ins of
former civilization, but without even the recollection that they had
been born and bred where people were, at the least, measurably sane,
somewhat religiously inclined, and, for the most, civilly behaved.

"Both of these conceptions of the character of the Pioneer Fathers are,
to a certain extent, correct as regards _individuals_ among them; but
the pictures which have often been given us, even when held up beside
such _individuals_, will prove to be exaggerations in more respects than
one. Daniel Boone is an individual instance of a man plunging into the
depths of an unknown wilderness, shunning rather than seeking contact
with his kind, his gun and trap the only companions of his solitude,
and wandering about thus for months,"

"'No mark upon the tree, nor print, nor track,
To lead him forward, or to guide him back.'"

"contented and happy; yet, for all this, if those who knew him well had
any true conception of his character, Boone was a man of ambition, and
shrewdness, and energy, and fine social qualities, and extreme sagacity.
And individual instances there _may_ have been--though even this
possibility is not sustained by the primitive histories of those
times--of men who were so far _outre_ to the usual course of their
kind, as to have afforded originals for the _Sam Huggs_ the _Nimrod
Wildfires_, the _Ralph Stackpoles_, the _Tom Bruces_, and the
_Earthquakes_, which so abound in most of those fictions whose _locale_
is the Western country. But that naturalist who should attempt, by ever
so minute a description of a pied blackbird, to give his readers a
correct idea of the _Gracula Ferruginea_ of ornithologists, would not
more utterly fail of accomplishing his object, than have the authors
whose creations we have named, by delineating such individual
instances--by holding up, as it were, such _outre_ specimens of an
original class--failed to convey any thing like an accurate impression
of the habits, customs, and general character of the western pioneers.

"Daniel Boone, and those who accompanied him into the wildernesses of
Kentucky, had been little more than hunters in their original homes,
on the frontiers of North Carolina; and, with the exception of their
leader, but little more than hunters did they continue after their
emigration. The most glowing accounts of the beauty and fertility of
the country northwest of the Laurel Ridge, had reached their ears from
Finley and his companions; and t