At first the hunters, with their small-bore rifles, were unsuccessful in killing buffalo.  Once, when George Rogers Clark had long resided in Kentucky, he and two companions discovered a camp of some forty new-comers actually starving, though buffalo were plenty.  Clark and his friends speedily relieved their necessities by killing fourteen of the great beasts; for when once the hunters had found out the knack, the buffalo were easier slaughtered than any other game.[28]

The hunters were the pioneers; but close behind them came another set of explorers quite as hardy and resolute.  These were the surveyors.  The men of chain and compass played a part in the exploration of the west scarcely inferior to that of the heroes of axe and rifle.  Often, indeed, the parts were combined; Boon himself was a surveyor.[29] Vast tracts of western land were continually being allotted either to actual settlers or as bounties to soldiers who had served against the French and Indians.  These had to be explored and mapped and as there was much risk as well as reward in the task, it naturally proved attractive to all adventurous young men who had some education, a good deal of ambition, and not too much fortune.  A great number of young men of good families, like Washington and Clark, went into the business.  Soon after the return of Boon and the Long Hunters, parties of surveyors came down the Ohio,[30] mapping out its course and exploring the Kentucky lands that lay beside it.[31]

Among the hunters, surveyors, and explorers who came into the wilderness in 1773 was a band led by three young men named McAfee,—­typical backwoodsmen, hardy, adventurous, their frontier recklessness and license tempered by the Calvinism they had learned in their rough log home.  They were fond of hunting, but they came to spy out the land and see if it could be made into homes for their children; and in their party were several surveyors.  They descended the Ohio in dugout canoes, with their rifles, blankets, tomahawks, and fishing-tackle.  They met some Shawnees and got on well with them; but while their leader was visiting the chief, Cornstalk, and listening to his fair speeches at his town of Old Chilicothe, the rest of the party were startled to see a band of young Shawnee braves returning from a successful foray on the settlements, driving before them the laden pack-horses they had stolen.[32]

They explored part of Kentucky, and visited the different licks.  One, long named Big Bone Lick, was famous because there were scattered about it in incredible quantity the gigantic remains of the extinct mastodon; the McAfees made a tent by stretching their blankets over the huge fossil ribs, and used the disjointed vertebrae as stools on which to sit.  Game of many kinds thronged the spaces round the licks; herds of buffalo, elk, and deer, as well as bears and wolves, were all in sight at once.  The ground round about some of them was trodden down so that there was not