The black bears which fed on the corpses left on the field of Braddock’s Defeat became for a time bold and somewhat fearless of man. Footnote 15: These stories are not to be doubted, and are not especially wonderful. The writer has often hunted in Mississippi with a planter, Colonel R. E. Bobo, who more than equalled all of Crockett’s records. In one year, soon after his first arrival in Coahoma County, Mississippi, Colonel Bobo killed two hundred and six bears. The writer was present when ten bears were killed in eight days. CHAPTER II AGAINST THE WATERS[16] In 1810 the Western frontier of the United States slanted like the roof of a house from Maine to Louisiana. The center of population was almost exactly on the site of the city of Washington. The West was a distinct section, and it was a section that had begun to develop an aristocracy. We still wore linsey-woolsey in Kentucky; still pounded our corn in a hollow stump in Ohio; still killed our Indians with the ancient weapon of our fathers; still took our produce to New Orleans in flat-boats; still were primitive in many ways. None the less we had among us an aristocrat, a man who classified himself as better than his fellow men. There had been born that early captain of transportation, the keel-boatman, the man that could go up-stream. The latter had for the stationary or semi-stationary man a vast and genuine contempt, as nomad man has ever had for the man of anchored habit. There was warrant for this feeling of superiority, for the keel-boat epoch was a great one in American history. Had this clumsy craft never been supplanted by the steamboat, its victories would have been of greater value to America than all the triumphs she ever won on the seas. As for the keel-boatmen themselves, they were a hardy, wild, and reckless breed. They spent their days in the blazing sun, their heads drooping over the setting-pole, their feet steadily trudging the walking-boards of their great vessels from morning until night and day after day. A wild life, a merry one, and a brief, was that lived by this peculiar class of men, who made characters for one of the vivid chapters in the tale of the early West. The men of the West had solved in some rude way the problem of getting up-stream, though still they clung to the highways of nature, the water-courses. The men of the ax and rifle had once more broken over the ultimate barriers assigned to them by the men of book and gown. That mysterious land beyond the Mississippi was even then receiving more and more of that adventurous population that the statesmen of the Louisiana Purchase feared would leave the East and never would return.