Colonel James Grant, with
whose army Boone had fought in 1761, had been appointed Governor
of the new colony and was offering generous inducements to
settlers. The party traveled along the borders of South Carolina
and Georgia. No doubt they made the greater part of their way
over the old Traders' Trace, the "whitened" warpath; and they
suffered severe hardships. Game became scarcer as they proceeded.
Once they were nigh to perishing of starvation and were saved
from that fate only through chance meeting with a band of Indians
who, seeing their plight, made camp and shared their food with
them--according to the Indian code in time of peace.
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.
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