gallop of the mighty herds, they crowded in dense throngs round the
licks, and the forest resounded with their grunting bellows. He and
other woodsmen came back there off and on, hunting and trapping, and
living in huts made of buffalo hides; just such huts as the hunters
dwelt in on the Little Missouri and Powder rivers as late as 1883,
except that the plainsmen generally made dug-outs in the sides of the
buttes and used the hides only for the roofs and fronts. So the place
was well known, and the reports of the hunters had made many settlers
eager to visit it, though as yet no regular path led thither. In 1778
the first permanent settler arrived in the person of a hunter named
Spencer, who spent the following winter entirely alone in this remote
wilderness, living in a hollow sycamore-tree. Spencer was a giant in his
day, a man huge in body and limb, all whose life had been spent in the
wilderness. He came to the bend of the Cumberland from Kentucky in the
early spring, being in search of good land on which to settle. Other
hunters were with him, and they stayed some time. A creole trapper from
the Wabash was then living in a cabin on the south side of the river. He
did not meet the new-comers; but one day he saw the huge moccasin tracks
of Spencer, and on the following morning the party passed close by his
cabin in chase of a wounded buffalo, halloing and shouting as they
dashed through the underwood. Whether he thought them Indians, or
whether, as is more likely, he shared the fear and dislike felt by most
of the Creoles for the American backwoodsmen, cannot be said; but
certainly he left his cabin, swam the river, and plunging into the
forest, straightway fled to his kinsfolk on the banks of the Wabash.
Spencer was soon left by his companions; though one of them stayed with
him a short time, helping him to plant a field of corn. Then this man,
too, wished to return. He had lost his hunting-knife; so Spencer went
with him to the barrens of Kentucky, put him on the right path, and
breaking his own knife, gave his departing friend a piece of the metal.