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