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The trees are as thick as a canebrake, the avenues are lost in the dusk; there are lakes and canals almost hidden by the verdure of the banks; rustic bridges, the crossways of unfrequented bridle-paths, shady recesses; and over all a cool, refreshing shade in which one seems to breathe the air of virginal nature and to be far removed from the turmoil of the world.
It was a straight quarter of a mile course, within two hundred yards of the stockade; at its farther end was a canebrake, wherein an Indian once lay hid and shot a rider, who was pulling up his horse at the close of a race. There was still but one ferry, that over the Kentucky River at Boonsborough; the price of ferriage was three shillings for either man or horse.
Boone says that in many of these regions he found buffalo roving in companies of several hundreds feeding upon the tender leaves of the canebrake, or browsing upon the smooth and extended meadows. Being far removed from the usual route of the Indian hunters, they were very tame, manifesting no fear at the approach of man.
In earlier days, to the northward through the forest, many old timbers rejected in railway construction or repair, with dead logs and limbs, had been drifted together by heavy rains, and had gathered a covering of soil; canebrake, luxurious willow-bushes, and tough grasses had sprung up on them and bound them with their roots.
He had a definite purpose and it was to rejoin his four comrades, Paul Cotter, Shif'less Sol Hyde, Long Jim Hart and Tom Ross, who were not far away in the greenwood, the five, since the repulse of the great attack upon the wagon train, continuing their chosen duties as keepers of the trail, that is, they were continually on guard in the vast forest and canebrake against the Northwestern Indians who were making such a bitter war upon the young Kentucky settlements.
We then disembarked, and marched through the canebrake, carrying lighted candles in our hands, till we got into the open cotton-fields at Hill's plantation, where we lay down for a few hours' rest.
Not all the Shawnees, not all the Miamis, not all the renegades could drive the five from this mighty, unoccupied wilderness of Kain-tuck-ee, which his comrades and he loved and in which they had as good a right as any Indian or renegade that ever lived. It was so still in the canebrake that the birds over the head of the watcher began to sing.
During this time we discovered no uneasiness or desire to escape, which made them less suspicious of us; but in the dead of night, as we lay in a thick canebrake by a large fire, when sleep had locked-up their senses, my situation not disposing me for rest, I touched my companion, and gently awoke him.
Even if they had heard the report of the rifles, they could only have supposed that it was from the guns of the hunters firing at game. The evening twilight was fading away. The whole party was concealed in a dense canebrake which fringed the stream.
The pioneers were hunters and husbandmen. Each, by the aid of axe and brand, cleared his patch of corn land in the forest, close to some clear, swift-flowing stream, and by his skill with the rifle won from canebrake and woodland the game on which his family lived until the first crop was grown.
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