could with unerring instinct follow any object of search, until
it was overtaken.

The name of Daniel Boone was mentioned to Governor Dunmore as precisely
the man to meet this exigency. The Governor made application to the
practiced hunter, and Boone, without the slightest hesitancy, accepted
the perilous office. Indeed he seems to have been entirely unconscious
of the heroism he was developing. Never did knight errant of the middle
ages undertake an achievement of equal daring; for capture not only was
certain death, but death under the most frightful tortures. But Boone,
calm, imperturbable, pensive, with never a shade of boastfulness in
word or action, embarked in the enterprise as if it had been merely one
of the ordinary occurrences of every-day life. In the following modest
words he records the event in his autobiography:

"I remained with my family on the Clinch river until the sixth of June,
1774, when I, and one Michael Stoner, were solicited by Governor Dunmore
of Virginia, to go to the Falls of the Ohio to conduct into the
settlements a number of surveyors that had been sent thither by him some
months before, this country having about this time drawn the attention
of many adventurers. We immediately complied with the Governor's
request, and conducted in the surveyors, completing a tour of eight
hundred miles, through many difficulties, in sixty-two days."

The narrative which follows will give the reader some idea of the
wilderness which Boone was about to penetrate and the perils which he
was to encounter.

An emigrant of these early days who lived to witness the transformation
of the wilderness from a scene of unbroken solitude into the haunts of
busy men, in the following words describes this change and its influence
upon the mind:

"To a person who has witnessed all the changes which have taken place in
the western country since its first settlement, its former appearance is
like a dream or romance. He will find it difficult to realise the
features of that wilderness which was the abode of his infant days. The
little cabin of his father no longer exists. The little field and truck
patch which gave him a scanty supply of coarse bread and vegetables have
been swallowed up in the extended meadows, orchard or grain fields. The
rude fort in which his people had resided so many painful summers has
vanished.

"Everywhere surrounded by the busy hum of men and the splendor, arts,
refinements and comforts of