r eagerness for empire, allied themselves with the
Indians, supplied them with arms, and offered a bounty for scalps; and
for nearly three quarters of a century, a bitter and bloody contest was
waged, which ended only with the expulsion of the French from the
continent. Deprived of their ally, the Indians retreated beyond the
mountains, where their war parties gathered to drive back the white
invader. Those years on the frontier developed a race of men accustomed
to danger and ready for any chance; and towering head and shoulders
above them all stands the mighty figure of Daniel Boone, the most famous
of American pioneers. About him cluster legends and tales innumerable,
some true, many false; but one thing is certain; for boldness, cunning
and knowledge of woodcraft and Indian warfare he had no equal.

Born in Pennsylvania, but moving at an early age to the little frontier
settlement of Holman's Ford, in North Carolina, the boy had barely
enough schooling to enable him to read and write. His real books were
the woods, and he studied them until they held no secrets from him. He
was a born hunter, a lover of the wild life of the forest, impatient of
civilization, and truly at home only in the wilderness. The cry of the
panther, the war-whoop of the Indian, were music to him; that was his
nature--to love adventure, to court danger, to welcome the thrill of the
pulse which peril brings. Understand him: he was not the man to incur
foolish risks; but he incurred necessary ones without a second thought.
He was near death no doubt a hundred times, yet lived to die in his
bed. But he was at his best, he really lived, only when the wilderness
held him and when his life depended upon his care and watchfulness.

[Illustration: Boone]

In 1755, Boone married and built a log cabin far up the Yadkin, where he
had no neighbors; but as the years passed, other families settled near;
the smoke of other cabins rose above the woods; his fields were bounded
by rude fences; he could scarcely stir out without encountering some
neighbor. It was too crowded for Daniel Boone; he felt the same
sensation that your nature lover feels to-day in the midst of a teeming
city--a sense of suffocation and disgust--and he finally determined to
move still further westward, and to cross the mountains into Kentucky,
concerning whose richness many stories had reached his ears. He
persuaded six men to accompany him, and on the first day of May, 1769,
set fort