Game was fast disappearing from the Yadkin.

To Boone above all men, then, Kentucky beckoned.

When he returned in the spring of 1771 from his explorations, it was with the resolve to take his family at once into the great game country and to persuade some of his friends to join in this hazard of new fortunes.
The perils of such a venture, only conjectural to us at this distance, he knew well; but in him there was nothing that shrank from danger, though he did not court it after the rash manner of many of his compeers.

Neither reckless nor riotous, Boone was never found among those who opposed violence to authority, even unjust authority; nor was he ever guilty of the savagery which characterized much of the retaliatory warfare of that period when frenzied white men bettered the red man's instruction.

In him, courage was illumined with tenderness and made equable by self-control.