, were yet not used for trifles.

* * *

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

Daniel Boone will always occupy a 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 the frowning defiles of Cumberland Gap, the