Wood-wise and wary, the young ark’s captain tied up to the Kentucky shore, two miles above the creek mouth, and sent Kenton round about through the woods to reconnoiter the lick. For, as it was a place frequented by deer and elk, it had come also to be a place of ambush for the stealthy redskins.
Kenton came upon the ashes of a campfire, two or three days old, on one of the hills overlooking the lick, and concluded that Indians had recently been watching there. The presence of a large herd of deer about the springs, however, convinced him that they had gone away.
Very early the next morning, therefore, the ark dropped down to the creek mouth and was poled up through the slack water for a distance of nearly two miles. But to guard against surprise, it was moored out in the stream, instead of being tied to the bank, by driving down three setting-poles, so as to give forty feet of open water all around it.
Shadwell Lincoln, with seven of the crew, including young Moses Ayer and Lewis Hoyt, was left in charge. Marion himself, with the others, set off for the lick, provided with axes and a shovel. From where the ark lay they had not far from two miles to go, through the forest and over hills.
Big Bone Creek is peculiar in that it comes almost wholly from five or six copious sulphur and saline springs, which issue from the earth in the marshy basin above mentioned.
When the first white hunters came here in 1729 the whole marsh bristled with enormous white bones—hence the name. Naturalists and collectors have now carried off everything in sight; but those who have patience to excavate the marsh are able occasionally to unearth bones of amazing magnitude.
In 1803, however, it was still possible to find partly buried skeletons intact, or nearly so. Marion Royce and his arksmen had not long to search for one, and were soon busy at their strange task.
The Royce and Ayer family traditions have it that the arksmen dug out a huge mammoth skeleton here, and were occupied until May 3 hauling it down to the ark on bob-sleds, which they constructed for the purpose. Many of the great molar teeth and numbers of the small bones were missing from this and all other skeletons found here; but, by overhauling several different skeletons, they were able to make up these deficiencies in part.