DANIEL BOONE.

and occupations.

When he was at the age of eighteen, the family removed to the remote northwestern corner of North Carolina. His father settled on the banks of the Yadkin, and the son pursued with him the life of a farmer. The youth now took to himself a wife of the daughters of the land, Rebecca Bryan, destined to share with him many a mishap and triumph of the frontier.

DANIEL BOONE, the pioneer hunter | poses of his life in habits of hardihood, of Kentucky, was born in Bucks prudence, and skill in the forest sports County, Pennsylvania, in February, 1735. His grandfather was an English emigrant, who came to America with his wife from the county of Devonshire, which furnished so much good blood to the New World. He settled in Bucks County, bringing with him, it is said, his family of eleven children. Of these, Squire Boone was the parent of the subject of our sketch. We read of his removing from the district, shortly after his son's birth, to It is curious to read of the motives the frontier hardships of Berks, the which, it is said, induced Boone to look distance between the Delaware and farther into the wilderness. The habits the Schuylkill, sufficient, in that day, to of North Carolina-it was exactly a make a frontiersman of the young hundred years ago-were even then, it Daniel. The woodland influences were seems, getting too luxurious for an as fresh there then as we can find them unsophisticated lover of freedom, like thousands of miles away in our own Boone. We might smile at the picture time. A simple, hardy population drawn of this early aristocracy by his lived face to face with nature. The biographers, of its signs of wealth schoolmaster had, indeed, penetrated which, perhaps, in the luxury of our to the spot with his elements of knowledge imparted to shock-headed urchins in a rude log-house, but the Mighty Mother without, in wood and fields, and mountains, was the great teacher. The young Boone learnt what was to be taught of reading, writing, and arithmetic from his unnamed preceptor, and an infinite deal more for the pur

own day would be accounted little better than poverty, did we not remember that the principle is the same, though the means of its exhibition has relatively changed. Labor, we are told, was ceasing to afford an honorable support to the white man; slaves were on the increase, and certain Scotch merchants were pompously ruling the

day with their equipage and expense quest of a habitation. A month's under the patronage of the colonial travel, in the spring of the year, court. Lawyers, too, began to abound as the country became more prosperous, and more than once in the history of our infant communities, when trade and finance were badly regulated, this gentry became, as in North Carolina at the time of which we are writing, objects of odium. Boone had a great distaste for the profession, though the bent of character which inflamed this dislike of the craft, must have tended to keep him out of the way of it in the first instance. We can hardly think that all this, the Scotchmen and the lawyers included, could very seriously affect the life of a simple farmer and hunter on the Yadkin, if he chose to be quiet. Rather should we look to the unresting mania of the genuine backwoodsman, whose cry is ever onward, pushing the ever-receding West before him, through stream and over mountain, to the edge of the Pacific.

brought the little party of six forest rangers, dressed in the hunting-shirt and supplied with the usual accoutrements of the craft, to a mountain eminence on the Red River, a stream flowing into the Kentucky, whence, at the close of a day in June, they first saw the far-stretching vale watered by that noble stream. The promised land was before them. The scene lives in description, and is a favorite subject for the painter. It is one of the memorable incidents, the landmarks of American civilization. Boone was then thirty-four, the prime of a hunter's manhood, sinewy, robust, resolute; full of strength of mind and of limb. He needed all these qualities to take possession of the hunter's paradise, which lay outspread before him. All splendid castles in this world worth taking possession of are guarded by infernal dragons of some species or other. The griffins of the fertile, game-flown, gametraversed, blessed hunting-grounds of Kentucky, were savage beasts which Boone and his companions did not mind much, and still more savage Indians, whom they were compelled to respect. These native warriors had indeed no settled habitation In 1769 the call comes in earnest to there; it was the debatable "middle," the backwoodsman from his friend, "dark and bloody ground," roamed John Finley, the adventurous trader over in hostile collision by the tribes and pioneer, who told of the wonders of the South and the North. So of wood and field in the hunting- much the more formidable was it, grounds of the Indians, on the banks perhaps, to the settler, who, whenever of the Kentucky. The two friends he encountered an Indian, would be had previously explored something of pretty sure to meet him armed for the the region together; they now went in fight.

Boone soon found his way over the present boundaries of North Carolina, to the head waters of the Holston and the Rock Castle of Kentucky, a tributary of the Cumberland. It was at first a mere exploring tour, but it brought him far on the way towards the scene of his future adventurous exploits.

separated from human life. Boone had occasional suspicions of the presence of Indians during this time in his tourings about his Robinson Crusoe hut;

His brother reached him again at the end of July, with fresh supplies and horses, when they continued their explorations together, taking the range of the Cumberland River. They were, however, attracted anew to the Kentucky, which they resolved to make the scene of a permanent settlement. They consequently returned home, carrying what peltry they could, with the intention of bringing their families from North Carolina. "Daniel had been absent two years, during which time he had tasted neither bread nor salt, nor seen any other human being than his travelling companions and the Indians who had taken him prisoner."1

Boone and his party pursued their hunting and explorations through the summer and autumn till December, without meeting with an Indian. Then Boone and Stewart, one of his com- but nothing of harm came of them. panions, were suddenly captured by a party of the savages on the bank of the Kentucky. After a few days of imprisonment, they effected their escape by night, and made their way, with difficulty, through the wilderness to the encampment, from which they had wandered. Their four associates were gone, to be seen no more in that quarter. Boone and his friend were left alone. Their ammunition now began to fail, and matters were looking serious, when they were surprised by the arrival of two men, one of whom turned out to be Boone's own brother, Squire, from North Carolina, bringing a welcome supply of powder and ball. It was well that he arrived, for shortly after, while Boone was out hunting with Stewart, the latter was picked off by an Indian, and scalped. The North Carolinian, also, who had accompanied Squire Boone, fell a prey to the perils of the region, and the two brothers were alone-a pair of Crusoes in the wilderness.

It was two years before the family arrangements were made for the exodus from North Carolina. Then, having disposed of his farm and property, in September, 1773, the two brothers, with their wives and children, set out on their patriarchal pilgrimage to the land of promise. They carried clothing and provisions on pack horses, and drove a herd of cows and swine to furnish refreshment by the way and stock their future settlement. They crossed the dividing ridge into Tennes see, and were on their way through Powell's Valley, where they were joined by a considerable addition of

The winter was passed without interruption in their lodge, where they supported themselves by the chase, and clothed themselves, with hunter's craft, in the skins of the deer they slew. When spring came, the brothers parted, Squire towards the distant Yadkin in quest of supplies of ammunition, Boone to pursue his hunting alone, and solace himself as best he could in his solitary camp. For three months he was thus Biography.

'Life of Boone, by John M. Peck, in Sparks' American