o by the necessity
of shipwreck; but all history can scarcely parallel another such an
instance of a man voluntarily consenting to be left alone among savages
and wild beasts, seven hundred miles from the nearest white inhabitant.
The separation came. The elder brother disappeared in the forest, and
Daniel Boone was left in the cabin, so recently cheered by the presence
of his brother, entirely alone. Their only dog followed the departing
brother, and Boone had nothing but his unconquerable spirit to sustain
him during the long and lonely days and nights, visited by the
remembrance of his distant wife and children.

To prevent the recurrence of dark and lonely thoughts, he set out, soon
after his brother left him, on a distant excursion to the north-west.
The country grew still more charming under his eye at every step of his
advance. He wandered through the delightful country of the Barrens, and
gained the heights of one of the ridges of Salt river, whence he could
look back on the Alleghany ridges, lifting their blue heads in the
direction of the country of his wife and children. Before him rolled the
majestic Ohio, down its dark forests, and seen by him for the first
time. It may be imagined what thoughts came over his mind, as the lonely
hunter stood on the shore of this mighty stream, straining his thoughts
towards its sources, and the unknown country where it discharged itself
into some other river, or the sea. During this journey he explored the
country on the south shore of the Ohio, between the Cumberland and the
present site of Louisville, experiencing in these lonely explorations a
strange pleasure, which, probably, none but those of his temperament can
adequately imagine.

Returning to his cabin, as a kind of head quarters, he found it
undisturbed by the Indians. Caution suggested to him the expedient of
often changing his position, and not continuing permanently to sleep in
the cabin. Sometimes he slept in the cane-brake sometimes under the
covert of a limestone cliff, often made aware on his return to the cabin
that the Indians had discovered it, and visited it during his absence.
Surrounded with danger and death, though insensible to fear, he
neglected none of those prudent precautions of which men of his
temperament are much more able to avail themselves, than those always
forecasting the fashion of uncertain evils. He was, however, never for
an hour in want of the most ample supply of food. Herds of de