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 Florida. Autumn was the season of departure on all forest excursions, because by that time the summer crops had been gathered in and the day of the deer had come. By hunting, the explorers must feed themselves on their travels and with deerskins and furs they must on their return recompense those who had supplied their outfit. Boone, the incessant but not always lucky wanderer, was in these years ever in debt for an outfit.
Boone and Hill made their way over the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies and crossed the Holston and Clinch rivers. Then they came upon the west fork of the Big Sandy and, believing that it would lead them to the Ohio, they continued for at least a hundred miles to the westward. Here they found a buffalo trace, one of the many beaten out by the herds in their passage to the salt springs, and they followed it into what is now Floyd County in eastern Kentucky. But this was not the prairie land described by Findlay; it was rough and hilly and so overgrown with laurel as to be almost impenetrable. They therefore wended their way back towards the river, doubtless erected the usual hunter's camp of skins or blankets and branches, and spent the winter in hunting and trapping. Spring found them returning to their homes on the Yadkin with a fair winter's haul.
Such urgent desire as Boone's, however, was not to be defeated.
The next year brought him his great opportunity. John Findlay came to the Yadkin with a horse pack of needles and linen and peddler's wares to tempt the slim purses of the Back Country folk. The two erstwhile comrades in arms were overjoyed to encounter each other again, and Findlay spent the winter of 1768-69 in Boone's cabin. While the snow lay deep outside and good-smelling logs crackled on the hearth, they planned an expedition into Kentucky through the Gap where Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky touch one another, which Findlay felt confident he could find. Findlay had learned of this route from cross-mountain traders in 1753, when he had descended the Ohio to the site of Louisville, whence he had gone with some Shawanoes as a prisoner to their town of Es-kip-pa-ki-thi-ki or Blue Licks.*
* Hanna, "The Wilderness Trail," vol. II, pp. 215-16.
On the first day of May, 1769, Boone and Findlay, accompanied by John Stewart and three other venturesome spirits, Joseph Holden, James Mooney, and William Cooley, took horse for the fabled land.
Passing through the Cumberland Gap, they built their first camp in Kentucky on the Red Lick fork of Station Camp Creek.
This camp was their base of operations. From it, usually in couples, we infer, the explorers branched out to hunt and to take their observations of the country. Here also they prepared the deer and buffalo meat for the winter, dried or smoked the geese they shot in superabundance, made the tallow and oil needed to keep their weapons in trim, their leather soft, and their kits waterproof. Their first ill luck befell them in December when Boone and Stewart were captured by a band of Shawanoes who were returning from their autumn hunt on Green River. The Indians compelled the two white men to show them the location of their camp, took possession of all it contained in skins and furs and also helped themselves to the horses. They left the explorers with just enough meat and ammunition to provide for their journey homeward, and told them to depart and not to intrude again on the red men's hunting grounds. Having given this pointed warning, the Shawanoes rode on northward towards their towns beyond the Ohio.
