INTRODUCTION.
DANIEL BOONE was the ideal of the American pioneer—brave, cool, self-reliant, a dead shot with his rifle, a consummate master of woodcraft, with sturdy frame, hopeful at all times, and never discouraged by disasters which caused many a weaker spirit to faint by the way. All that the pen of romance depicts in the life of one whose lot is cast in the Western forests, marked the career of Boone. In the lonely solitudes he encountered the wild animal and the fiercer wild man; and he stood on the bastions at Boonesborough through the flaming sun or the solemn hours of night, exchanging shots with the treacherous Shawanoe, when every bullet fired was meant to extinguish a human life; he was captured by Indians three times, his companions were shot down at his side, his daughter was carried away by savages and quickly rescued by himself and a few intrepid comrades, his oldest boy was shot dead before he set foot in Kentucky, and another was killed while bravely fighting at Blue Licks; the border town named after him was assaulted and besieged by overwhelming bodies of British and Indians, his brother was slain and he himself underwent all manner of hardship and suffering.
Yet through it all, he preserved his honest simplicity, his unswerving integrity, his prudence and self-possession, and his unfaltering faith in himself, in the future of his country, and in God.
He lived through this crucial period to see all his dreams realized, and Kentucky one of the brightest stars in the grand constellation of the Union.
Such a life cannot be studied too closely by American youth; and in the following pages, we have endeavored to give an accurate description of its opening, its eventful progress and its peaceful close, when, in the fullness of time and in a ripe old age, he was finally laid to rest, honored and revered by the great nation whose possessions stretch from ocean to ocean, and whose "land is the fairest that ever sun shone on!"