When Boone returned home he found the Back Country of North Carolina in the throes of the Regulation Movement. This movement, which had arisen first from the colonists' need to police their settlements, had more recently assumed a political character. The Regulators were now in conflict 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 company of colonists for the dangerous and delectable land. The dishonesty practiced by Lord Granville's agents in the matter of deeds had made it difficult for Daniel and his friends to dispose of their acreage.
When at last in the spring of 1773 the Wanderer was prepared to depart, he was again delayed; this time by the arrival of a little son to whom was given the name of John. By September, however, even this latest addition to the party was ready for travel; and that month saw the Boones with a small caravan of families journeying towards Powell's Valley, whence the Warrior's Path took its way through Cumberland Gap. At this point on the march they were to be joined by William Russell, a famous pioneer, from the Clinch River, with his family and a few neighbors, and by some of Rebecca Boone's kinsmen, the Bryans, from the lower Yadkin, with a company of forty men.
Of Rebecca Boone history tells us too little--only that she was born a Bryan, was of low stature and dark eyed, that she bore her husband ten children, and lived beside him to old age. Except on his hunts and explorations, she went with him from one cabined home to another, always deeper into the wilds. There are no portraits of her. We can see her only as a shadowy figure moving along the wilderness trails beside the man who accepted his destiny of God to be a way-shower for those of lesser faith.
"He tires not forever on his leagues of march Because her feet are set to his footprints, And the gleam of her bare hand slants across his shoulder."
Boone halted his company on Walden Mountain over Powell's Valley to await the Bryan contingent and dispatched two young men under the leadership of his son James, then in his seventeenth year, to notify Russell of the party's arrival. As the boys were returning with Russell's son, also a stripling, two of his slaves, and some white laborers, they missed the path and went into camp for the night. When dawn broke, disclosing the sleepers, a small war band of Shawanoes, who had been spying on Boone and his party, fell upon them and slaughtered them. Only one of Russell's slaves and a laborer escaped. The tragedy seems augmented by the fact that the point where the boys lost the trail and made their night quarters was hardly three miles from the main camp--to which an hour later came the two survivors with their gloomy tidings.
Terror now took hold of the little band of emigrants, and there were loud outcries for turning back. The Bryans, who had arrived meanwhile, also advised retreat, saying that the "signs" about the scene of blood indicated an Indian uprising. Daniel carried the scalped body of his son, the boy-comrade of his happy hunts, to the camp and buried it there at the beginning of the trail.
His voice alone urged that they go on.
Fortunately indeed, as events turned out, Boone was overruled, and the expedition was abandoned. The Bryan party and the others from North Carolina went back to the Yadkin. Boone himself with his family accompanied Russell to the Clinch settlement, where he erected a temporary cabin on the farm of one of the settlers, and then set out alone on the chase to earn provision for his wife and children through the winter.
