The boat party had many hundreds of miles of unknown and dangerous waters to travel, and the journey took them three months, a time longer than it now requires to travel around the world. They ran thirty miles of rapids on the shoals of the Tennessee, pursued and fired upon by Cherokees. Of this division of the party only ninety-seven got through alive, and nine of these were wounded. One was drowned, one died of natural causes and was buried, and the rest were killed by the Indians. [Illustration: THE DOWN-RIVER MEN.] Their voyage was indeed “without a parallel in modern history.” Among those who survived the hardships of the journey was Rachel Donelson, later the wife of Andrew Jackson. The path of empire in America, the path of corn and venison, was a highway that never ran backward. These men would never leave this country now that they had taken it. But what a tax was this that the barbaric land demanded of them! In November of 1780, less than a year after the party was first organized, there were only one hundred and thirty-four persons left alive out of the original three hundred and eighty, but in the settlement itself there had not been a natural death. The Indians killed these settlers, and the settlers killed the Indians. Death and wounds meant nothing to the adults. The very infants learned a stoic hardihood. Out of two hundred and fifty-six survivors, thirty-nine were killed in sixty days. Out of two hundred and seventeen survivors, the next season saw but one hundred and thirty-four left. The spring of 1781 found only seventy persons left alive. But when the vote was cast whether to stay or return, not one man voted to give up the fight. In that West corn was worth one hundred and sixty-five dollars a bushel, and in its raising the rifle was as essential as the plow. Powder and lead were priceless. Man and woman together, fearless, changeless, they held the land, giving back not one inch of the west-bound distance they had gained! In 1791 there were only fifteen persons left alive out of the three hundred and eighty that made this American migration. There had been only one natural death among them. In such a settlement there was no such thing as a hero, because all were heroes. Each man was a master of weapons, and incapable of fear. No fiction ever painted a hero like to any one of these. One man, after having been shot and stabbed many times, was scalped alive, and jested at it. A little girl was scalped alive, and lived to forget it. An army of Indians assaulted the settlement, and fifteen men and thirty women beat them off. Mrs. Sally Buchanan, a forgotten heroine, molded bullets all one night during an Indian attack, and on the next morning gave birth to a son.