thought they had mistaken the place until they Came to the Lick
and saw what had been done.... One could walk for several
hundred yards a round the Lick and in the lick on buffellows
Skuls, & bones and the whole flat round the Lick was bleached
with buffellows bones, and they found out the Cause of the Canes
growing up so suddenly a few miles around the Lick which was in
Consequence of so many buffellows being killed."
This expedition was of genuine importance, opening the eyes of
the frontiersmen to the charms of the country and influencing
many to settle subsequently in the West, some in Tennessee, some
in Kentucky. The elaborate and detailed information brought back
by Henry Scaggs exerted an appreciable influence, no doubt, in
accelerating the plans of Richard Henderson and Company for the
acquisition and colonization of the trans-Alleghany. But while
the "Long Hunters" were in Tennessee and Kentucky the same region
was being more extensively and systematically explored by Daniel
Boone. To his life, character, and attainments, as the typical
"long hunter" and the most influential pioneer we may now turn
our particular attention.
CHAPTER IX. Daniel Boone and Wilderness Exploration
Here, where the hand of violence shed the blood of the innocent;
where the horrid yells of the savages, and the groans of the
distressed, sounded in our ears, we now hear the praises and
adorations of our Creator; where wretched wigwams stood, the
miserable abodes of savages, we behold the foundations of cities
laid, that, in all probability, will equal the glory of the
greatest upon earth.--Daniel Boone, 1781.
The wandering life of a border Nimrod in a surpassingly beautiful
country teeming with game was the ideal of the frontiersman of
the eighteenth century. AS early as 1728, while running the
dividing line between North Carolina and Virginia, William Byrd
encountered along the North Carolina frontier the typical figure
of the professional hunter: "a famous Woodsman, call'd
Epaphroditus Bainton. This Forester Spends all his time in
ranging the Woods, and is said to make great Havock among the
Deer, and other Inhabitants of the Forest, not much wilder than
himself." By the middle of the century, as he was threading his
way through the Carolina piedmont zone, the hunter's paradise of
the Yadkin and Catawba country, Bishop Spangenberg found ranging
there many hunters, living like Indians, who killed thousands of
deer each y
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