o the
heart of what was later justly named the "Dark and Bloody Ground"
(see Chapter XIV)--"not doubting," says an old border chronicler,
"that they were to be encountered by Indians, and to subsist on
game." From the duration of their absence from home, they
received the name of the Long Hunters--the romantic appellation
by which they are known in the pioneer history of the Old
Southwest. Many natural objects were named by this party--in
particular Dick's River, after the noted Cherokee hunter, Captain
Dick, who, pleased to be recognized by Charles Scaggs, told the
Long Hunters that on HIS river, pointing it out, they would find
meat plenty--adding with laconic signifigance: "Kill it and go
home." From the Knob Lick, in Lincoln County, as reported by a
member of the party, "they beheld largely over a thousand
animals, including buffaloe, elk, bear, and deer, with many wild
turkies scattered among them; all quite restless, some playing,
and others busily employed in licking the earth.... The
buffaloe and other animals had so eaten away the soil, that they
could, in places, go entirely underground." Upon the return of a
detachment to Virginia, fourteen fearless hunters chose to
remain; and one day, during the absence of some of the band upon
a long exploring trip, the camp was attacked by a straggling
party of Indians under Will Emery, a halfbreed Cherokee. Two of
the hunters were carried into captivity and never heard of again;
a third managed to escape. In embittered commemoration of the
plunder of the camp and the destruction of the peltries, they
inscribed upon a poplar, which had lost its bark, this emphatic
record, followed by their names:

2300 Deer Skins lost Ruination by God

Undismayed by this depressing stroke of fortune, they continued
their hunt in the direction of the lick which Bledsoe had
discovered the preceding year. Shortly after this discovery, a
French voyageur from the Illinois who had hunted and traded in
this region for a decade, Timothe de Monbreun, subsequently
famous in the history of Tennessee, had visited the lick and
killed an enormous number of buffaloes for their tallow and
tongues with which he and his companion loaded a keel boat and
descended the Cumberland. An early pioneer, William Hall, learned
from Isaac Bledsoe that when "the long hunters Crossed the ridge
and came down on Bledsoe's Creek in four or five miles of the
Lick the Cane had grown up so thick in the woods that they