y-second year of his age. Exacting from his
friends the promise that should he die, his remains should be brought
back and buried by the side of those of his wife, he took a boy with him
and went to the mouth of the Kansas River, where he remained two weeks.

Returning from this, his last expedition, he visited his youngest son,
Major Nathan Boone, who had reared a comfortable stone house in that
remote region, to which emigrants were now rapidly moving. Here he died
after an illness of but three days, on the 26th day of September, 1820.
He was then eighty-six years of age.

Soon after the death of his wife, Colonel Boone made his own coffin,
which he kept under his bed awaiting the day of his burial. In this
coffin he was buried by the side of his wife. Missouri, though very
different from the Missouri of the present day, was no longer an
unpeopled wilderness. The Indians had retired; thousands of emigrants
had flocked to its fertile plains, and many thriving settlements had
sprung up along the banks of its magnificent streams. The great respect
with which Colonel Boone was regarded by his fellow-citizens, was
manifest in the large numbers who were assembled at his burial. The
Legislature of Missouri, which chanced then to be in session, adjourned
for one day, in respect for his memory, and passed a resolve that all
the members should wear a badge of mourning for twenty days. This was
the first Legislature of the new State.

Colonel Boone was the father of nine children, five sons and four
daughters. His two eldest sons were killed by the Indians. His third
son, Daniel Morgan Boone, had preceded his father in his emigration to
the Upper Louisiana, as it was then called, and had taken up his
residence in the Femme Osage settlement. He became a man of influence
and comparative wealth, and attained the advanced age of fourscore.
Jesse, the fourth son, also emigrated to Upper Louisiana about the year
1806, where he died a few years after. The youngest son, Nathan, whose
privilege it was to close his father's eyes in death, had found a home
beyond the Mississippi; he became a man of considerable note, and
received the commission of Captain in the United States Dragoons. The
daughters, three of whom married, lived and died in Kentucky.

In the meantime Kentucky, which Boone had found a pathless wilderness,
the hunting ground of Indians who were scarcely less wild and savage
than the beasts they pursued in the chase, was r