Cutbirth and his friends spent a year or two upon the river. In the
autumn they ascended the stream for a considerable distance, also one of
its tributaries, made a stationary camp for the winter, and in the
spring descended to New Orleans, where they sold at good prices their
skins, furs, bear-bacon, bear's oil, buffalo "jerk" (dried meat),
tallow, and dried venison hams. Their expedition down the river was
performed at great risks, for they had many hairbreadth escapes from
snags, river banks shelving in, whirlpools, wind-storms, and Indians.
Their reward, says a chronicler of the day, was "quite a respectable
property;" but while upon their return homeward, overland, they were set
upon by Choctaws, who robbed them of their all.
Meanwhile, Daniel Boone was slow in making up his mind to leave home and
the wife and family whom he dearly loved for so long and perilous a trip
as a journey into the now much-talked-of land of Kentucky. Perhaps,
despite his longings, he might never have gone had affairs upon the
Yadkin remained satisfactory to him. But game, his chief reliance, was
year by year becoming harder to obtain. And the rascally agents of Earl
Granville, the principal landholder of the region, from whom the Boones
had purchased, were pretending to find flaws in the land-titles and
insisting upon the necessity for new deeds, for which large fees were
exacted.
This gave rise to great popular discontent. Boone's protest consisted in
leaving the Sugar Tree settlement and moving northwest for sixty-five
miles toward the head of the Yadkin. His new cabin, a primitive shell of
logs, could still be seen, a few years ago, at the foot of a range of
hills some seven and a half miles above Wilkesboro, in Wilkes County.
After a time, dissatisfied with this location, he moved five miles
farther up the river and about half a mile up Beaver Creek. Again he
changed his mind, choosing his final home on the upper Yadkin, just
above the mouth of Beaver. It was from this beautiful region among the
Alleghany foot-hills, where game and fish were plenty and his swine and
cattle had good range, that Boone, crowded out by advancing
civilization, eventually moved to Kentucky.
In the spring and early summer of 1767 there were fresh outbreaks on the
part of the Indians. Governor Tryon had run a boundary-line between the
back settlements of the Carolinas and the Cherokee hunting-grounds. But
hunters and traders would persist in wandering to the west of this line,
and sometimes they were killed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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