sh in the forces of Morgan's Riflemen
and Nelson's Riflemen. Their skill with firearms, their fearlessness,
made them invaluable to Washington. "It was their quality of cool
courage and personal independence," said Raine, "that won the battles of
Kings Mountain and Cowpens and drove Lord Cornwallis to his surrender at
Yorktown."

Each movement toward independence in Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, and
North Carolina had been under the leadership of mountain men and the
accomplishment of their several declarations paved the way for the more
widespread Continental Declaration of Independence at Philadelphia, July
4, 1776.

It echoed around the world, but Daniel Boone, that young rebel, didn't
even hear of it until the following August. Whereupon the fearless
hunter with the abandon of a happy lad danced a jig around the bonfire
inside the stockade. It could have been an Elizabethan jig, ironically
enough, for the Boones were English. Daniel tossed his coonskin cap into
the air again and again and let out a war whoop that brought the
terrified Rebecca hurrying to the cabin door, a whoop that pierced the
silence of the forest beyond.

By the time the Declaration was signed the mountain people constituted
one sixth of the settlement of the United States.

As for Daniel Boone, twenty-five years had passed since he, a boy of
sixteen, had left Pennsylvania with his father and brothers. He was
forty-one years old when he set up housekeeping at Boonesborough where
the fort stood on the banks of the Kentucky. Never in all his life had
he been quite so settled. Daniel had acquired title to lands from the
Transylvania Company and things looked promising. Rebecca too must have
been happy in their security. The children could safely play inside the
stockade even if they did squabble with the neighbors' children. Rebecca
must have sung a ballad betimes as she cooked venison or wild turkey at
the hearth, or swept the floor with her rived oak broom. For Daniel
could whittle a broom for her while he sat meditating aloud on his past
adventures. Daniel was satisfied. Rebecca could see that. Now with the
colony established in the wilderness Daniel Boone had realized the dream
of his life.

In the thirteen years Boone lived in Kentucky he continued to hunt and
trap and explore. He took others along with him on his various
expeditions. In January, 1778, with a party of thirty men he went to
make salt at Blue Lick. He knew the places to go