During these weeks of waiting for his brother, he led a very lonely life. In all that time he did not speak to a single human being, nor had he even a dog, cat, or horse for company. Without salt, sugar, or flour, his sole food was the game he shot or caught in traps.
How gladly he must have welcomed his brother, who returned at the end of two months, bringing the needed supplies! Other hunters also came from time to time, and Boone joined one party of them for a while.
After two years of his life in the woods he returned to his home on the Yadkin to bring out his wife and children.
By September, 1773, he had sold his farm and was ready with his family to go and settle in Kentucky. He had praised the new land so much that many others wished to go with him. So when he started there were, besides his wife and children, five families and forty men driving their horses and cattle before them. This group was the first to attempt settlement far out in the wilderness, away from the other settlers.
But while still on its way, the little company was set upon by a band of Indians near a narrow and difficult pass in the mountains. Six men were killed, among them Boone’s eldest son, and the cattle were scattered. This misfortune brought such gloom upon the party that all turned back for a time to a settlement on the Clinch River.
But Daniel Boone was one of those who would not give up. He said of himself that he was “ordained of God to settle the wilderness,” and in the end he carried out his unflinching purpose to make his home in the beautiful Kentucky region.
This region had already become well known by report east of the mountains. The Indians called it “a dark and bloody ground,” for, as an old chief told Boone, many tribes hunted and fought there, and the Indians had roamed over it for hundreds of years.
But none of the tribes really owned the land. So it was not possible to buy any part of it outright. Yet, to avoid strife, a friend of Boone’s, Richard Henderson, and a few others made treaties with the most powerful tribe, the Cherokees, who said that they might settle there.
As soon as it became certain that the Indians would not make trouble, Henderson sent Boone, in charge of thirty men, to open a pathway from the Holston River through Cumberland Gap to the Kentucky River.
With their axes the men chopped out a path through the dense undergrowth and cane-brakes broad enough for a pack-horse. You will be interested to know that this bridle-path was the beginning of the famous “Wilderness Road,” as it is still called. Later the narrow trail was widened into a highway for wagons, and it was along this way, rightly called a “wilderness road,” that in later years so many thousand settlers led their pack-trains over the mountains into Kentucky and Tennessee.