were for a long time unable to protect them. The war was
virtually terminated by the campaign of 1759, when Quebec was taken.
The next year Canada was ceded to England; and a Cherokee war, which had
disturbed the border setters of North Carolina, was terminated. Daniel
Boone's biographers all agree that it was about this time when he first
began to make long excursions toward the West; but it is difficult to
fix exactly the date of his first long journey through the woods in
this direction. It is generally dated in 1771 or 1772, We now make a
quotation from Ramsay's Annals of Tennessee, which shows, beyond the
possibility of a doubt, that he hunted on the Wataga River in 1760, and
renders it probable that he was in the West at an earlier date. Our
readers will excuse the length of this quotation, as the first part of
it gives so graphic a picture of the hunter and pioneer life of the
times of Daniel Boone, and also shows what had been done by others in
western explorations before Boone's expeditions commenced.

"The Colonists of the Carolinas and of Virginia had been steadily
advancing to the West, and we have traced their approaches in the
direction of our eastern boundary,[8] to the base of the great
Appalachian range."

Of the country beyond it, little was positively known or accurately
understood. A wandering Indian would imperfectly delineate upon the
sand, a feeble outline of its more prominent physical features--its
magnificent rivers, with their numerous tributaries--its lofty
mountains, its dark forests, its extended plains and its vast extent.
A voyage in a canoe, from the source of the Hogohegee[9] to the
Wabash,[10] required for its performance, in their figurative language,
'two paddles, two warriors, three moons.' The Ohio itself was but a
tributary of a still larger river, of whose source, size and direction,
no intelligible account could be communicated or understood. The Muscle
Shoals and the obstructions in the river above them, were represented
as mighty cataracts and fearful whirlpools, and the Suck, as an awful
vortex. The wild beasts with which the illimitable forests abounded,
were numbered by pointing to the leaves upon the trees, or the stars
in a cloudless sky.

"These glowing descriptions of the West seemed rather to stimulate
than to satisfy the intense curiosity of the approaching settlers.
Information more reliable, and more minute, was, from time to time,
furnished from other sources.