t with the authorities, because the frontier folk were suffering
through excessive taxes, extortionate fees, dishonest land titles,
and the corruption of the courts. In May, 1771, the conflict lost its
quasi-civil nature. The Regulators resorted to arms and were defeated by
the forces under Governor Tryon in the Battle of the Alamance.

The Regulation Movement, which we shall follow in more detail further
on, was a culmination of those causes of unrest which turned men
westward. To escape from oppression and to acquire land beyond the
bounds of tyranny became the earnest desire of independent spirits
throughout the Back Country. But there was another and more potent
reason why the country east of the mountains no longer contented Boone.
Hunting and trapping were Boone's chief means of livelihood. In those
days, deerskins sold for a dollar a skin to the traders at the Forks or
in Hillsborough; beaver at about two dollars and a half, and otter
at from three to five dollars. A pack-horse could carry a load of
one hundred dressed deerskins, and, as currency was scarce, a hundred
dollars was wealth. Game was fast disappearing from the Yadkin. To Boone
above all men, then, Kentucky beckoned. When he returned in the spring
of 1771 from his explorations, it was with the resolve to take his
family at once into the great game country and to persuade some of his
friends to join in this hazard of new fortunes.

The perils of such a venture, only conjectural to us at this distance,
he knew well; but in him there was nothing that shrank from danger,
though he did not court it after the rash manner of many of his
compeers. Neither reckless nor riotous, Boone was never found among
those who opposed violence to authority, even unjust authority; nor
was he ever guilty of the savagery which characterized much of the
retaliatory warfare of that period when frenzied white men bettered the
red man's instruction. In him, courage was illumined with tenderness and
made equable by self-control. Yet, though he was no fiery zealot like
the Ulstermen who were to follow him along the path he had made and
who loved and revered him perhaps because he was so different from
themselves, Boone nevertheless had his own religion. It was a simple
faith best summed up perhaps by himself in his old age when he said that
he had been only an instrument in the hand of God to open the wilderness
to settlement.

Two years passed before Boone could muster a compan