56.  See Doddridge.

57.  McAfee MSS.

58.  Doddridge.

59.  Said one old Indian fighter, a Col.  Joseph Brown, of Tennessee, with quaint truthfulness, “I have tried also to be a religious man, but have not always, in a life of so much adventure and strife, been able to act consistently.”—­Southwestern Monthly, Nashville, 1851, I., 80.

CHAPTER VI.

BOON AND THE LONG HUNTERS; AND THEIR HUNTING IN NO-MAN’S-LAND, 1769-1774.

The American backwoodsmen had surged up, wave upon wave, till their mass trembled in the troughs of the Alleghanies, ready to flood the continent beyond.  The peoples threatened by them were dimly conscious of the danger which as yet only loomed in the distance.  Far off, among their quiet adobe villages, in the sun-scorched lands by the Rio Grande, the slow Indo-Iberian peons and their monkish masters still walked in the tranquil steps of their fathers, ignorant of the growth of the power that was to overwhelm their children and successors; but nearer by, Spaniard and Creole Frenchman, Algonquin and Appalachian, were all uneasy as they began to feel the first faint pressure of the American advance.

As yet they had been shielded by the forest which lay over the land like an unrent mantle.  All through the mountains, and far beyond, it stretched without a break; but towards the mouth of the Kentucky and Cumberland rivers the landscape became varied with open groves of woodland, with flower-strewn glades and great barrens or prairies of long grass.  This region, one of the fairest in the world, was the debatable ground between the northern and the southern Indians.  Neither dared dwell therein,[1] but both used it as their hunting-grounds; and it was traversed from end to end by the well marked war traces[2] which they followed when they invaded each other’s territory.  The whites, on trying to break through the barrier which hemmed them in from the western lands, naturally succeeded best when pressing along the line of least resistance; and so their first great advance was made in this debatable land, where the uncertainly defined hunting-grounds of the Cherokee, Creek, and Chickasaw marched upon those of northern Algonquin and Wyandot.

Unknown and unnamed hunters and Indian traders had from time to time pushed some little way into the wilderness; and they had been followed by others of whom we do indeed know the names, but little more.  One explorer had found and named the Cumberland river and mountains, and the great pass called Cumberland Gap.[3] Others had gone far beyond the utmost limits this man had reached, and had hunted in the great bend of the Cumberland and in the woodland region of Kentucky, famed amongst the Indians for the abundance of the game.[4] But their accounts excited no more than a passing interest; they came and went without comment, as lonely stragglers had come and gone for nearly a century.  The backwoods civilization crept slowly westward without being influenced in its movements by their explorations.[5]