Nevertheless small straggling bands of young braves occasionally came down through the woods; and though they did not attack any fort or any large body of men, they were ever on the watch to steal horses, burn lonely cabins, and waylay travellers between the stations.  They shot the solitary settlers who had gone out to till their clearings by stealth, or ambushed the boys who were driving in the milk cows or visiting their lines of traps.  It was well for the victim if he was killed at once; otherwise he was bound with hickory withes and driven to the distant Indian towns, there to be tortured with hideous cruelty and burned to death at the stake. [Footnote:  McAfee MSS.  The last was an incident that happened to a young man named McCoun on March 8, 1781.] Boon himself suffered at the hands of one of these parties.  He had gone with his brother to the Blue Licks, to him a spot always fruitful of evil; and being ambushed by the Indians, his brother was killed, and he himself was only saved by his woodcraft and speed of foot.  The Indians had with them a tracking dog, by the aid of which they followed his trail for three miles; until he halted, shot the dog, and thus escaped. [Footnote:  Boon’s Narrative.]

    Life of the Settlers.

During this comparatively peaceful fall the settlers fared well; though the men were ever on the watch for Indian war parties, while the mothers, if their children were naughty, frightened them into quiet with the threat that the Shawnees would catch them.  The widows and the fatherless were cared for by the other families of the different stations.  The season of want and scarcity had passed for ever; from thenceforth on there was abundance in Kentucky.  The crops did not fail; not only was there plenty of corn, the one essential, but there was also wheat, as well as potatoes, melons, pumpkins, turnips, and the like.  Sugar was made by tapping the maple trees; but salt was bought at a very exorbitant price at the Falls, being carried down in boats from the old Redstone Fort.  Flax had been generally sown (though in the poorer settlements nettle bark still served as a substitute), and the young men and girls formed parties to pick it, often ending their labor by an hour or two’s search for wild plums.  The men killed all the game they wished, and so there was no lack of meat.  They also surveyed the land and tended the stock—­cattle, horses, and hogs, which throve and multiplied out on the range, fattening on the cane, and large white buffalo-clover.  At odd times the men and boys visited their lines of traps.  Furs formed almost the only currency, except a little paper money; but as there were no stores west of the mountains, this was all that was needed, and each settlement raised most things for itself, and procured the rest by barter.