s on the
Yellowstone and the few hunters who wintered on the Little Missouri had
a similar experience. The buffalo crowded with the few tame cattle round
the hayricks and log-stables; the starving deer and antelope gathered in
immense bands in sheltered places. Riding from my ranch to a neighbor's
I have, in deep snows, passed through herds of antelope that would
barely move fifty or a hundred feet out of my way.] The scanty supply of
corn gave out, until there was not enough left to bake into johnny-cakes
on the long boards in front of the fire. [Footnote: _Do._] Even at the
Falls, where there were stores for the troops, the price of corn went up
nearly fourfold, [Footnote: From fifty dollars (Continental money) a
bushel in the fall to one hundred and seventy-five in the spring.] while
elsewhere among the stations of the interior it could not be had at any
price, and there was an absolute dearth both of salt and of vegetable
food, the settlers living for weeks on the flesh of the lean wild game,
[Footnote: McAfee MSS.] especially of the buffalo. [Footnote: Boon's
Narrative.] The hunters searched with especial eagerness for the bears
in the hollow trees, for they alone among the animals kept fat; and the
breast of the wild turkey served for bread. [Footnote: McAfee MSS.]
Nevertheless, even in the midst of this season of cold and famine, the
settlers began to take the first steps for the education of their
children. In this year Joseph Doniphan, whose son long afterwards won
fame in the Mexican war, opened the first regular school at
Boonsborough, [Footnote: _Historical Magazine_, Second Series, Vol.
VIII.] and one of the McAfees likewise served as a teacher through the
winter. [Footnote: McAfee MSS.] But from the beginning some of the
settlers' wives had now and then given the children in the forts a few
weeks' schooling.

Through the long, irksome winter, the frontiersmen remained crowded
within the stockades. The men hunted, while the women made the clothes,
of tanned deer-hides, buffalo-wool cloth, and nettle-bark linen. In
stormy weather, when none could stir abroad, they turned or coopered the
wooden vessels; for tin cups were as rare as iron forks, and the
"noggin" was either hollowed out of the knot of a tree, or else made
with small staves and hoops. [Footnote: McAfee MSS.] Every thing was of
home manufacture--for there was not a store in Kentucky,--and the most
expensive domestic products seem to have been the