ky Mountain hunters
in 1888. Boon has recorded in his own quaint phraseology an incident of
his life during this summer, which shows how eagerly such a little band
of frontiersmen read a book, and how real its characters became to their
minds. He was encamped with five other men on Red River, and they had
with them for their "amusement the history of Samuel Gulliver's travels,
wherein he gave an account of his young master, Glumdelick, careing
[sic] him on a market day for a show to a town called Lulbegrud." In the
party who, amid such strange surroundings, read and listened to Dean
Swift's writings was a young man named Alexander Neely. One night he
came into camp with two Indian scalps, taken from a Shawnese village be
had found on a creek running into the river; and he announced to the
circle of grim wilderness veterans that "he had been that day to
Lulbegrud, and had killed two Brobdignags in their capital." To this day
the creek by which the two luckless Shawnees lost their lives is known
as Lulbegrud Creek.[15]

Soon after this encounter the increasing danger from the Indians drove
Boon back to the valley of the Cumberland River, and in the spring of
1771 he returned to his home on the Yadkin.

A couple of years before Boon went to Kentucky, Steiner, or Stoner, and
Harrod, two hunters from Pittsburg, who had passed through the Illinois,
came down to hunt in the bend of the Cumberland, where Nashville now
stands; they found vast numbers of buffalo, and killed a great many,
especially around the licks, where the huge clumsy beasts had fairly
destroyed most of the forest, treading down the young trees and bushes
till the ground was left bare or covered with a rich growth of clover.
The bottoms and the hollows between the hills were thickset with cane.
Sycamore grew in the low ground, and towards the Mississippi were to be
found the persimmon and cottonwood. Sometimes the forest was open and
composed of huge trees; elsewhere it was of thicker, smaller growth.[16]
Everywhere game abounded, and it was nowhere very wary. Other hunters of
whom we know even the names of only a few, had been through many parts
of the wilderness before Boon, and earlier still Frenchmen had built
forts and smelting furnaces on the Cumberland, the Tennessee, and the
head tributaries of the Kentucky.[17] Boon is interesting as a leader
and explorer; but he is still more interesting as a type. The west was
neither discovered, won, nor settled b