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Boone lived hunting up to ninety;

And, what 's still stranger, left behind a name
For which men vainly decimate the throng,
Not only famous, but of that good fame,

Without which glory 's but a tavern song,-
Simple, serene, the antipodes of shame,

Which hate nor envy e'er could tinge with wrong;

'Tis true he shrank from men, even of his nation;
When they built up unto his darling trees,
He moved some hundred miles off, for a station
Where there were fewer houses and more ease;

But where he met the individual man,

He showed himself as kind as mortal can.

The freeborn forest found and kept them free,
And fresh as is a torrent or a tree.

And tall, and strong, and swift of foot were they,
Beyond the dwarfing city's pale abortions,
Because their thoughts had never been the prey

Of care or gain; the green woods were their portions;

Simple they were, not savage; and their rifles,
Though very true, were yet not used for trifles.

Serene, not sullen, were the solitudes
Of this unsighing people of the woods.

- Byron.

DANIEL BOONE

AND THE FOUNDING OF KENTUCKY

ANIEL BOONE will always occupy a

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unique place in our history as the archetype of the hunter and wilderness wanderer. He was a true pioneer, and stood at the head of that class of Indian-fighters, game-hunters, forest-fellers, and backwoods farmers who, generation after generation, pushed westward the border of civilization from the Alleghanies to the Pacific. As he himself said, he was "an instrument ordained of God to settle the wilderness." Born in Pennsylvania, he drifted south into western North Carolina, and settled on what was then the extreme frontier. There he married, built a log cabin, and hunted, chopped trees, and tilled the ground like any other frontiersman. The Alleghany Mountains still marked a boundary beyond which the settlers dared not go; for west of them lay immense reaches of frowning forest, uninhabited save by bands of warlike Indians. Occasionally some venturesome hunter or trapper

penetrated this immense wilderness, and returned with strange stories of what he had seen and done.

In 1769 Boone, excited by these vague and wondrous tales, determined himself to cross the mountains and find out what manner of land it was that lay beyond. With a few chosen companions he set out, making his own trail through the gloomy forest. After weeks of wandering, he at last emerged into the beautiful and fertile country of Kentucky, for which, in after years, the red men and the white strove with such obstinate fury that it grew to be called "the dark and bloody ground." But when Boone first saw it, it was a fair and smiling land of groves and glades and running waters, where the open forest grew tall and beautiful, and where innumerable herds of game grazed, roaming ceaselessly to and fro along the trails they had trodden during countless generations. Kentucky was not owned by any Indian tribe, and was visited only by wandering war-parties and hunting-parties who came from among the savage nations living north of the Ohio or south of the Tennessee.

A roving war-party stumbled upon one of Boone's companions and killed him, and the others. then left Boone and journeyed home; but his brother came out to join him, and the two spent the winter together. Self-reliant, fearless, and

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DANIEL BOONE IN THE FRONTIER WOODS. AT CLOSE QUARTERS.

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