was an easy task for him to remove. In such an hour, one can
sometimes well say, "Blessed be Nothing." A few pack-horses were
sufficient to convey all his household goods. It is probable that his
wife and children, indignant at the treatment which the husband and
father had received, were glad to leave.

This was doubtless one of the saddest journeys that Colonel Boone ever
undertook. Traversing an almost pathless wilderness in a direction a
little north of east from Boonesborough, he crossed the various speers
of the Alleghany range, supporting his family with his rifle on the way,
until after passing over three hundred miles of the wilderness, he
reached the mouth of the Kanawha river, as that stream flows from
Virginia due north, and empties into the Ohio river. Here there was a
point of land washed by the Ohio on the north, and the Great Kanawha on
the west, to which the appropriate name of Point Pleasant had been
given. It does not appear that civilization had as yet penetrated this
region. The emigration to Kentucky had floated by it down the river,
descending from Pittsburg, or had crossed the mountain passes from North
Carolina, several hundred miles to the south.

Colonel Boone was now fifty-five years of age. If there were any
settlement at the time at Point Pleasant, it must have consisted merely
of a few log huts. Here at all events, Colonel Boone found the solitude
and the communion with nature alone, for which his heart yearned. The
world might call him poor, and still he was rich in the abundant supply
of all his earthly wants. He reared his log hut where no one appeared to
dispute his claim. The fertile soil around, a virgin soil, rich with
undeveloped treasures, under the simplest culture produced abundantly,
and the forest around supplied him daily with animal food more than a
European peasant sees in a year.

Here Colonel Boone and his family remained for several years, to use a
popular phrase, buried from the world. His life was mainly that of a
hunter. Mr. Peck, speaking of the habits of those pioneers who depended
mainly upon the rifle for support, writes:

"I have often seen him get up early in the morning, walk hastily out,
and look anxiously to the woods and snuff the autumnal winds with the
highest rapture; then return into the house and cast a quick and
attentive look at the rifle, which was always suspended to a joist by a
couple of buck-horns or little forks. The hunting dog understandin