retched without a break; but towards the mouth of the Kentucky and
Cumberland rivers the landscape became varied with open groves of
woodland, with flower-strewn glades and great barrens or prairies of
long grass. This region, one of the fairest in the world, was the
debatable ground between the northern and the southern Indians. Neither
dared dwell therein,[1] but both used it as their hunting-grounds; and
it was traversed from end to end by the well marked war traces[2] which
they followed when they invaded each other's territory. The whites, on
trying to break through the barrier which hemmed them in from the
western lands, naturally succeeded best when pressing along the line of
least resistance; and so their first great advance was made in this
debatable land, where the uncertainly defined hunting-grounds of the
Cherokee, Creek, and Chickasaw marched upon those of northern Algonquin
and Wyandot.

Unknown and unnamed hunters and Indian traders had from time to time
pushed some little way into the wilderness; and they had been followed
by others of whom we do indeed know the names, but little more. One
explorer had found and named the Cumberland river and mountains, and the
great pass called Cumberland Gap.[3] Others had gone far beyond the
utmost limits this man had reached, and had hunted in the great bend of
the Cumberland and in the woodland region of Kentucky, famed amongst the
Indians for the abundance of the game.[4] But their accounts excited no
more than a passing interest; they came and went without comment, as
lonely stragglers had come and gone for nearly a century. The backwoods
civilization crept slowly westward without being influenced in its
movements by their explorations.[5]

Finally, however, among these hunters one arose whose wanderings were to
bear fruit; who was destined to lead through the wilderness the first
body of settlers that ever established a community in the far west,
completely cut off from the seaboard colonies. This was Daniel Boon. He
was born in Pennsylvania in 1734,[6] but when only a boy had been
brought with the rest of his family to the banks of the Yadkin in North
Carolina. Here he grew up, and as soon as he came of age he married,
built a log hut, and made a clearing, whereon to farm like the rest of
his backwoods neighbors. They 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 the