Daniel Boone

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 Smokeys to the Pacific. As he himself said, he was "an instrument ordained of God to settle the wilderness." He was born on November 2, 1734, in a log cabin in Berks County, Pennsylvania. Boone had little formal education, but he did learn the skills of a woodsman early in life. By age twelve, his sharp hunter's eye and skill with a rifle helped keep his family well provided with wild game. In 1756, Boone married Rebecca Bryan, a pioneer woman with great courage and patience. He 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 unknown forest, inhabited only by tribes of warlike Indians. Occasionally some pioneer hunter or trapper penetrated this dark wilderness, and returned with strange stories of what he had seen and done.…