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The brothers left such traces—­or blazes as they are technically called—­of their course, as they thought would enable them to find it again, until they reached the foot of the mountains.  They tried various ascents, and finally discovered a route, which, with some labor might be rendered tolerably easy.  They proposed to cross the families here, and blazed the path in a way that could not be mistaken.  This important point settled, they hastened to the settlement, which they reached without accident.

CHAPTER VI.

Boone starts with his family to Kentucky—­Their return to Clinch river—­He conducts a party of surveyors to the Falls of Ohio—­He helps build Boonesborough, and removes his family to the fort—­His daughter and two of Col.  Calloway’s daughters taken prisoners by the Indians—­They pursue the Indians and rescue the captives.

The next step was to collect a sufficient number of emigrants who would be willing to remove to the new country with the families of the Boones, to give the settlements security and strength to resist the attacks of the Indians.  This was not an easy task.  It may be readily imagined that the Boones saw only the bright side of the contemplated expedition.  They painted the fertility and amenity of the flowering wilderness in the most glowing colors.  They described the cane-brakes, the clover and grass, the transparent limestone springs and brooks, the open forests, the sugar maple orchards, the buffaloes, deer, turkeys and wild fowls, in all the fervid colors of their own imaginations.  To them it was the paradise of the first pair, whose inhabitants had only to put forth their hands, and eat and enjoy.  The depredations, captivities, and scalpings, of the Indians; the howling of the wolves; the diseases, and peculiar trials and difficulties of a new country, without houses, mills, and the most indispensable necessaries of civilized life, were all overlooked.  But in such a case, in a compact settlement like that of the Yadkin, there are never wanting gainsayers, opposers, gossips, who envied the Boones.  These caused those disposed to the enterprise to hear the other part, and to contemplate the other side of the picture.  They put stories in circulation as eloquent as those of the Boones, which told of all the scalpings, captivities, and murders of the Indians, magnified in a tenfold proportion.  With them, the savages were like the ogres and bloody giants of nursery stories.  They had pleasant tales of horn-snakes, of such deadly malignity, that the thorn in their tails, struck into the largest tree in full verdure, instantly blasted it.  They scented in the air of the country, deadly diseases, and to them, Boone’s paradise was a Hinnom, the valley of the shadow of death.

The minds of the half resolved, half doubting persons, that meditated emigration, vibrated alternately backwards and forwards, inclined or disinclined to it, according to the last view of the case presented to them.  But the natural love of adventure, curiosity, fondness for the hunting life, dissatisfaction with the incessant labor necessary for subsistence on their present comparatively sterile soil, joined to the confident eloquence of the Boones, prevailed on four or five families to join them in the expedition.