ning back. The Bryans, who had arrived
meanwhile, also advised retreat, saying that the "signs" about the scene
of blood indicated an Indian uprising. Daniel carried the scalped body
of his son, the boy-comrade of his happy hunts, to the camp and buried
it there at the beginning of the trail. His voice alone urged that they
go on.

Fortunately indeed, as events turned out, Boone was overruled, and the
expedition was abandoned. The Bryan party and the others from North
Carolina went back to the Yadkin. Boone himself with his family
accompanied Russell to the Clinch settlement, where he erected a
temporary cabin on the farm of one of the settlers, and then set out
alone on the chase to earn provision for his wife and children through
the winter.

Those who prophesied an Indian war were not mistaken. When the snowy
hunting season had passed and the "Powwowing Days" were come, the Indian
war drum rattled in the medicine house from the borders of Pennsylvania
to those of Carolina. The causes of the strife for which the red men
were making ready must be briefly noted to help us form a just opinion
of the deeds that followed. Early writers have usually represented the
frontiersmen as saints in buckskin and the Indians as fiends without
the shadow of a claim on either the land or humanity. Many later writers
have merely reversed the shield. The truth is that the Indians and the
borderers reacted upon each other to the hurt of both. Paradoxically,
they grew like enough to hate one another with a savage hatred--and both
wanted the land.

Land! Land! was the slogan of all sorts and conditions of men. Tidewater
officials held solemn powwows with the chiefs, gave wampum strings, and
forthwith incorporated. * Chiefs blessed their white brothers who
had "forever brightened the chain of friendship," departed home, and
proceeded to brighten the blades of their tomahawks and to await, not
long, the opportunity to use them on casual hunters who carried in their
kits the compass, the "land-stealer." Usually the surveying hunter was
a borderer; and on him the tomahawk descended with an accelerated gusto.
Private citizens also formed land companies and sent out surveyors,
regardless of treaties. Bold frontiersmen went into No Man's Land and
staked out their claims. In the very year when disaster turned the Boone
party back, James Harrod had entered Kentucky from Pennsylvania and had
marked the site of a settlement.

* The activ