[Illustration: Boone]
In 1755, Boone married and built a log cabin far up the Yadkin, where he
had no neighbors; but as the years passed, other families settled near;
the smoke of other cabins rose above the woods; his fields were bounded
by rude fences; he could scarcely stir out without encountering some
neighbor. It was too crowded for Daniel Boone; he felt the same
sensation that your nature lover feels to-day in the midst of a teeming
city--a sense of suffocation and disgust--and he finally determined to
move still further westward, and to cross the mountains into Kentucky,
concerning whose richness many stories had reached his ears. He
persuaded six men to accompany him, and on the first day of May, 1769,
set forth on the perilous journey which was to mark the beginning of his
life-work.
Up to that time, the Alleghany Mountains had marked a boundary beyond
which white settlers dared not go, for to the west lay great reaches of
forest, uninhabited except for wild beasts and still wilder bands of
roving Indians. Into this forest, Boone and his companions plunged, and
after some weeks of wandering, emerged into the beautiful and fertile
country of Kentucky--a country not owned by any Indian tribe, but
visited only by wandering war- and hunting-parties from the nations
living north of the Ohio or south of the Tennessee.
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