expedition. They
painted the fertility and amenity of the flowering wilderness in the
most glowing colors. They described the cane-brakes, the clover and
grass, the transparent limestone springs and brooks, the open forests,
the sugar maple orchards, the buffaloes, deer, turkeys and wild fowls,
in all the fervid colors of their own imaginations. To them it was the
paradise of the first pair, whose inhabitants had only to put forth
their hands, and eat and enjoy. The depredations, captivities, and
scalpings, of the Indians; the howling of the wolves; the diseases, and
peculiar trials and difficulties of a new country, without houses,
mills, and the most indispensable necessaries of civilized life, were
all overlooked. But in such a case, in a compact settlement like that of
the Yadkin, there are never wanting gainsayers, opposers, gossips, who
envied the Boones. These caused those disposed to the enterprise to
hear the other part, and to contemplate the other side of the picture.
They put stories in circulation as eloquent as those of the Boones,
which told of all the scalpings, captivities, and murders of the
Indians, magnified in a tenfold proportion. With them, the savages were
like the ogres and bloody giants of nursery stories. They had pleasant
tales of horn-snakes, of such deadly malignity, that the thorn in their
tails, struck into the largest tree in full verdure, instantly blasted
it. They scented in the air of the country, deadly diseases, and to
them, Boone's paradise was a _Hinnom, the valley of the shadow of
death_.

The minds of the half resolved, half doubting persons, that meditated
emigration, vibrated alternately backwards and forwards, inclined or
disinclined to it, according to the last view of the case presented to
them. But the natural love of adventure, curiosity, fondness for the
hunting life, dissatisfaction with the incessant labor necessary for
subsistence on their present comparatively sterile soil, joined to the
confident eloquence of the Boones, prevailed on four or five families to
join them in the expedition.

All the necessary arrangements of preparing for this distant expedition,
of making sales and purchases, had occupied nearly two years. The
expedition commenced its march on the 26th of September, 1773. They all
set forth with confident spirits for the western wilderness, and were
joined by forty persons in Powell's Valley, a settlement in advance of
that on the Yadkin, towards the