While parleying with them, inquiring after old acquaintances, and proposing to give them his tobacco when cured, he diverted their attention from his purpose, until he had collected together a number of sticks of dry tobacco, and so turned them as to fall between the poles directly in their faces.  At the same instant, he jumped upon them with as much of the dry tobacco as he could gather in his arms, filling their mouths and eyes with its pungent dust; and blinding and disabling them from following him, rushed out and hastened to his cabin, where he had the means of defense.  Notwithstanding the narrow escape, he could not resist the temptation, after retreating some fifteen or twenty yards, to look round and see the success of his achievement.  The Indians blinded and nearly suffocated, were stretching out their hands and feeling about in different directions, calling him by name and cursing him for a rogue, and themselves for fools.  The old man, in telling the story, imitated their gestures and tones of voice with great glee.

Emigration to Kentucky was now rapidly on the increase, and many new settlements were formed.  The means of establishing comfortable homesteads increased.  Horses, cattle, and swine were rapidly in creasing in number; and trading in various commodities became more general.  From Philadelphia, merchandise was transported to Pittsburg on pack-horses, and thence taken down the Ohio River in flat-boats and distributed among the settlements on its banks.  Country stores, land speculators, and paper money made their appearance, affording a clear augury of the future activity of the West in commercial industry and enterprise.

[Illustration:  BOLD STRATEGEM OF BOONE]

Most of the settlers came from the interior of North Carolina and Virginia; and brought with them the manners and customs of those States.  These manners and customs were primitive enough.  The following exceedingly graphic description, which we transcribe from “Doddridge’s Notes,” will afford the reader a competent idea of rural life in the times of Daniel Boone.

“HUNTING.—­This was an important part of the employment of the early settlers of this country.  For some years the woods supplied them with the greater amount of their subsistence, and with regard to some families, at certain times, the whole of it; for it was no uncommon thing for families to live several months without a mouthful of bread.  It frequently happened that there was no breakfast until it was obtained from the woods.  Fur and peltry were the people’s money.  They had nothing else to give in exchange for rifles, salt, and iron, on the other side of the mountains.

“The fall and early part of the winter was the season for hunting deer, and the whole of the winter, including part of the spring, for bears and fur-skinned animals.  It was a customary saying that fur is good during every month in the name of which the letter R occurs.