Boon which seems remarkably lifelike, because I remember how
difficult other writers find it to individualize most of the
figures of the pioneers.

The backwoodsmen, he says, "all tilled their own clearings,
guiding the plow among the charred stumps left when the trees
were chopped down and the land burned over, and they were all, as
a matter of course, hunters. With Boon, hunting and exploration
were passions, and the lonely life of the wilderness, with its
bold, wild freedom, the only existence for which he really cared.
He was a tall, spare, sinewy man, with eyes like an eagle's, and
muscles that never tired; the toil and hardship of his life made
no impress on his iron frame, unhurt by intemperance of any kind,
and he lived for eighty-six years, a backwoods hunter to the end
of his days. His thoughtful, quiet, pleasant face, so often
portrayed, is familiar to every one; it was the face of a man who
never blustered or bullied, who would neither inflict nor suffer
any wrong, and who had a limitless fund of fortitude, endurance,
and indomitable resolution upon which to draw when fortune proved
adverse. His self-command and patience, his daring, restless love
of adventure, and, in time of danger, his absolute trust in his
own powers and resources, all combined to render him peculiarly
fitted to follow the career of which he was so fond."*

* Winning of the West, 1, 137, 138 (ed. 1889).


Roosevelt contributed two volumes to the American Statesmen
Series, one on Thomas Hart Benton in 1886, and the other on
Gouverneur Morris in 1887. The environment and careers of these