Forty-Four Years of the Life of a Hunter, pages 11-17

In a land clear of Indians, not yet clear of game to hunt or forests to wander in, and not yet taken over by the land-grabbers, at age 16, Meshach set out on an odyssey that was bucolic in the way that he was hosted, advised, welcomed and wished well by his relations and others of his kind. These folks had joined the 20,000 person exodus out of indentured servitude and down into the deadly Ohio Valley where fierce Indians—foremost among them the Shawnees who butchered Sinclair's army in 1791—yet fought grimly to hold back the white refugee tide out of the slave states of Maryland, Virginia and the Carolinas welling up via the Cumberland and Ohio watersheds.

Meshach happened upon his kind grandfather who introduced him to his heartbroken and rapidly aging mother, to whom he told the terrible tale of his bondage at the hands of his aunt and uncle, who had told him he would be their son and heir, but who lied and bound him instead. He went into great detail about his aunt's attempt to kill him at age 12, by leading him around the cabin and breaking stick after stick after stick after sick on him. This turned into a full-blown animal fight in which he attempted to tear a mouthful of flesh from the inside of the hag's thigh, but she was too tough to bite chunks out of.

Meshach was recruited as a hunter by a mapping expedition and was excited to go, but was pleaded with by his mother who complained that in the Ohio Country he "will feed the wolves." Dissuaded, he took a job as a houseboy with a bear hunter and worked alongside a black female servant named Dinah, who seems to have been an indenture, not a lifetime slave. He was soon involved in brutal combat, fighting off feral mules from his master's feed stands.

Eventually, while his master was away, a bunch of men he regarded as "back-country gentry" came through bear hunting with the wrong kind of guns, the wrong kind of dogs, no experience and heap of cowardliness. What followed was an extensive description of a brutal hunt in which the bear was treed and shot numerous times with what seems to have been birdshot and squirrel-shot. But the only decent shot was Meshach's and he only had one round for his old gun, which broke the bear's back but did not end the fight. The men cursed and threated him and would not listen to his expert advice or fetch him more powder and shot. At length, the maimed bear came down from the tree and the men from the east climbed their own trees, leaving the dogs to fend for themselves. At this point Meshach used a tree branch to aid his master's two dogs in their fight with the bear, eventually killing the bear with the crude weapon. This was a really bad day to be a bear! Then the men—and it is no wonder the Indians scoffed at these settlers—lied to Meshach's master about the hunt. But this man was a master at reading the signs of a struggle and upon examining the body of the beast declared step by step what had happened, declared his boy to have killed the bear and not any of the cowards, who yet threatened Meshach with reprisals. These thugs read like released indentures, come west with the plantation proclivity for dealing with people of less status through beatings.

Meshach was a man of repute, complete with jealous enemies, and a bear-skin trophy, by age 16.

This portion of the biography is excellent for seeing the Appalachian Frontier for what it was, a many-layered migration, with pathfinders, followed by long hunters, followed by homesteaders, followed by waves of migrants with decreasingly appropriate skill sets, and ultimately by the "back-country gentry," proud, coward scum of the east.