2300 Deer Skins lost Ruination by God [91]
Undismayed by this depressing stroke of fortune, they continued their hunt in the direction of the lick which Bledsoe had discovered the preceding year. Shortly after this discovery, a French voyageur from the Illinois who had hunted and traded in this region for a decade, Timothé de Monbreun, subsequently famous in the history of Tennessee, had visited the lick and killed an enormous number of buffaloes for their tallow and tongues with which he and his companion loaded a keel boat and descended the Cumberland. An early pioneer, William Hall, learned from Isaac Bledsoe that when "the long hunters Crossed the ridge and came down on Bledsoe's Creek in four or five miles of the Lick the Cane had grown up so thick in the woods that they thought they had mistaken the place until they Came to the Lick and saw what had been done.… One could walk for several hundred yards a round the Lick and in the lick on buffellows Skuls, & bones and the whole flat round the Lick was bleached with buffellows bones, and they found out the Cause of the Canes growing up so suddenly a few miles around the Lick which was in Consequence of so many buffellows being killed."
This expedition was of genuine importance, opening the eyes of the frontiersmen to the charms of the country and influencing many to settle subsequently in the West—some in Tennessee, some in Kentucky. The elaborate and detailed information brought back by Henry Scaggs exerted an appreciable influence, no doubt, in accelerating the plans of Richard Henderson and Company for the acquisition and colonization of the trans-Alleghany. But while the "Long Hunters" were in Tennessee and Kentucky the same region was being more extensively and systematically explored by Daniel Boone. To his life, character, and attainments, as the typical "long hunter" and the most influential pioneer we may now turn our particular attention.
[CHAPTER IX.]
Daniel Boone and Wilderness Exploration
Here, where the hand of violence shed the blood of the innocent; where the horrid yells of the savages, and the groans of the distressed, sounded in our ears, we now hear the praises and adorations of our Creator; where wretched wigwams stood, the miserable abodes of savages, we behold the foundations of cities laid, that, in all probability, will equal the glory of the greatest upon earth.
—Daniel Boone, 1784.
The wandering life of a border Nimrod in a surpassingly beautiful country teeming with game was the ideal of the frontiersman of the eighteenth century. As early as 1728, while running the dividing line between North Carolina and Virginia, William Byrd encountered along the North Carolina frontier the typical figure of the professional hunter: "a famous Woodsman, call'd Epaphroditus Bainton. This Forester Spends all his time in ranging the Woods, and is said to make great Havock among the Deer, and other Inhabitants of the Forest, not much wilder than himself." By the middle of the century, as he was threading his way through the Carolina piedmont zone, the hunter's paradise of the Yadkin and Catawba country, Bishop Spangenberg found ranging there many hunters, living like Indians, who killed thousands of deer each year and sold the skins in the local markets or to the fur-traders from Virginia whose heavy pack-trains with their tinkling bells constantly traversed the course of the Great Trading Path.
The superlative skill of one of these hunters, both as woodsman and marksman, was proverbial along the border. The name of Daniel Boone became synonymous with expert huntsmanship and almost uncanny wisdom in forest lore. The bottoms of the creek near the Boone home, three miles west of present Mocksville, contained a heavy growth of beech, which dropped large quantities of its rich nuts or mast, greatly relished by bears; and this creek received its name, Bear Creek, because Daniel and his father killed in its rich bottoms ninety-nine bears in a single hunting-season. After living for a time with his young wife, Rebecca Bryan, in a cabin in his father's yard, Daniel built a home of his own upon a tract of land, purchased from his father on October 12, 1759, and lying on Sugar Tree, a tributary of Dutchman's Creek. Here he dwelt for the next five years, with the exception of the period of his temporary removal to Virginia during the terrible era of the Indian war. Most of his time during the autumn and winter, when he was not engaged in wagoning or farming, he spent in long hunting-journeys into the mountains to the west and northwest. During the hunting-season of 1760 he struck deeper than ever before into the western mountain region and encamped in a natural rocky shelter amidst fine hunting-grounds, in what is now Washington County in east Tennessee. Of the scores of inscriptions commemorative of his hunting-feats, which Boone with pardonable pride was accustomed throughout his life-time to engrave with his hunting-knife upon trees and rocks, the earliest known is found upon a leaning beech tree, only recently fallen, near his camp and the creek which since that day has borne his name. This is a characteristic and enduring record in the history of American exploration: