1 82 The Winning of the West 



and used the disjointed vertebrae as stools on which 

 to sit. Game of many kinds thronged the spaces 

 round the licks; herds of buffalo, elk, and deer, as 

 well as bears and wolves, were all in sight at once. 

 The ground round about some of them was trodden 

 down so that there was not as much grass left as 

 would feed a sheep; and the game trails were like 

 streets, or the beaten roads round a city. A little 

 village to this day recalls by its name the fact that 

 it stands on a former "stamping ground" of the 

 buffalo. At one lick the explorers met with what 

 might have proved a serious adventure. One of the 

 McAfees and a companion were passing round its 

 outskirts, when some others of the party fired at a 

 gang of buffaloes, which stampeded directly toward 

 the two. While his companion scampered up a 

 leaning mulberry bush, McAfee, less agile, leaped 

 behind a tree trunk, where he stood sidewise till the 

 buffalo passed, their horns scraping off the bark on 

 either side; then he looked round to see his friend 

 "hanging in the mulberry bush like a coon." 33 



When the party left this lick they followed a 

 buffalo trail, beaten out in the forest, "the size of 

 the wagon road leading out of Williamsburg," then 

 the capital of Virginia. It crossed the Kentucky 

 River at a riffle below where Frankfort now stands. 

 Thence they started homeward across the Cumber- 

 land Mountains, and suffered terribly while mak- 



33 McAfee MSS. A similar adventure befell my brother 

 Elliott and my cousin John Roosevelt while they were hunt- 

 ing buffalo on the staked plains of Texas in 1877. 



