Cutbirth and his friends spent a year or two upon the river. In the autumn they ascended the stream for a considerable distance, also one of its tributaries, made a stationary camp for the winter, and in the spring descended to New Orleans, where they sold at good prices their skins, furs, bear-bacon, bear's oil, buffalo "jerk" (dried meat), tallow, and dried venison hams. Their expedition down the river was performed at great risks, for they had many hairbreadth escapes from snags, river banks shelving in, whirlpools, wind-storms, and Indians. Their reward, says a chronicler of the day, was "quite a respectable property;" but while upon their return homeward, overland, they were set upon by Choctaws, who robbed them of their all.
Meanwhile, Daniel Boone was slow in making up his mind to leave home and the wife and family whom he dearly loved for so long and perilous a trip as a journey into the now much-talked-of land of Kentucky. Perhaps, despite his longings, he might never have gone had affairs upon the Yadkin remained satisfactory to him. But game, his chief reliance, was year by year becoming harder to obtain. And the rascally agents of Earl Granville, the principal landholder of the region, from whom the Boones had purchased, were pretending to find flaws in the land-titles and insisting upon the necessity for new deeds, for which large fees were exacted.
This gave rise to great popular discontent. Boone's protest consisted in leaving the Sugar Tree settlement and moving northwest for sixty-five miles toward the head of the Yadkin. His new cabin, a primitive shell of logs, could still be seen, a few years ago, at the foot of a range of hills some seven and a half miles above Wilkesboro, in Wilkes County. After a time, dissatisfied with this location, he moved five miles farther up the river and about half a mile up Beaver Creek. Again he changed his mind, choosing his final home on the upper Yadkin, just above the mouth of Beaver. It was from this beautiful region among the Alleghany foot-hills, where game and fish were plenty and his swine and cattle had good range, that Boone, crowded out by advancing civilization, eventually moved to Kentucky.
In the spring and early summer of 1767 there were fresh outbreaks on the part of the Indians. Governor Tryon had run a boundary-line between the back settlements of the Carolinas and the Cherokee hunting-grounds. But hunters and traders would persist in wandering to the west of this line, and sometimes they were killed.