CHAPTER IV.
Camp Life Beyond the Alleghanies.
John Finley and his Adventures.—Aspect of the Country.—Boone's Private Character.—His Love for the Wilderness.—First view of Kentucky.—Emigrants' Dress.—Hunter's Home.—Capture of Boone and Stewart by the Indians.—Their Escape.—Singular Incident.
In the year 1767, a bold hunter by the name of John Finley with two or three companions crossed the mountain range of the Alleghanies into the region beyond, now known as Kentucky. The mountains where he crossed, consisting of a series of parallel ridges, some of which were quite impassable save at particular points, presented a rugged expanse nearly fifty miles in breadth. It took many weary days for these moccassined feet to traverse the wild solitudes. The Indian avoids the mountains. He chooses the smooth prairie where the buffalo and the elk graze, and where the wild turkey, the grouse and the prairie chicken, wing their flight, or the banks of some placid stream over which he can glide in his birch canoe, and where fish of every variety can be taken. Indeed the Indians, with an eye for picturesque beauty, seldom reared their villages in the forest, whose glooms repelled them. Generally where the forest approached the stream, they clustered their wigwams in its edge, with the tranquil river and the open country spread out before them.
John Finley and his companions traversed the broad expanse of the Alleghanies, without meeting any signs of human life. The extreme western ridge of these parallel eminences or spurs, has received the name of the Cumberland mountains. Passing through a gorge, which has since then become renowned in peace and war as Cumberland Gap, they entered upon a vast undulating expanse, of wonderful fertility and beauty. In its rivers, its plains, its forests, its gentle eminences, its bright skies and salubrious clime, it presented then, as now, as attractive a residence for man as this globe can furnish. Finley and his companions spent several months roving through this, to them, new Eden. Game of every variety abounded. Through some inexplicable reason, no Indians held possession of the country. But wandering tribes, whose homes and acknowledged territory were far away in the north, the west, and the south, were ever traversing these regions in hunting bands. They often met in bloody encounters. These conflicts were so frequent and so sanguinary, that this realm so highly favored of God for the promotion of all happiness, subsequently received the appropriate name of "The dark and bloody ground."
After an absence of many months, Finley and his companions returned to North Carolina, with the most glowing accounts of the new country which they had found. Their story of the beauty of those realms was so extravagant, that many regarded them as gross exaggerations. It subsequently appeared, however, that they were essentially true. A more lovely and attractive region cannot be found on earth. It is man's inhumanity to man, mainly, which has ever caused such countless millions to mourn.