came.

Yet the frontier was in fact very near to Philadelphia. A few outlying
fields about the town alone separated it from the wild forest; guards
were ever ready to give warning of danger from Indians on the war-path,
and friendly Indians were constantly met with on the streets. There were
many fur-traders, too, who brought their goods to market as Daniel did,
and one was constantly meeting some rough-clad trapper in from the
wilds for a few days of city life.

Daniel wandered about slowly, enjoying everything he saw with a boy's
delight in the unusual, and finally exchanging the skins he had brought
with him for things he needed in his hunting,--long, sharp-edged knives,
flints, powder and lead for his gun.

When Daniel was fourteen his older brother married a young Quakeress who
had received a better education than any of her neighbors. She liked
Daniel and began to teach him to read and to figure. He was not a
brilliant scholar, but he learned enough to do rough surveying work, and
to write letters which expressed what he meant although spelled on a
plan of his own. At about the same time Squire Boone started a
blacksmith shop, and Daniel added this work to what he already did as
herdsman and hunter. The work in iron gave him a chance to plan and
carry out new ideas of his in regard to guns and traps.

The Pennsylvania country was gradually filling up, and in 1750, when
Daniel was fifteen, Squire Boone began to wonder where his eleven
children would find farming land. Directly westward rose the Alleghany
Mountains, a high barrier to pioneers, and report said that the Indians
who lived just beyond them were particularly fierce. Southwest, however,
lay alluring valleys, broad meadows between the Appalachian ranges that
stretched from Pennsylvania through Virginia and the Carolinas into
far-off Georgia. Men who wanted new and bigger lands went south into the
Blue Ridge country, and some near neighbors of the Boones had pushed on
to the Yadkin Valley which lay in northwestern North Carolina. Reports
came back of the splendid lands they found there.

Squire Boone was by nature a pioneer, a man who loved to explore new
lands and build new settlements, and so he decided to venture into this
new and promising country. There is a world of romance in such a journey
as this the Boones now undertook, and they were but one of many thousand
families who were pushing west and south, laying the foundations of a
great land.