stranger is, it appears, on his way back to Chilicothé, and is very humanely sent on by the stage, free of all expense, and is received and fed at every tavern with gratuitous kindness. Even my driver gave him, this day, a dollar. This humanity and hospitality seem national in the west.
I rode over an extent of hills, 20 miles, so flinty and barren, that the plough never could and never will touch it. The hogs that grunt and roam over it look lean, hungry, and starved. The few inhabitants live by hunting and shooting squirrels and good wild ducks. I saw a fresh-water turtle on the edge of the creek. On these stony, flinty hills, the first settlers of Kentucky fell, being most of them destroyed by battling with the Indians, who considered themselves invaded.[56] They fired from ambushes. The bones of the unfortunate Kentuckyans still remain above ground, bleaching {190} in considerable numbers, at the bottom of a deep hollow of the mountains, into which their bodies were thrown in heaps, for want of earth and industry to bury them.
Wheat, in this state, is fine in quality, and in quantity averaging about 25 bushels an acre; but where the land is fallowed, from 40 to 50 are frequently had. Fallow means corn land, or land planted first with Indian corn, then with oats the second year, and with wheat the next, which is generally more abundant than when sown immediately after, or amongst the corn at the last horse-hoeing; for the land gets a good ploughing for the oats, and another for the wheat. What a curious idea of fallowing does this seem to an English farmer, who knows of no fallow, positively so, except a naked fallow!
After passing the hills of stone and human bones, all
