unted on the western waters, going continually farther west. In 1765
Croghan made a sketch of the Ohio River. In 1766 James Smith and others
explored Tennessee. Stoner, Harrod, and Lindsay, and a party from South
Carolina were near the present site of Nashville in 1767, in the same
year John Finley and others were in Kentucky, and it was Finley who
first told Boon about it and led him thither.

5. The attempt to find out the names of the men who first saw the
different portions of the western country is not very profitable. The
first visitors were hunters, simply wandering in search of game, not
with any settled purpose of exploration. Who the individual first-comers
were, has generally been forgotten. At the most it is only possible to
find out the name of some one of several who went to a given locality.
The hunters were wandering everywhere. By chance some went to places we
now consider important. By chance the names of a few of these have been
preserved. But the credit belongs to the whole backwoods race, not to
the individual backwoodsman.

6. August 22, 1734 (according to James Parton, in his sketch of Boon).
His grandfather was an English immigrant; his father had married a
Quakeress. When he lived on the banks of the Delaware, the country was
still a wilderness. He was born in Berks Co.

7. The inscription is first mentioned by Ramsey, p. 67. See Appendix C,
for a letter from the Hon. John Allison, at present (1888) Secretary of
State for Tennessee, which goes to prove that the inscription has been
on the tree as long as the district has been settled. Of course it
cannot be proved that the inscription is by Boon; but there is much
reason for supposing that such is the case, and little for doubting it.

8. He was by birth a Virginian, of mixed Scotch and Welsh descent. See
Collins, II., 336; also Ramsey. For Boon's early connection with
Henderson, in 1764, see Haywood, 35.

9. Even among his foes; he is almost the only American praised by
Lt.-Gov. Henry Hamilton of Detroit, for instance (see _Royal
Gazette_, July 15, 1780).

10. John Finley.

11. "The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boon, formerly a hunter";
nominally written by Boon himself, in 1784, but in reality by John
Filson, the first Kentucky historian,--a man who did history good
service, albeit a true sample of the small hedge-school pedant. The old
pioneer's own language would have been far better than that which Filson
used; for the latter's comp