Pioneers of the Old Southwest

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stinguish himself as a frontier commander in both defense and attack. Or it may be that his heart was full of the wondrous tales told him by the trader, John Findlay, of that Hunter's Canaan, Kentucky, where

hold, was offered him the oldest and sweetest of all hazards to the daring. He was twenty-two, strong and comely and a whole man; and therefore he was in no mind to refuse what life held out

young hunter, walking abroad in the spring gloaming, saw Mistress Rebecca's large dark eyes shining in the dusk of the forest, mistook them for a deer's eyes and shot-his aim on this occasion fortunately being bad! But if Boone's rifle was m

son; but back on the border with his rifle, after the harvest, aiding in defense against the Indians. In 1759 he purchased from his father a lot on Sugar Tree Creek, a tributary of Dutchman's Creek (Davie County, North Carolina) and built thereon a cabin for himself. The date when he brought his wife and children to live in their new abode on the border is not recorded. It was probably some time after the close of the Indian War. Of Boone himself during these years we have but scant information. We hear of him again in Virginia and also as a member of the pack-horse caravan which brought into the Back Country th

son through all the perils of the wilderness, a comradeship to come to its tragic end ten years later when, as we shall see, the seventeen-year-old lad fell under the red man's tomahawk as his father was leading the first settlers towards Kentucky. In the cold nights of the open

had been appointed Governor of the new colony and was offering generous inducements to settlers. The party traveled along the borders of South Carolina and Georgia. No doubt they made the greater part of their way over the old Traders' Trace, the "whitened" warpath; and they suffered severe

desires again towards the land of Kentucky. 1 The silencing of the enemy's whisper in the Cherokee camps had opened the border forests once more to the nomadic rifleman. Boone was not alone in the desire to seek out what lay beyond. His brother-in-law, John Stewart, and a nephew by marriage, Benjamin Cutbirth, or Cutbird, with two other young men, John Baker and James Ward, in 1766 cro

dair calls the territory "the old fields." The Indians apparently used the word "

k. He must find the magic door that led through the vast mountain wall into Kentucky-Kentucky, with its green prairies where the buffalo a

ure on all forest excursions, because by that time the summer crops had been gathered in and the day of the deer had come. By hunting, the explorers must feed themselves on their travels and wi

found a buffalo trace, one of the many beaten out by the herds in their passage to the salt springs, and they followed it into what is now Floyd County in eastern Kentucky. But this was not the prairie land described by Findlay; it was rough and hilly and so overgrown with laurel as t

were overjoyed to encounter each other again, and Findlay spent the winter of 1768-69 in Boone's cabin. While the snow lay deep outside and good-smelling logs crackled on the hearth, they planned an expedition into Kentucky through the Gap where Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky touch on

erness Trail, vol

spirits, Joseph Holden, James Mooney, and William Cooley, took horse for the fabled land. Passing throug

ammunition to provide for their journey homeward, and told them to depart and not to intrude again on the red men's hunting grounds. Having given this pointed warning, the Shawanoes rode on northward towards their towns beyond the Ohio. On foot, swiftly and craftily, Boone and his brother-in-law trailed the band for two days. They came upon the camp in dead of night, recaptured their horses, and fled. But this was a game in which the Indians themselves excelled, and at this date the Shawanoes had an advantage over Boone in their thorough knowledge of the territory; so that within forty-eight hours the white men were once more prisoners. After they had amused themselves by making Boone caper about with a horse bell on his neck, while they jeered at him in broken English

putting in another year at hunting and trapping in order to discharge his debts and provide for his family. Near the mouth of Red River the new party built their station camp. Here, in idle hours, Neely read aloud from a copy of Gulliver's Travels t

scouraged by this tragic event, had returned to the Yadkin. In May, Squire Boone fared forth, taking with him the season's catch of bea

ance-if we except his former disappointing journey into the laurel thickets of Floyd County. But these others, barring Stewart, who fell there, turned back when they met with loss and hardship and measured the certain risks against the possib

m their green shelter and found him, off guard for the moment, standing on a cliff gazing with rapture over the vast rolling stretches of Kentucky. He was apparently cut off from escape, for the savages were on three sides, advancing without haste to take him

o Blue Licks and saw the enormous herds licking up the salt earth, a darkly ruddy moving mass of beasts whose numbers could not

fruits a year before. In the same year (1770) there had come into Kentucky from the Yadkin another party of hunters, called, from their lengthy sojourn in the twilight zone, the Long Hunters. One of these, Gasper Mansker, afterwards related how the Long Hunters were startled one day by hearing sounds such as no buffalo or turkey ever made, and how Mansker himself stole silently under

f debt and to insure the comfort of the family he had not seen for two years. But again evil fortune met them, this time in the very gat