Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 6).djvu/64

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64
BOONE'S WILDERNESS ROAD

broke up some ground, & planted Corn, and Peach Stones."

Thus was raised, beside the tumbling Cumberland, on the farm now owned by George M. Faulkner four miles below Barbourville, Kentucky, the first house now recorded as built by white men in the fine territory between the Cumberland Mountains and the Ohio River, now the state of Kentucky. It was not an "improver's cabin"—a log pen without roof—but a roofed house, and instituted what the English Loyal Land Company could claim to be a "settlement" in the territory which they had been granted. This was completed by the planting of corn and peach trees. The formality of this "settlement" is evinced by the fact that, two days later, the entire party moved on for further exploration, never again to return to their house or to reap their crops. It was twenty years before a house was erected in Kentucky for the permanent dwelling.

From this on, Dr. Walker's journal is a long story of accidents and disappointments. One horse became lame, and "another had been bit in the Nose by a Snake."