d little
game, and on one occasion narrowly escaped starvation. They
explored Florida from St. Augustine to Pensacola; and Boone, who
relished fresh scenes and a new environment, purchased a house
and lot in Pensacola in anticipation of removal thither. But upon
his return home, finding his wife unwilling to go, Boone once
more turned his eager eye toward the West, that mysterious and
alluring region beyond the great range, the fabled paradise of
Kentucky.

The following year four young men from the Yadkin, Benjamin
Cutbird, John Stewart (Boone's brother-in-law who afterwards
accompanied him to Kentucky), John Baker, and James Ward made a
remarkable journey to the westward, crossing the Appalachian
mountain chain over some unknown route, and finally reaching the
Mississippi. The significance of the journey, in its bearing upon
westward expansion, inheres in the fact that while for more than
half a century the English traders from South Carolina had been
winning their way to the Mississippi along the lower routes and
Indian trails, this was the first party from either of the
Carolinas, as far as is known, that ever reached the Mississippi
by crossing the great mountain barrier. When Cutbird, a superb
woodsman and veritable Leather stocking, narrated to Boone the
story of his adventures, it only confirmed Boone in his
determination to find the passage through the mountain chain
leading to the Mesopotamia of Kentucky.

Such an enterprise was attended by terrible dangers. During 1766
and 1767 the steady encroachments of the white settlers upon the
ancestral domain which the Indians reserved for their imperial
hunting-preserve aroused bitter feelings of resentment among the
red men. Bloody reprisal was often the sequel to such
encroachment. The vast region of Tennessee and the
trans-Alleghany was a twilight zone, through which the savages
roamed at will. From time to time war parties of northern
Indians, the inveterate foes of the Cherokees, scouted through
this no-man's land and even penetrated into the western region of
North Carolina, committing murders and depredations upon the
Cherokees and the whites indiscriminately. During the summer of
1766, while Boone's friend and close connection, Captain William
Linville, his son John, and another young man, named John
Williams, were in camp some ten miles below Linville Falls, they
were unexpectedly fired upon by a hostile band of Northern
Indians, and before they had tim