Thither they were followed, apparently in the spring of 1799, by Daniel Boone and wife and their younger children. The departure of the great hunter, now in his sixty-fifth year, was the occasion for a general gathering of Kanawha pioneers at the home near Charleston. They came on foot, by horseback, and in canoe, from far and near, and bade him a farewell as solemnly affectionate as though he were departing for another world; indeed, Missouri then seemed almost as far away to the West Virginians as the Klondike is to dwellers in the Mississippi basin to-day--a long journey by packhorse or by flatboat into foreign wilds, beyond the great waterway concerning which the imaginations of untraveled men often ran riot. The hegira of the Boones, from the junction of the Elk and the Kanawha, was accomplished by boats, into which were crowded such of their scant herd of live stock as could be accommodated. Upon the way they stopped at Kentucky towns along the Ohio, either to visit friends or to obtain provisions, and attracted marked attention, for throughout the West Boone was, of course, one of the best-known men of his day. In Cincinnati he was asked why, at his time of life, he left the comforts of an established home again to subject himself to the privations of the frontier. "Too crowded!" he replied with feeling. "I want more elbow-room!" Arriving at the little Kentucky colony on Femme Osage Creek, where the Spanish authorities had granted him a thousand arpents[17] of land abutting his son's estate upon the north, he settled down in a little log cabin erected largely by his own hands, for the fourth and last time as a pioneer. He was never again in the Kanawha Valley, and but twice in Kentucky--once to testify as to some old survey-marks made by him, and again to pay the debts which he had left when removing to Point Pleasant. FOOTNOTE: [17] Equivalent to about 845 English acres. CHAPTER XV A SERENE OLD AGE Missouri's sparse population at that time consisted largely of Frenchmen, who had taken easily to the yoke of Spain. For a people of easy-going disposition, theirs was an ideal existence. They led a patriarchal life, with their flocks and herds grazing upon a common pasture, and practised a crude agriculture whose returns were eked out by hunting in the limitless forests hard by. For companionship, the crude log cabins in the little settlements were assembled by the banks of the waterways, and there was small disposition to increase tillage beyond domestic necessities. There were practically no taxes to pay; military burdens sat lightly; the local syndic (or magistrate), the only government servant to be met outside of St. Louis, was sheriff, judge, jury, and commandant combined; there were no elections, for representative government was unknown; the fur and lead trade with St. Louis was the sole commerce, and their vocabulary did not contain the words enterprise and speculation.