xt7nk931348h https://exploreuk.uky.edu/dips/xt7nk931348h/data/mets.xml Hill, George Canning, 1825-1898. 1859  books b92f454h55018592009 English Historical Publishing Company  : Dayton, Ohio Contact the Special Collections Research Center for information regarding rights and use of this collection. Boone, Daniel, 1734-1820 Kentucky --History --To 1792 Daniel Boone, the pioneer of Kentucky. A biography. text Daniel Boone, the pioneer of Kentucky. A biography. 1859 2009 true xt7nk931348h section xt7nk931348h 
    
    
    
   BOONE FIGHTING INDIANS 
    
   Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1859, bjr GEORGE CANNING L In the Clerk'B Office of the District Court for the District of Massachusetts. 
   PREFACE.

The author has designed the present series of Biographies more particularly for the young. And in pursuing his original plan along to its termination, he has set before himself the following objects, to which he invites the reader's attention :

To furnish from the pages of the world's history a few examples of true manhood, lofty purpose, and persevering effort, such as may be safely held up either for the admiration or emulation of the youth of the present day;

To clear away, in his treatment of these subjects, whatever mistiness and mustiness may have accumulated with time about them, presenting to the mental vision fresh and living pictures, that shall seem to be clothed with naturalness, and energy, and vitality ;

To offer no less instruction to the minds, than pleasure to the imaginations of the many for whom he has taken it in hand to write ;

And, more especially, perhaps, to familiarize the youth     P 
   PREFACE.

of our day with those striking and manly characters, that have long ago made their mark, deep and lasting, on the history and fortunes of the Amebican Continent.

The deeds of these men, it is true, are to be found abundantly recorded in Histories; but they lie so scattered along their ten thousand pages, and are so intermixed with the voluminous records of other matters, as to be practically out of the reach of the younger portion of readers, and so of the very ones for whom this series has been undertaken. These want only pictures of actual life; and, if the author shall, in any due degree, succeed even in sketching interesting outlines, he will feel that he is answering the very purpose that has long lain unperformed within his heart.

V 
   CONTENTS,

CHAPTER I.

HIS EARLY DAYS, ",........9

CHAPTER II.

REMOVAL TO NORTH CAROLINA,   .... 27

CHAPTER TIL

HIS EMIGRATION TO KENTUCKY,. .     ... 43

CHAPTER IV.

ALL ALONE, '.     .     . 63

CHAPTER V.

TRANSYLVANIA,       .        ;;.::    .... 8l

CHAPTER VI.

TROUBLE WITH THE INDIANS,       .     .     . 104 
   vifi CONTENTS.

CHAPTER VII.

BATTLES AND SIEGES,.......122

CHAPTER VIII.

A PRISONER,.........141

CHAPTER IX.

A WONDERFUL ESCAPE,......160

CHAPTER X.

SIEGE OF BOONESBORO UGH......17S

CHAPTER XI.

MISFORTUNES AND TRIALS......192

CHAPTER XII.

LAND AND LAND-OWNING,       .     .     .     .     . 212

CHAPTER XIII.

A NEW HOME IN THE FAR WEST,     ... 231

CHAPTER XIV.

LAST DAYS OF THE HUNTER,.....249 
   DANIEL BOONE.

CHAPTER I.

HIS EARLY DAYS.

LIFE in the woods is a romance from beginning to end. The mind delights to dwell upon the freedom, the beauty, the trials, and even the hazards of such* a life, and thinks of it, in contrast with the set forms and customs of civilization, as something so fresh that it raises the imagination to a pitch of the most pleasurable excitement.

There are very few hoys who have not, at one time or another in their lives, felt the secret hut strong impulse to go to sea, or to play at a game of Selkirk solitude in the woods. Daniel Webster used to say to his friends when assembled on his lawn at Marshfield, in the summer evenings, that the two objects in creation which chiefly inspired sentiments of grandeur within his breast, were the stars and the sea; he might well have added to 
   10

DANIEL BOONE.

these, the forest, than which, in its remote and awful solitudes, nothing in all the world can be named which so imposes lofty and solemn thoughts upon the soul.

We all love nature so much, even those of us who were never nursed upon her hosom. We love the streams, the lawns, the rocks, the trees, the dense masses of foliage, and even the driving snows and deluging rains. That love is born with us; and we cannot altogether outroot it, if we would. The birds and beasts ; the grove and river; mountain and waterfall; blue sky and black cloud freighted with thunder; sunsets and sunrisings; the winds that roar and howl themselves hoarse in winter, and the balmy breezes that blow up through the open windows of the south in summer; every one of these is able to.strike a chord of sympathy in the human breast, and waken the heart to a living ecstasy.

There have been many men in the world who loved the silence and solitudes of nature, but none, certainly, who pursued the enjoyments they offer with such singleness of heart as the famous Daniel Boone, the pioneer of Kentucky. He was a marked man from the start. Such true and simple children of nature are so rare as to attract a great deal of 
   HIS EARLY DATS. 11

attention on all sides. Their speech is not the speech of the world ; their manners are not those of common men; and their lives are crowded with deeds of daring, whose narration forms the most attractive of romances. Old and young delight to read of the wonderful encounters with Indians and wild beasts; the' narrow escape from the perils of flood and forest; the hardy and prolonged endurance, and the steady perseverance and resolution. These are stories of which the young, especially, never tire.   They are fresh forever.

It requires peculiar qualities to make a good pioneer. We who enjoy what a heroic ancestry won for us by their own sufferings and sacrifices, know little, and think less, of the cost at which all these things were secured. Some of those noble men marched forth to beat down oppression, as it sought to draw its bands closer and closer around them ; and some silently went out into the wilderness, resolved to subdue even nature herself to their far-reaching purposes. But large as was their comprehension, they could not then take into their vision the half of the grand picture which was so soon to unroll, like a panorama, before the gaze of an astonished world.

The name of Daniel Boone, as one of the pio- 
   12 DANIEL BOONE.

neers, has gone around the world. Long ago it was celebrated wherever men admired courage, or loved to read stories of individual sacrifice and daring. Captain Cook had sailed around the globe, bringing home with him accounts of men that were known scarcely in the popular imagination ; Ledyard traversed wild wastes where vegetation never grew, and made himself famous for the courage he displayed in penetrating to climes that were thought unable to sustain human life ; but Boone set out with calmness, as if he were obeying a religious inspiration, and buried himself forevei in the wilderness. It required great resolution to do what he did ; and yet it seemed to come to him as easily as play to a child.

Lord Byron proclaimed his undying fame in some of his noblest verse, which deserves to be incorporated with a biographical sketch of the man. It is as follows:

" Of all men, saving Sylla, the man-slayer,

Who passes for, in life and death, most lucky,

Of the great names which in our faces stare, The General Boone, backwoodsman, of Kentucky,

WaB happiest among mortals anywhere; For, killing nothing but a bear or buck, he

Enjoyed the lonely, vigorous, harmless days

Of his old age, in wilds of deepest maze. 
   HIS EARLY DAYS.

Grime came not near him     she is not the child Of solitude ; health shrank not from him    for

Her home is in the rarely trodden wild,

Where, if men seek her not, and death be mow

Their choice than life, forgive them, as, beguiled By habit, to what their own hearts abhor,

In cities caged.   The present case in point I

Cite is, that 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;

An active hermit, even in age the child

Of nature, or the man of Ross run wild.

1 'Tis true he shrank from men even of his nation.

When they built up into his darling trees, He moved some hundred miles off, for a station

Where there were fewer houses, and more ease. The inconvenience of civilization

Is, that you neither can be pleased, nor please. But where he met the individual man, He showed himself as kind as mortal can.

1 He was not all alone ; around him grew A sylvan tribe of children of the chaBe,

Whose young, unwakenM world was ever new 5 Nor sword nor sorrow yet had left a trace

On her unwrinkled brow, nor could you view A frown on nature's, or on human face ;

The free-born 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. 
   14

DANIEL BOONE.

No sinking spirits told them they grew grey;

No fashion made them apes of her distortions. Simple they were, not savage ; and their rifles, j

Though very true, were not yet used for trifles.

" Motion was in their days, rest in their slumbers, And cheerfulness the handmaid of their toil;

Nor yet too many nor too few their numbers; Corruption could not make their hearts her soil.

The lust which stings, the splendor which encumbers, "With the free foresters divide no Bpoil.

Serene, not sullen, were the solitudes

Of this unsighing people of the woods.*1

It is to be remembered, too, that when Boone shouldered his rifle and went with his little family into the wilderness, the days of the American Revolution were just drawing nigh. Had he listened intently, it would seem as if he could have almost caught the echoes of the early cannon fired by his resisting countrymen, and heard the roll of the drums, and the tramp of the ill-clad armies that were mustering in the field. But as his life chanced to be cast without the immediate reach of these influences, nothing was left him hut to follow the direction of his own tastes or desires. He loved the mysteries of woodcraft; he yearned for the companionship that silence alone offered him; he sighed daily, even at the season of early manhood, for the unbroken delights of solitude; and by all these signs had God 
   HIS EARLY DAYS.

15

sent him into the world to be a pioneer. Any other life would have been a mistake for him.

We are all over apt to consider only those -men the real founders of our nation, who perilled their lives or fortunes in the strife of the Revolution; but we allow ourselves to rest much short of the reality, when we do so. A great share of that work was done in silence and solitude; by self-sacrifices that were not seen by the eyes of the world     not in the smoke and roar of battle, but with patient and repeated efforts     frequently offering scarce a hope of final success. The men who lived and labored thus, were at least equal heroes with any other. They endured as much ; they toiled as much; they made as noble sacrifices for their posterity; and the results that flowed, and still flow, out of their endeavor, are no wise behind what has been wrought by the rest, either in importance or permanence.

The true way to look at the claims of the different workers for the inheritance we now enjoy, is to regard them, one and all, as engaged in the selfsame purpose ; to study them as the individuals of a fraternity; to match what one accomplished in one place and direction, with what another accomplished in an opposite or corresponding one. They labored together in a hody, shoulder to shoulder, though 
   16

DANIEL BOONE.

perhaps they knew it not at the time, nor even knew what great things they were doing. Each one took the part which heaven had allotted him, and worked it out as far as time and strength permitted.

And out of the long and brilliant list of patriots    whether orators, or warriors, or statesmen, or divines, whether at work in this field or that     no name shines with a purer or steadier lustre than that of Daniel Boone. Even for the days in which he lived, he was accounted a wonderful being; and those who read or heard of him felt the bewitching influence of his very name. No boy ever hung over the fictitious narrative of Alexander Selkirk with any greater delight and wonder, than did the men and women of the days following the Bevolution over the real story of Boone and his romantic fortunes in the great Western, wilderness. Stories of his courage and fortitude came to the ears of his countrymen on the seaboard, like whispering voices out of the pathless woods ; and all alike were enchanted. It was so new, so fresh, so strange, this life away from the reach of civilization ; the imagination loved to go" out into just such realms as those in which he dwelt, and to people them in obedience to its own laws " alone.

The Boone family sprang from English soil, and ' 
   HIS EARLY DAYS.

17

once dwelt in pleasant Devonshire, that spot of earth whose rich slopes and emerald pasture-lands are the glory of the mother country, and accounted among the garden-spots of the globe. The ancestor who brought the name to America, was George Boone. He came with his bounteous family of nineteen children (nine sons and ten daughters), and settled on the broad acres that lay open for his possession in Berks County, Pennsylvania. This George Boone, it seems, had a great ambition to hold land, and in time became the owner of noble tracts, not only in the county where he settled, but likewise in the adjoining States of Maryland and Virginia.

England had not land enough for his great needs    that is, land that he might, by his own effort and industry, acquire. In America there was plenty for all, and- uncounted acres to spare. It was in the year 1717, that George Boone came over to this country, and at a time when the people of overcrowded England began seriously to turn their attention to the advantages offered them on this unpeopled soil.

George Boone was, of course, a patriarch, with such a long roll of children, and deserves to be held in honor as the respected head of so large a family. He came out to see the land, and possess it. Having 2   
   18

DANIEL BOONE.

exhausted the vocabulary of scripture-titles in naming his children, as the custom was in those times, he gave the odd name of " Squire " to the one who otherwise might have gone without any. This Squire Boone, when lie came to manhood, married a young woman named Morgan, and settled in Bucks County, in Pennsylvania. Qf course, he was not far away from his father.

He raised up a large family also, as his father had done before him. He named his sons Samuel, and Israel, and Daniel, and Jonathan, and when he came to the seventh and last, he saw no other way than to give him his own title     Squire.

Daniel Boone was born in Bucks County, in the year 1735, on the 11th of February, and was consequently a little younger than Washington, at the time of the Revolution. He was a boy of a remarkably good constitution, which was about the best inheritance his parents could leave him. At three years of age he was removed, with the family, into what is now the town of Reading, Berks County     then, however, but a meagre and exposed post on the outskirts of the wilderness. The Indians threatened the peace of the settlement at all hours. It was not safe to go out of the reach of the dwelling, unless precautions were taken against sudden attacks from 
   HIS EARLY DAYS.

19

the forest natives. Ambushes were likely to be sprung upon the settlers on every side.

It was in a school of danger like this that the boy, then scarcely more than an infant, received his first lessons in life; and it may be believed they were rugged and lasting ones. Here on the edge of the trackless forest, his pliant mind was impressed with those images of nature, and those pictures of the pleasures of solitude, which are very apt to be indelible. He played about the far-off settlement, and gazed into the scowling wilderness with feelings that, during all his subsequent life, he labored to make real and true.

There he learned all about the tricks and traits of the Indians. The talk was chiefly upon them and their wily habits. He learned the dangers of the life his parents led, and was, at the same time, taught to love perfect simplicity. He was taught, too, that peacefulness brought the most happiness, agreeably to the views of his parents and those around him.

During his seclusion in the woods, it is not to be supposed that he enjoyed quite as many privileges as young lads do in these days, especially in the way of schooling. His education was very limited and meagre.   Schooling did not mean then as much 
   20

DANIEL BOONE.

as it does now. Then, it was but a hard chance indeed. The books were few, and teachers were rare. Little more than the rudiments were taught, and taught very hastily at that. The scholars did not, assemble in fine buildings, and seat themselves at handsome desks, as they do now ; but were compelled to huddle together as best they could in close and ill-lighted log cabins, the rudest structures that can be conceived.

The sturdy men of those times were educated in a rough school. It was almost a necessity that they should be. They knew much less of books than they did of life. They stammered over their spelling, perhaps, but made it up in their action. Polish was not much wanted then, but rather ruggedness and strength.

We can, in imagination, look into one of these log huts on the Pennsylvania frontier, now, and see the little lad Boone, busy over his tasks. Simple enough they were, yet no doubt as difficult for him to master as the incomparably tougher ones that are set before the boys of the present day. AVe can behold him gazing intently out through the open window, which, in fact, is no more than a square hole in the side of the cabin, and roaming, in thought, among the dense and dark trees, all among 
   HIS EARLY DAYS.

21

the mysterious shadows, or into and out of the recesses, that hide nowhere as they can in the forest. He, no doubt, sat, as many an impatient schoolboy has sat on his bench since, and dreamed of what was just beyond his reach outside     of butterflies, and green grass, and running across meadows, with no teacher to watch them, and freedom from restraint of every character. He would have been very different from other boys if he had not done so.

Of course, he was glad to get through the routine of school, and have it done with forever. The day of his release from that unwilling service, he considered as the most to be desired of any in his life. He learned to read, to write, and to cipher; these were all. And it cannot be asserted that he was anything beyond perfection in any of these. He did not pretend to write with more accuracy or elegance than the other boys of his time. Nor were his exploits in the way of spelling very much to be boasted of. He was a good reader, no doubt, as those things then went. And perhaps when we have said this much about the early schooling of Daniel Boone, we have said all.

As his life was to be in the woods, he looked at no education except that which would give him skill and advantage there.   The books could have taught 
   22

DANIEL BOONE.

him not the first syllable of the sort of learning he most wanted. That he could better acquire of the Indians, of the elements, of the open day, and the mysterious night, of the very animals that made their abode in the wilderness. The seasons themselves became his instructors. Nature was a volume always open to him ; and he studied it with eagerness and devotion.

The forest, too, was thought to be the scene of many and many a contest between the white man and the Indian. Hence the character of the savage was studied with the greatest care and patience. If the woods were indeed his special hunting-ground, and it was not permitted the white man to roam over them also, it would not be a great while before the reason for the latter's exclusion was better understood. And in order to meet the savage on an equal footing, it was necessary for the former to understand his nature at every crook and turn.

Nobody could tell, easier than the Indian, the paths that conducted them through the tangled forest mazes. He was an expert in arts like this. And it was exactly such as this that the frontier settler had to learn of him, enemy as he was, in order to be anywhere near his equal. How to make his escape in time of imminent danger, was a prob- 
   HIS EARLY DAYS.

23

lem which it required a good deal of study and skillful practise to solve. How to match his savage rival in the thousand arts and dissimulations that he was so ready to practise, was quite enough to occupy all his time and thought.

Young Boone grew up in the midst of circumstances and influences like these. Whatever else he did not learn, he certainly did learn the most lasting lessons of self-reliance. Here was he strong; and here was his strength always to lie. He felt the peculiar glory there was in trusting to himself, in relying on his own exertions. No school could have been a better one, either, to teach him how to make the most of what means lay around him; how to keep himself always on his feet; how to extricate himself from any kind of difficulties that threatened to hem him in; and how to perform the most with the fewest means, and under the greatest discouragements.

Of course he learned to use the gun a3 soon as he had the strength to carry it about with him. He became an expert marksman very early. Sharp shooting, in fact, was necessary almost to his existence ; and if not so much so at the time, it certainly became so in more than a single instance afterwards.   As he grew up nearer to the limit of man- 
   24

DANIEL BOONE.

hood, his love of hunting and solitude became more and more noticeable. He would be off alone in the woqds, with nothing but his gun for company, all through the day. Many a story is told of his wonderful feats, such as the number of animals he brought down with his unerring bullet, or the fierce and finally successful encounters he was wont to have with the forest denizens. The whole settlement looked upon him with pride, if not with hope; for they saw in him those shining qualities that give lasting fame' to the frontiersman and pioneer.

Having acquired the fame of a hunter, it was natural enough that he should think of no other occupation in life. So he soon began to grow, resk less under the restraints of home, and finally went out from beneath his father's roof and built a little hut in the forest, where he played the hermit and woodsman to his hearty's content. The wild beasts roamed all around him by day, and their howlings made a dismal concert for him at night. He was alone ; yet the solitude never became oppressive to him. He had yearned for just such a life since he hegan to estimate what life was worth.

The walls of his hut were hung around with skins of animals, trophies of his skill and daring. He stood in the door of his rude cabin of logs, and 
   HIS EARLY DAYS. 25

contemplated the forest, with its profound silence and gloom, with a pleasure that none could understand. In the untrodden depths of that wilderness he tried, no doubt, to find his own future ; which, even then, ho felt was as full of mazy windings and dark recesses, as the forest itself. He tried, in short, to taste the life he so much longed for, in advance of its coming ; he sought to make his fancies real as fast as he could, impatient that time did not untie the pack at its back a little faster. 3 
   26

CHAPTER II.

REMOVAL TO NORTH CAROLINA.

SQUIRE Boone, the father of Daniel, made up his mind after a time to remove with his family to a tract in North Carolina. He had been off on a visit among his friends in Maryland; - and it was while there, that he first heard the alluring stories of the land in North Carolina, which made him uneasy in remaining longer where he was. He remembered, too, the large family on his hands, and how necessary it was to make provision in the future for them. He must have land enough to ,settle all his boys upon around him, and they would very soon be men. In Pennsylvania, he had a fear that ere long he would be crowded ; but in North Carolina the land was taken up by fewer settlers, and he thought he could more easily secure what he wanted.

Daniel was no doubt glad to go. He had grown familiar with all the scenes about his Pennsylvania home, and would be delighted to start off and try nature in another region. This change of location, too, taking him as it did into still more remote soli- 
   REMOVAL TO NORTH CAROLINA. 27

tudes, was just the school for the work he had yet to do. The boy had now reached the age of eighteen years, almost manhood; but he was the fresh child ef nature still.

After the usual busy preparations, the family set out from Reading on their long and lonely journey, through Maryland and Virginia, for. North Carolina. It was a sad scene, the parting with the friends and neighbors, those with whom the Boones had shared a common danger in the wilderness. They felt that they were cutting loose from all they held dear in life, and were going forth again, as it were, to open a path for themselves in the world. We can see that little band of a single family starting off into the wilderness; the father walking now at the head of the line, and now in the rear, keeping watch against surprises, and overseeing the details of the march; the mother and her younger children safely stowed in the tented wagon, whose snow-white top showed far off as it receded in the depths of the forest; young Daniel, with his rifle across his shoulder     tall, straight and manly in his appearance, noting the signs of the season everywhere around him, with an eye awake to any enemy that might be near, and wondering and dreaming, perhaps, of his untried future. 
   28

DANIEL BOONE.

Little is known, however, of the particulars of that most important journey. If its details could all be told, they would form a chapter that every man, woman, and child in America would be eager to

   

read. But unfortunately the story is not preserved; and we of this day are left to imagine what it really was. We know at least that it was crowded with trials and deprivations, and that even in the brave heart of the father there were moments when doubt and fear had their way. Yet he pushed on, and finally reached in safety the promised land.

The first thing he did was to select a spot near a stream. This river was called the South Yadkin. It rises in the northwestern part of North Carolina, in the mountain country, runs across the State in a southeasterly course, - thence through a corner of South Carolina, and pours itself into the Atlantic above the mouth of the Santee. When he settled down near this river, it was the year 1753 ; a little more than a century ago.....

Here young Daniel Boone lived .with his father's family, and here he arrived at full manhood. His life differed not much from that which he led in Pennsylvania. He practised with his rifle ; he made constant excursions all around the fainily settlement; he increased his capacity for self-reliance; he contin- 
   REMOVAL TO NORTH CAROLINA, 29

ually tried his courage; he learned more minutely ;than ever the silent laws of forest life, and what a close relation they had to his fortunes and hi*-nature.

About this time, too, great events were transpiring in the world, and grander ones were preparing. The French and English were at war with each other, and the contest was transferred to this continent, where it was waged with terrific fury. It was along through these years that Israel Putnam was getting his valuable experience as a soldier in the neighborhood of Lake George, fighting bravely against the French and Indians. Washington, too, was schooling under Braddock in the Western wilderness, having already acquired the quick eye and the firm foot, in his perilous enterprises as a surveyor in the depths of the forest. But the war was not felt as far as among the mountains in the neighborhood of the South Yadkin. There the few settlers dwelt in peace, scarcely touched by the wave of battle that broke and died before its roar sounded in their ears.

Peaceful and quiet was the life of the young pioneer, himself ignorant of what the future had in store. He was, with his father, a plain and hardworking farmer, helping the best he could to clear the land and get it ready for cultivation.   This la- 
   30

DANIEL BOONE.

bor he relieved with hunting, losing none of the skill he had already acquired with the rifle. In this double capacity of farmer and hunter, the years wore noiselessly away. The country about him began to fill up, from time to time, with new settlers. Families came from a long distance to occupy the land which had so much promise for them. The forests began to melt before the invading axe, that heralds the march of civilization. Settlers' cabins were to be seen here and there, over the wide landscape. The crack of the hunter's rifle was to be heard more frequently in all directions. Farms were opening to the light of day, and beginning to bless their owners with the earth's bounteous increase.

Among the families that came and settled near the Yadkin, and in the immediate neighborhood of the Boones, was one by the name of Bryan ; a name at this day held in honor in the State of North Carolina. The Boones and the Bryans were not long in finding the secret pleasures that belong to friendship and good neighborhood. Like many other families that share the burdens of distance and solitude, they soon became intimate. Among the Bryans was a young girl, a daughter, named Rebecca; and for her young Daniel Boone soon 
    
    
   REMOVAL TO NORTH CAROLINA.

31

found he felt an ardent attachment. It was, in fact, the first dawning of love.

He was fonder of the forest, he had thought hitherto, than of any human society, and he knew that this love was growing stronger in his heart every day, too; yet there was a stronger attraction about this young girl, Rebecca Bryan, than he could find even in the charms of forest life. He knew not what it was. He had never been in love before, and, in fact, had never thought of such a thing. But now, of a sudden, he discovered that all his life had taken a new coloring, and his hopes and feelings were fast centering on an object, whose power to attract one like himself he had never dreamed of. It is a very common thing for a young man to fall in love; and Daniel Boone, at his time of life, was no exception to the great rule.

A pretty story is told of an accident which came

very near occurring, while he was paying attention

to young Rebecca Bryan ; but whether it is quite true

or not, is a matter of some doubt.   It is said that,

while out hunting deer one day, he observed a pair

of bright eyes looking steadily at him from out the

thicket.   He raised his rifle to his shoulder, and was

on the point of firing, when a timely movement on

the part of the owner of the eyes disclosed to him 3 
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DANIEL BOONE.

the fact that he had come very near shooting his intended bride!

Soon after the acquaintance between these two young persons ripened into intimacy and love, they were married. This was Daniel Boone's first real step out into the world ; for now he left the roof of his father, and set up housekeeping for himself. Now he was an independent man, the head of a family of his own. He had his own living to earn ; he must now hunt and farm for the support of her whom he had taken to wife; they both had left father and mother, sister and brother, and gone off to dwell apart by themselves. Of course, it was a sudden turn in the fortunes of both of them.

Before he married, however, he tramped a long distance up the valley of the Yadkin River, desirous of finding a spot on which to locate. He wanted to be off again. He did not like the settlements any better than he used to in Pennsylvania. Solitude was still his strong desire. The valley led away in the direction of the mountains, where the forest still stood untamed. Thi n