Yet they came across mounds and graves and other remains of an ancient people who had once lived in the land, but had died out of it long ages before the incoming of the white men.[19] The hunters made a permanent camp in one place, and returned to it at intervals to deposit their skins and peltries.

Between times they scattered out singly or in small bands.

They hunted all through the year, killing vast quantities of every kind of game.

Most of it they got by fair still-hunting, but some by methods we do not now consider legitimate, such as calling up a doe by imitating the bleat of a fawn, and shooting deer from a scaffold when they came to the salt licks at night.

Nevertheless, most of the hunters did not approve of "crusting" the game--that is, of running it down on snow-shoes in the deep mid-winter snows.
At the end of the year some of the adventurers returned home; others[20] went north into the Kentucky country, where they hunted for several months before recrossing the mountains; while the remainder, led by an old hunter named Kasper Mansker,[21] built two boats and hollowed out of logs two pirogues or dugouts--clumsier but tougher craft than the light birch-bark canoes--and started down the Cumberland.