ometimes immoral, with a gross and uncouth viciousness. We read of one
party of six men and a woman, who were encountered on the Cumberland
River; the woman acted as the wife of a man named Big John, but deserted
him for one of his companions, and when he fell sick persuaded the whole
party to leave him in the wilderness to die of disease and starvation.
Yet those who left him did not in the end fare better, for they were
ambushed and cut off, when they had gone down to Natchez, apparently by
Indians.

At first the hunters, with their small-bore rifles, were unsuccessful in
killing buffalo. Once, when George Rogers Clark had long resided in
Kentucky, he and two companions discovered a camp of some forty
new-comers actually starving, though buffalo were plenty. Clark and his
friends speedily relieved their necessities by killing fourteen of the
great beasts; for when once the hunters had found out the knack, the
buffalo were easier slaughtered than any other game.[28]

The hunters were the pioneers; but close behind them came another set of
explorers quite as hardy and resolute. These were the surveyors. The men
of chain and compass played a part in the exploration of the west
scarcely inferior to that of the heroes of axe and rifle. Often, indeed,
the parts were combined; Boon himself was a surveyor.[29] Vast tracts of
western land were continually being allotted either to actual settlers
or as bounties to soldiers who had served against the French and
Indians. These had to be explored and mapped and as there was much risk
as well as reward in the task, it naturally proved attractive to all
adventurous young men who had some education, a good deal of ambition,
and not too much fortune. A great number of young men of good families,
like Washington and Clark, went into the business. Soon after the return
of Boon and the Long Hunters, parties of surveyors came down the
Ohio,[30] mapping out its course and exploring the Kentucky lands that
lay beside it.[31]

Among the hunters, surveyors, and explorers who came into the wilderness
in 1773 was a band led by three young men named McAfee,--typical
backwoodsmen, hardy, adventurous, their frontier recklessness and
license tempered by the Calvinism they had learned in their rough log
home. They were fond of hunting, but they came to spy out the land and
see if it could be made into homes for their children; and in their
party were several surveyors. They descended the Ohio in d