Simple they were, not savage; and their rifles,
Though very true, were yet not used for trifles.

* * *

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



DANIEL BOONE AND THE FOUNDING OF KENTUCKY

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.