the reader a very correct idea of this renowned
fortress of logs, which was regarded as the Gibraltar of Indian warfare.

Having finished this fort Daniel Boone, leaving a sufficient garrison
for its security, set out for his home on the Clinch river to bring his
wife and family to the beautiful land he so long had coveted for their
residence. It seems that his wife and daughters were eager to follow
their father to the banks of the Kentucky, whose charms he had so
glowingly described to them. Several other families were also induced to
join the party of emigration. They could dwell together in a very social
community and in perfect safety in the spacious cabins within the
fortress. The river would furnish them with an unfailing supply of
water. The hunters, with their rifles, could supply them with game, and
with those rifles could protect themselves while laboring in the fields,
which with the axe they had laid open to the sun around the fort. The
hunters and the farmers at night returning within the enclosure, felt
perfectly safe from all assaults.

Daniel Boone commenced his journey with his wife and children, and
others who joined them, back to Boonesborough in high spirits. It was a
long journey of several hundred miles, and to many persons it would seem
a journey fraught with great peril, for they were in danger almost every
mile of the way, of encountering hostile Indians. But Boone, accustomed
to traversing the wilderness, and accompanied by well armed men, felt no
more apprehensions of danger than the father of a family would at the
present day in traveling by cars from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania.

It was beautiful autumnal weather when the party of pioneers commenced
its adventurous tour through the wilderness, to find a new home five
hundred miles beyond even the remotest frontiers of civilization. There
were three families besides that of Boone, and numbered in all
twenty-six men, four women, and four or five boys and girls of various
ages. Daniel Boone was the happy leader of this heroic little band.

In due time they all arrived safely at Boonesborough "without having
encountered," as Boone writes, "any other difficulties than such as are
common to this passage." As they approached the fort, Boone and his
family, for some unexplained reason, pressed forward, and entered the
fortress a few days in advance of the rest of the party. Perhaps Boone
himself had a little pride to have it said, that Mrs. Bo