warriors, and the most expert of strategists. The romancers who have
attempted to describe their habits of life and delineate their
characters, catching this last idea, and imagining things probable of
the country they were in, have drawn the one in lines the most grotesque
and absurd, and colored the other with a pencil dipped in all hues but
the right. To them the early pioneers appear to have been people of a
character demi-devil, demi-savage, not only with out the remains of
former civilization, but without even the recollection that they had
been born and bred where people were, at the least, measurably sane,
somewhat religiously inclined, and, for the most, civilly behaved.

"Both of these conceptions of the character of the Pioneer Fathers are,
to a certain extent, correct as regards _individuals_ among them; but
the pictures which have often been given us, even when held up beside
such _individuals_, will prove to be exaggerations in more respects than
one. Daniel Boone is an individual instance of a man plunging into the
depths of an unknown wilderness, shunning rather than seeking contact
with his kind, his gun and trap the only companions of his solitude,
and wandering about thus for months,"

"'No mark upon the tree, nor print, nor track,
To lead him forward, or to guide him back.'"

"contented and happy; yet, for all this, if those who knew him well had
any true conception of his character, Boone was a man of ambition, and
shrewdness, and energy, and fine social qualities, and extreme sagacity.
And individual instances there _may_ have been--though even this
possibility is not sustained by the primitive histories of those
times--of men who were so far _outre_ to the usual course of their
kind, as to have afforded originals for the _Sam Huggs_ the _Nimrod