15.  Deposition of Daniel Boon, September 15, 1796.  Certified copy from Deposition Book No.  I, page 156, Clarke County Court, Ky.  First published by Col.  John Mason Brown, in “Battle of the Blue Licks,” p. 40 (Frankfort, 1882).  The book which these old hunters read around their camp-fire in the Indian-haunted primaeval forest a century and a quarter ago has by great good-luck been preserved, and is in Col.  Durrett’s library at Louisville.  It is entitled the “Works of Dr. Jonathan Swift, London, MDCCLXV,” and is in two small volumes.  On the title-page is written “A.  Neelly, 1770”

Frontiersmen are often content with the merest printed trash; but the better men among them appreciate really good literature quite as much as any other class of people.  In the long winter evenings they study to good purpose books as varied as Dante, Josephus, Macaulay, Longfellow, Parton’s “Life of Jackson,” and the Rollo stories—­to mention only volumes that have been especial favorites with my own cowboys and hunters.

16.  MS. diary of Benj.  Hawkins, 1796.  Preserved in Nash.  Historical Soc.  In 1796 buffalo were scarce; but some fresh signs of them were still seen at licks.

17.  Haywood, p. 75, etc.  It is a waste of time to quarrel over who first discovered a particular tract of this wilderness.  A great many hunters traversed different parts at different times, from 1760 on, each practically exploring on his own account.  We do not know the names of most of them; those we do know are only worth preserving in county histories and the like; the credit belongs to the race, not the individual.

18.  From twenty to forty.  Compare Haywood and Marshall, both of whom are speaking of the same bodies of men; Ramsey makes the mistake of supposing they are speaking of different parties; Haywood dwells on the feats of those who descended the Cumberland; Marshall of those who went to Kentucky.

19.  The so-called mound builders; now generally considered to have been simply the ancestors of the present Indian races.

20.  Led by one James Knox.

21.  His real name was Kasper Mansker, as his signature shows, but he was always spoken of as Mansco.

22.  McAfee MSS. ("Autobiography of Robt.  McAfee").  Sometimes the term Long Hunters was used as including Boon, Finley, and their companions, sometimes not; in the McAfee MSS. it is explicitly used in the former sense.

23.  See Haywood for Clinch River, Drake’s Pond, Mansco’s Lick, Greasy Rock, etc., etc.

24.  A hunter named Bledsoe; Collins, II., 418.

25.  Carr’s “Early Times in Middle Tennessee,” pp. 52, 54, 56, etc.

26.  The hunter Bledsoe mentioned in a previous note.

27.  As Haywood, 81.

28.  This continued to be the case until the buffalo were all destroyed.  When my cattle came to the Little Missouri, in 1882, buffalo were plenty; my men killed nearly a hundred that winter, though tending the cattle; yet an inexperienced hunter not far from us, though a hardy plainsman, killed only three in the whole time.  See also Parkman’s “Oregon Trail” for an instance of a party of Missouri backwoodsmen who made a characteristic failure in an attempt on a buffalo band.