It
constitutes my initial point of travels; but, as I have described it
from my journal, in a separate form, it will not be necessary here to do
more than say that it was successfully accomplished. After spending the
fall of 1818, and the winter of 1819, in a series of adventures in
barren, wild, and mountainous scenes, we came out on the tributary
waters of the Arkansas, down which we descended in a log canoe. On the
Strawberry River, my ankle, which I had injured by leaping from a wall
of rock while hunting in the Green Mountains four years before,
inflamed, and caused me to lie by a few days; which was the only injury
I received in the route.
I returned to Potosi in February. The first man I met (Major Hawking),
on reaching the outer settlements, expressed surprise at seeing me, as
he had heard from the hunters, who had been on my trail about eighty
miles to the Saltpetre caves on the Currents River, that I had been
killed by the Indians. Every one was pleased to see me, and no one more
so than my kind Kentucky host, who had been the last to bid me adieu on
the verge of the wilderness.
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