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..