After Boone’s return to North Carolina, more than two years passed away before he could complete the arrangements necessary for removing his family to Kentucky.  He sold his farm on the Yadkin, which had been for many years under cultivation, and no doubt brought him a sum amply sufficient for the expenses of his journey and the furnishing of a new home in the promised land.  He had, of course, to overcome the natural repugnance of his wife and children to leave the home which had become dear to them; and he had also to enlist other adventurers to accompany him.  And here we deem it proper, before entering upon the account of his departure, to quote from a contemporary,[20] some general remarks on the character of the early settlers of Kentucky.

“Throughout the United States, generally, the most erroneous notions prevail with respect to the character of the first settlers of Kentucky; and by several of the American novelists, the most ridiculous uses have been made of the fine materials for fiction which lie scattered over nearly the whole extent of that region of daring adventure and romantic incident.  The common idea seems to be, that the first wanderers to Kentucky were a simple, ignorant, low-bred, good-for-nothing set of fellows, who left the frontiers and sterile places of the old States, where a considerable amount of labor was necessary to secure a livelihood, and sought the new and fertile country southeast of the Ohio River and northwest of the Cumberland Mountains, where corn would produce bread for them with simply the labor of planting, and where the achievements of their guns would supply them with meat and clothing; a set of men who, with that instinct which belongs to the beaver, built a number of log cabins on the banks of some secluded stream, which they surrounded with palisades for the better protection of their wives and children, and then went wandering about, with guns on their shoulders, or traps under their arms, leading a solitary, listless, ruminating life, till aroused by the appearance of danger, or a sudden attack from unseen enemies, when instantly they approved themselves the bravest of warriors, and the most expert of strategists.  The romancers who have attempted to describe their habits of life and delineate their characters, catching this last idea, and imagining things probable of the country they were in, have drawn the one in lines the most grotesque and absurd, and colored the other with a pencil dipped in all hues but the right.  To them the early pioneers appear to have been people of a character demi-devil, demi-savage, not only with out the remains of former civilization, but without even the recollection that they had been born and bred where people were, at the least, measurably sane, somewhat religiously inclined, and, for the most, civilly behaved.

“Both of these conceptions of the character of the Pioneer Fathers are, to a certain extent, correct as regards individuals among them; but the pictures which have often been given us, even when held up beside such individuals, will prove to be exaggerations in more respects than one.  Daniel Boone is an individual instance of a man plunging into the depths of an unknown wilderness, shunning rather than seeking contact with his kind, his gun and trap the only companions of his solitude, and wandering about thus for months,”