This gave rise to great popular discontent. Boone's protest consisted in leaving the Sugar Tree settlement and moving northwest for sixty-five miles toward the head of the Yadkin. His new cabin, a primitive shell of logs, could still be seen, a few years ago, at the foot of a range of hills some seven and a half miles above Wilkesboro, in Wilkes County. After a time, dissatisfied with this location, he moved five miles farther up the river and about half a mile up Beaver Creek. Again he changed his mind, choosing his final home on the upper Yadkin, just above the mouth of Beaver. It was from this beautiful region among the Alleghany foot-hills, where game and fish were plenty and his swine and cattle had good range, that Boone, crowded out by advancing civilization, eventually moved to Kentucky.

In the spring and early summer of 1767 there were fresh outbreaks on the part of the Indians. Governor Tryon had run a boundary-line between the back settlements of the Carolinas and the Cherokee hunting-grounds. But hunters and traders would persist in wandering to the west of this line, and sometimes they were killed.

In the autumn of that year Daniel Boone and a warm friend, William Hill, and possibly Squire Boone, determined to seek Kentucky, of which Finley had told him twelve years before. They crossed the mountain wall, were in the valleys of the Holston and the Clinch, and reached the head waters of the West Fork of the Big Sandy. Following down this river for a hundred miles, determined to find the Ohio, they appear to have struck a buffalo-path, along which they traveled as far as a salt-lick ten miles west of the present town of Prestonburg, on a tributary of the West (or Louisa) Fork of the Sandy, within Floyd County, in the extreme eastern part of Kentucky.

Caught in a severe snow-storm, they were compelled to camp at this lick for the entire winter. It proved to be the most profitable station that they could have selected, for buffaloes and other animals came in large numbers to lick the brackish soil, and all the hunters had to do was to "rise, kill, and eat."

Although now considerably west of the Cumberland Mountains, the explorers were not aware that they were within the famed Kentucky; and as the country was very hilly, covered with briers which annoyed them greatly, and altogether forbidding, they despaired of reaching the promised land by this path, and in the spring returned to the Yadkin.

CHAPTER VI
ALONE IN THE WILDERNESS

In the winter of 1768-69 a pedler with horse and wagon wandered into the valley of the upper Yadkin, offering small wares to the settlers' wives. This was thrifty John Finley, former fur-trader and Indian fighter, who, thirteen years before, had, as we have seen, fraternized with Boone in Braddock's ill-fated army on the Monongahela. Finley had, in 1752, in his trade with the Indians, descended the Ohio in a canoe to the site of Louisville, accompanied by three or four voyageurs, and, with some of his dusky customers, traveled widely through the interior of Kentucky. His glowing descriptions of this beautiful land had inspired Boone to try to find it. The latter was still sorrowing over his unpromising expedition by way of the Big Sandy when, by the merest chance, the man who had fired his imagination knocked at his very door.

Throughout the winter that Finley was Daniel's guest, he and his brother Squire were ready listeners to the pedler's stories of the over-mountain country—tales of countless water-fowl, turkeys, deer, elk, and buffaloes, which doubtless lost nothing in the telling. The two Boones resolved to try Finley's proposed route by way of Cumberland Gap, and the fur-trader promised to lead the way.

After the spring crops were in, Finley, Daniel Boone, and the latter's brother-in-law, John Stuart, started from Daniel's house upon the first of May. In their employ, as hunters and camp-keepers, were three neighbors—Joseph Holden, James Mooney, and William Cooley. Each man was fully armed, clad in the usual deerskin costume of the frontier, and mounted upon a good horse; blanket or bearskin was strapped on behind the saddle, together with camp-kettle, a store of salt, and a small supply of provisions, although their chief food was to be game. Squire remained to care for the crops of the two families, and agreed to reenforce the hunters late in the autumn.