Wildfires_, the _Ralph Stackpoles_, the _Tom Bruces_, and the
_Earthquakes_, which so abound in most of those fictions whose _locale_
is the Western country. But that naturalist who should attempt, by ever
so minute a description of a pied blackbird, to give his readers a
correct idea of the _Gracula Ferruginea_ of ornithologists, would not
more utterly fail of accomplishing his object, than have the authors
whose creations we have named, by delineating such individual
instances--by holding up, as it were, such _outre_ specimens of an
original class--failed to convey any thing like an accurate impression
of the habits, customs, and general character of the western pioneers.

"Daniel Boone, and those who accompanied him into the wildernesses of
Kentucky, had been little more than hunters in their original homes,
on the frontiers of North Carolina; and, with the exception of their
leader, but little more than hunters did they continue after their
emigration. The most glowing accounts of the beauty and fertility of
the country northwest of the Laurel Ridge, had reached their ears from
Finley and his companions; and they shouldered their guns, strapped
their wallets upon their backs and wandered through the Cumberland Gap
into the dense forests, and thick brakes, and beautiful plains which
soon opened upon their visions, more to indulge a habit of roving, and
gratify an excited curiosity, than from any other motive; and, arrived
upon the head-waters of the Kentucky, they built themselves rude log
cabins, and spent most of their lives in hunting and eating, and
fighting marauding bands of Indians. Of a similar character were the
earliest Virginians, who penetrated these wildernesses. The very first,
indeed, who wandered from the parent State over the Laurel Ridge, down
into the unknown regions on its northwest, came avowedly as hunters and
trappers; and such of them as escaped the tomahawk of the Indian, with
very few exceptions, remained hunters and trappers till their deaths.