Not long after the robbery, when the Long Hunters were upon Green River, one of the parties into which the band was divided were going into camp for the night, when a singular noise was heard proceeding from a considerable distance in the forest. The leader, Caspar Mausker, commanded silence on the part of his comrades, and himself crept cautiously from tree to tree in the direction of the sound. Imagine his surprise and amusement to find "a man bare-headed, stretched flat upon his back on a deerskin spread on the ground, singing merrily at the top of his voice!" The singer was our hero, Daniel Boone, who, regardless of possible Indian neighbors, was thus enjoying himself while awaiting Squire's belated return to camp. Like most woodsmen of his day and ours, Boone was fond of singing, in his rude way, as well as of relating tales of stirring adventure. In such manner were many hours whiled away around the camp-fires of wilderness hunters.
The Boones at once joined and spent some time with the Long Hunters, no doubt delighted at this opportunity of once more mingling with men of their kind. Among their amusements was that of naming rivers, creeks, and hills after members of the party; many of these names are still preserved upon the map of Kentucky. At one time they discovered that some French hunters from the Illinois country had recently visited a lick to kill buffaloes for their tongues and tallow, which they had loaded into a keel-boat and taken down the Cumberland. In after years one of the Long Hunters declared that this wholesale slaughter was so great "that one could walk for several hundred yards in and around the lick on buffaloes' skulls and bones, with which the whole flat around the lick was bleached."
It was not until August that the Long Hunters returned to their homes, after a profitable absence of eleven months. But the Boone brothers left their comrades in March and headed for the Yadkin, with horses now well laden with spoils of the chase. They were deeply in debt for their latest supplies, but were returning in light heart, cheered with the prospect of settling their accounts and being able to revisit Kentucky in good condition. But in Powell's Valley, near Cumberland Gap, where they might well have supposed that small chance of danger remained, they were suddenly set upon by a war party of Northern Indians who had been raiding the white settlers as well as their Southern foes, the Cherokees and Catawbas. Roughly handled and robbed of their packs, the unfortunate hunters reached the Yadkin in no happy frame of mind. Daniel had been absent for two years, and was now poorer than when he left home. He used to say, however, in after years, that having at last seen Kentucky, his ideal of an earthly paradise, that served as solace for his woes.
CHAPTER VIII
THE HERO OF CLINCH VALLEY
While Daniel Boone had been hunting and exploring amid the deep forests and waving greenswards of Kentucky, important events had been taking place in the settlements. The colonists along the Atlantic tidewater had become so crowded that there were no longer any free lands in that region; and settlers' cabins in the western uplands of Pennsylvania, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia had so multiplied that now much of the best land there had also been taken up. The far-outlying frontier upon which the Boones and Bryans had reared their rude log huts nearly a quarter of a century before, no longer abounded in game and in free pastures for roving herds; indeed, the frontier was now pushed forward to the west-flowing streams—to the head waters of the Watauga, Clinch, Powell, French Broad, Holston, and Nolichucky, all of them affluents of the Tennessee, and to the Monongahela and other tributaries of the upper Ohio.
The rising tide of population demanded more room to the westward. The forbidding mountain-ranges had long hemmed in the restless borderers; but the dark-skinned wilderness tribes had formed a still more serious barrier, as, with rifles and tomahawks purchased from white traders, they terrorized the slowly advancing outposts of civilization. With the French government no longer in control of Canada and the region east of the Mississippi—although French-Canadian woodsmen were freely employed by the British Indian Department—with the consequent quieting of Indian forays, with increased knowledge of the over-mountain passes, and with the strong push of population from behind, there had arisen a general desire to scale the hills, and beyond them to seek exemption from tax-gatherers, free lands, and the abundant game concerning which the Kentucky hunters had brought glowing reports.
Upon the defeat of the French, the English king had issued a proclamation (1763) forbidding his "loving subjects" to settle to the west of the mountains. The home government was no doubt actuated in this by two motives: first, a desire to preserve the wilderness for the benefit of the growing fur trade, which brought wealth to many London merchants; second, a fear that borderers who pushed beyond the mountains might not only be beyond the reach of English trade, but also beyond English political control. But the frontiersmen were already too far distant to have much regard for royal proclamations. The king's command appears to have had no more effect than had he, like one of his predecessors, bade the ocean tide rise no higher.
In 1768, at Fort Stanwix, N.Y., the Iroquois of that province, whose war parties had raided much of the country between the Hudson and the Mississippi, surrendered what shadowy rights they might be supposed to have over all lands lying between the Ohio and the Tennessee. Meanwhile, at the South, the Cherokees had agreed to a frontier which opened to settlement eastern Kentucky and Tennessee.
But, without waiting for these treaties, numerous schemes had been proposed in England and the Atlantic coast colonies for the settlement of Kentucky and the lands of the upper Ohio. Most of these projects failed, even the more promising of them being checked by the opening of the Revolutionary War; but their existence showed how general was the desire of English colonists to occupy those fertile Western lands which explorers like Gist, Washington, the Boones, and the Long Hunters had now made familiar to the world. The new treaties strengthened this desire, so that when Daniel and Squire Boone reached their homes upon the Yadkin the subject of Western settlement was uppermost in the minds of the people.