which may tend to the
improvement of the mind and the diffusion of useful knowledge even
among its remote citizens, whose situation in a barbarous neighborhood
and a savage intercourse might otherwise render them unfriendly to
science." This was the origin of the Transylvania University of
Lexington, which rose and flourished for many years on the utmost