borders of South Carolina and Georgia. No doubt they made the greater
part of their way over the old Traders' Trace, the "whitened" warpath;
and they suffered severe hardships. Game became scarcer as they
proceeded. Once they were nigh to perishing of starvation and were saved
from that fate only through chance meeting with a band of Indians
who, seeing their plight, made camp and shared their food with
them--according to the Indian code in time of peace.

Boone's party explored Florida from St. Augustine to Pensacola, and
Daniel became sufficiently enamored of the tropical south to purchase
there land and a house. His wife, however, was unwilling to go to
Florida, and she was not long in convincing the hunter that he would
soon tire of a gameless country. A gameless country! Perhaps this was
the very thought which turned the wanderer's desires again towards the
land of Kentucky. * The silencing of the enemy's whisper in the Cherokee
camps had opened the border forests once more to the nomadic rifleman.
Boone was not alone in the desire to seek out what lay beyond. His
brother-in-law, John Stewart, and a nephew by marriage, Benjamin
Cutbirth, or Cutbird, with two other young men, John Baker and James
Ward, in 1766 crossed the Appalachian Mountains, probably by stumbling
upon the Indian trail winding from base to summit and from peak to base
again over this part of the great hill barrier. They eventually reached
the Mississippi River and, having taken a good quantity of peltry on
the way, they launched upon the stream and came in time to New Orleans,
where they made a satisfactory trade of their furs.

* Kentucky, from Ken-ta-ke, an Iroquois word meaning "the place
of old fields." Adair calls the territory "the old fields." The Indians
apparently used the word "old," as we do in a sense of endearment and
possession as well as relative to age.

Boone was fired anew by descriptions of this successful feat, in which
two of his kinsmen had participated. He could no longer be held back.
He must find the magic door that led through the vast mountain wall into
Kentucky--Kentucky, with its green prairies where the buffalo and deer
were as "ten thousand thousand cattle feeding" in the wilds, and where
the balmy air vibrated with the music of innumerable wings.

Accordingly, in the autumn of 1767, Boone began his quest of the
delectable country in the company of his friend, William Hill, who had
been with him in Flori