y were all, as a matter of course,
hunters. With Boon hunting and exploration were passions, and the lonely
life of the wilderness, with its bold, wild freedom, the only existence
for which he really cared. He was a tall, spare, sinewy man, with eyes
like an eagle's, and muscles that never tired; the toil and hardship of
his life made no impress on his iron frame, unhurt by intemperance of
any kind, and he lived for eighty-six years, a backwoods hunter to the
end of his days. His thoughtful, quiet, pleasant face, so often
portrayed, is familiar to every one; it was the face of a man who never
blustered or bullied, who would neither inflict nor suffer any wrong,
and who had a limitless fund of fortitude, endurance, and indomitable
resolution upon which to draw when fortune proved adverse. His
self-command and patience, his daring, restless love of adventure, and,
in time of danger, his absolute trust in his own powers and resources,
all combined to render him peculiarly fitted to follow the career of
which he was so fond.

Boon hunted on the western waters at an early date. In the valley of
Boon's Creek, a tributary of the Watauga, there is a beech tree still
standing, on which can be faintly traced an inscription setting forth
that "D. Boon cilled a bar on (this) tree in the year 1760."[7] On the
expeditions of which this is the earliest record he was partly hunting
on his own account, and partly exploring on behalf of another, Richard
Henderson. Henderson was a prominent citizen of North Carolina,[8] a
speculative man of great ambition and energy. He stood high in the
colony, was extravagant and fond of display, and his fortune being
jeopardized he hoped to more than retrieve it by going into speculations
in western lands on an unheard of scale; for he intended to try to
establish on his own account a great proprietary colony beyond the
mountains. He had great confidence in Boon; and it was his backing which
enabled the latter to turn his discoveries to such good account.

Boon's claim to distinction rests not so much on his wide wanderings in
unknown lands, for in this respect he did little more than was done by a
hundred other backwoods hunters of his generation, but on the fact that
he was able to turn his daring woodcraft to the advantage of his
fellows. As he himself said, he was an instrument "ordained of God to
settle the wilderness." He inspired confidence in all who met him,[9] so
that the men of means and in