CHAPTER VI.
BOON AND THE LONG HUNTERS; AND THEIR HUNTING IN NO-MAN'S-LAND, 1769-1774.
The American backwoodsmen had surged up, wave upon wave, till their mass trembled in the troughs of the Alleghanies, ready to flood the continent beyond.

The peoples threatened by them were dimly conscious of the danger which as yet only loomed in the distance.

Far off, among their quiet adobe villages, in the sun-scorched lands by the Rio Grande, the slow Indo-Iberian peons and their monkish masters still walked in the tranquil steps of their fathers, ignorant of the growth of the power that was to overwhelm their children and successors; but nearer by, Spaniard and Creole Frenchman, Algonquin and Appalachian, were all uneasy as they began to feel the first faint pressure of the American advance.
As yet they had been shielded by the forest which lay over the land like an unrent mantle.

All through the mountains, and far beyond, it stretched without a break; but towards the mouth of the Kentucky and Cumberland rivers the landscape became varied with open groves of woodland, with flower-strewn glades and great barrens or prairies of long grass.

This region, one of the fairest in the world, was the debatable ground between the northern and the southern Indians.