and some of them wore men's hats. Their hair was commonly
clubbed. Once, at a large meeting, I noticed there but two women
that had on long gowns. One of these was laced genteelly, and the
body of the other was open, and the tail thereof drawn up and
tucked in her apron or coat-string."

While Daniel Boone was quietly engaged in the pleasant pursuits
of the chase, a vast world-struggle of which he little dreamed
was rapidly approaching a crisis. For three quarters of a century
this titanic contest between France and England for the interior
of the continent had been waged with slowly accumulating force.
The irrepressible conflict had been formally inaugurated at Sault
Ste. Marie in 1671, when Daumont de Saint Lusson, swinging aloft
his sword, proclaimed the sovereignty of France over "all
countries, rivers, lakes, and streams . . . both those which have
been discovered and those which may be discovered hereafter, in
all their length and breadth, bounded on the one side by the seas
of the North and of the West, and on the other by the South Sea."
Just three months later, three hardy pioneers of Virginia,
despatched upon their arduous mission by Colonel Abraham Wood in
behalf of the English crown, had crossed the Appalachian divide;
and upon the banks of a stream whose waters slipped into the Ohio
to join the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico, had carved the
royal insignia upon the blazed trunk of a giant of the forest,
the while crying: "Long live Charles the Second, by the grace of
God, King of England, Scotland, France, Ireland and Virginia and
of the territories thereunto belonging."

La Salle's dream of a New France in the heart of America was
blotted out in his tragic death upon the banks of the River