One of Blount's Kentucky correspondents, Thomas Hart, the grandfather of Benton, in his letter to Blount shows these traits in typical fashion.
He was engaged in various land speculations with Blount, [Footnote: Clay MSS., Blount to Hart, Knoxville, February 9, 1794.

This was just as Hart was moving to Kentucky.] and was always writing to him about locating land warrants, advertising the same as required by law, and the like.

He and Blount held some tens of thousands of acres of the Henderson claim, and Hart proposed that they should lay it out in five-hundred-acre tracts, to be rented to farmers, with the idea that each farmer should receive ten cows and calves to start with; a proposition which was of course hopeless, as the pioneers would not lease lands when it was so easy to obtain freeholds.

In his letters, Hart mentioned cheerfully that though he was sixty-three years old he was just as well able to carry on his manufacturing business, and, on occasion, to leave it, and play pioneer, as he ever had been, remarking that he "never would be satisfied in the world while new countries could be found," and that his intention, now that he had moved to Kentucky, was to push the mercantile business as long as the Indian war continued and money was plenty, and when that failed, to turn his attention to farming and to divide up those of his lands he could not till himself, to be rented by others.
[Footnote: Blount MSS., Thomas Hart to Blount, Dec.

23, 1793.] This letter to Blount shows, by the way, as was shown by Madison's correspondent from Kentucky, that the Indian war, scourge though it was to the frontiersmen as a whole, brought some attendant benefits in its wake by putting a stimulus on the trade of the merchants and bringing ready money into the country.