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In a single day he could kill enough bears to make a ton of what was called bear-bacon; there were numberless wolves, panthers, and wildcats; turkeys, beavers, otters and smaller animals ran wild all about him, and from morn till night he was out hunting in the woods. But life was not all sport for the young Boones.
The rancor that manifested itself in Boone's treatment of the Misses Perley was not imitated by them. They never alluded to their affluent neighbor, never suffered gossip concerning the Boones in what Olympia humorously called the "Orphic adytum," the "tabby-shop," as Wesley named the Perley parlors. Young Dick, however, had none of the scruples that kept his aunts silent.
With these sad stories floating about continually, it is not wonderful that the Boones found difficulty in beating up companions, and that more than two years passed away before they were ready for a start.
In March, 1771, after spending some time in company with the Long Hunters, the Boones, their horses laden with furs, set their faces homeward. On their return journey, near Cumberland Gap, they had the misfortune to be surrounded by a party of Indians who robbed them of their guns and all their peltries.
But in such a case, in a compact settlement like that of the Yadkin, there are never wanting gainsayers, opposers, gossips, who envied the Boones. These caused those disposed to the enterprise to hear the other part, and to contemplate the other side of the picture.
But the natural love of adventure, curiosity, fondness for the hunting life, dissatisfaction with the incessant labor necessary for subsistence on their present comparatively sterile soil, joined to the confident eloquence of the Boones, prevailed on four or five families to join them in the expedition.
The Boones begged them to keep on their way not to think of turning back; but it was all to no purpose; most of them insisted on retreating, and they at length yielded to the general desire. Accordingly, the dead were decently buried, and in great sadness they all traced their way back to Clinch river. Here Daniel Boone remained with his family eight months.
Their story is, that the three started out upon a hunt; that this man was separated from the Boones, and became entangled in a swamp. The Boones searched for him, but could not find him. Afterward, they found fragments of his clothes, which convinced them that the poor man had been torn to pieces by wolves. Daniel Boone, however, tells a different story.
This diviner glimpse illumines the lives of our Daniel Boones, the man of civilization and old-world ideas confronted with our forest solitudes, confronted, too, for the first time, with his real self, and so led gradually to disentangle the original substance of his manhood from the artificial results of culture.
Here settled, like the gravel along the cleats of a sluice, the daring men who had pushed west from Kentucky, Tennessee, lower Ohio, eastern Missouri the Boones, Carsons, Crocketts, and Kentons of their day. Here came the Mormons to found their towns, and later to meet the armed resistance which drove them across the plains.
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