Pioneers of the Old Southwest [30]
returned to the Red River camp and there met Squire Boone with another pack of supplies. The two brothers continued their hunting and exploration together for some months, chiefly in Jessamine County, where two caves still bear Boone's name. In that winter they even braved the Green River ground, whence had come the hunting Shawanoes who had taken Daniel's first fruits a year before. In the same year (1770) there had come into Kentucky from the Yadkin another party of hunters, called, from their lengthy sojourn in the twilight zone, the Long Hunters. One of these, Gasper Mansker, afterwards related how the Long Hunters were startled one day by hearing sounds such as no buffalo or turkey ever made, and how Mansker himself stole silently under cover of the trees towards the place whence the strange noises came, and descried Daniel Boone prone on his back with a deerskin under him, his famous tall black hat beside him and his mouth opened wide in joyous but apparently none too tuneful song. This incident gives a true character touch. It is not recorded of any of the men who turned back that they sang alone in the wilderness.
In March, 1771, the two Boones started homeward, their horses bearing the rich harvest of furs and deerskins which was to clear Daniel of debt and to insure the comfort of the family he had not seen for two years. But again evil fortune met them, this time in the very gates--for in the Cumberland Gap they were suddenly surrounded by Indians who took everything from them, leaving them neither guns nor horses.
Chapter VI. The Fight For Kentucky
When Boone returned home he found the Back Country of North Carolina in the throes of the Regulation Movement. This movement, which had arisen first from the colonists' need to police their settlements, had more recently assumed a political character. The Regulators were now in conflict with the authorities, because the frontier folk were suffering through excessive taxes, extortionate fees, dishonest land titles, and the corruption of the courts. In May, 1771, the conflict lost its quasi-civil nature. The Regulators resorted to arms and were defeated by the forces under Governor Tryon in the Battle of the Alamance.
The Regulation Movement, which we shall follow in more detail further on, was a culmination of those causes of unrest which turned men westward. To escape from oppression and to acquire land beyond the bounds of tyranny became the earnest desire of independent spirits throughout the Back Country. But there was another and more potent reason why the country east of the mountains no longer contented Boone. Hunting and trapping were Boone's chief means of livelihood. In those days, deerskins sold for a dollar a skin to the traders at the Forks or in Hillsborough; beaver at about two dollars and a half, and otter at from three to five dollars. A pack-horse could carry a load of one hundred dressed deerskins, and, as currency was scarce, a hundred dollars was wealth. Game was fast disappearing from the Yadkin. To Boone above all men, then, Kentucky beckoned. When he returned in the spring of 1771 from his explorations, it was with the resolve to take his family at once into the great game country and to persuade some of his friends to join in this hazard of new fortunes.
The perils of such a venture, only conjectural to us at this distance, he knew well; but in him there was nothing that shrank from danger, though he did not court it after the rash manner of many of his compeers. Neither reckless nor riotous, Boone was never found among those who opposed violence to authority, even unjust authority; nor was he ever guilty of the savagery which characterized much of the retaliatory warfare of that period when frenzied white men bettered the red man's instruction. In him, courage was illumined with tenderness and made equable by self-control. Yet, though he was no fiery zealot like the Ulstermen who were to follow him along the path he had made and who loved and revered him perhaps because he was so different from themselves, Boone nevertheless
In March, 1771, the two Boones started homeward, their horses bearing the rich harvest of furs and deerskins which was to clear Daniel of debt and to insure the comfort of the family he had not seen for two years. But again evil fortune met them, this time in the very gates--for in the Cumberland Gap they were suddenly surrounded by Indians who took everything from them, leaving them neither guns nor horses.
Chapter VI. The Fight For Kentucky
When Boone returned home he found the Back Country of North Carolina in the throes of the Regulation Movement. This movement, which had arisen first from the colonists' need to police their settlements, had more recently assumed a political character. The Regulators were now in conflict with the authorities, because the frontier folk were suffering through excessive taxes, extortionate fees, dishonest land titles, and the corruption of the courts. In May, 1771, the conflict lost its quasi-civil nature. The Regulators resorted to arms and were defeated by the forces under Governor Tryon in the Battle of the Alamance.
The Regulation Movement, which we shall follow in more detail further on, was a culmination of those causes of unrest which turned men westward. To escape from oppression and to acquire land beyond the bounds of tyranny became the earnest desire of independent spirits throughout the Back Country. But there was another and more potent reason why the country east of the mountains no longer contented Boone. Hunting and trapping were Boone's chief means of livelihood. In those days, deerskins sold for a dollar a skin to the traders at the Forks or in Hillsborough; beaver at about two dollars and a half, and otter at from three to five dollars. A pack-horse could carry a load of one hundred dressed deerskins, and, as currency was scarce, a hundred dollars was wealth. Game was fast disappearing from the Yadkin. To Boone above all men, then, Kentucky beckoned. When he returned in the spring of 1771 from his explorations, it was with the resolve to take his family at once into the great game country and to persuade some of his friends to join in this hazard of new fortunes.
The perils of such a venture, only conjectural to us at this distance, he knew well; but in him there was nothing that shrank from danger, though he did not court it after the rash manner of many of his compeers. Neither reckless nor riotous, Boone was never found among those who opposed violence to authority, even unjust authority; nor was he ever guilty of the savagery which characterized much of the retaliatory warfare of that period when frenzied white men bettered the red man's instruction. In him, courage was illumined with tenderness and made equable by self-control. Yet, though he was no fiery zealot like the Ulstermen who were to follow him along the path he had made and who loved and revered him perhaps because he was so different from themselves, Boone nevertheless