14 The Wilderness Hunter 



depth and incredible beauty and majesty. There 

 are tropical swamps, and sad, frozen marshes ; des- 

 erts and Death Valleys, weird and evil, and the 

 strange wonderland of the Wyoming geyser region. 

 The waterfalls are rivers rushing over precipices; 

 the prairies seem without limit, and the forest never 

 ending. 



At the time when we first became a nation, nine- 

 tenths of the territory now included within the limits 

 of the United States was wilderness. It was during 

 the stirring and troubled years immediately preced- 

 ing the outbreak of the Revolution that the most 

 adventurous hunters, the vanguard of the hardy 

 army of pioneer settlers, first crossed the Allegha- 

 nies, and roamed far and wide through the lonely, 

 danger-haunted forests which filled the No-man's- 

 land lying between the Tennessee and the Ohio. 

 They waged ferocious warfare with Shawnee and 

 Wyandot and wrought huge havoc among the 

 herds of game with which the forest teemed. While 

 the first Continental Congress was still sitting, Dan- 

 iel Boone, the archetype of the American hunter, was 

 leading his bands of tall backwoods riflemen to set- 

 tle in the beautiful country of Kentucky, where the 

 red and the white warriors strove with such obsti- 

 nate rage that both races alike grew to know it as 

 "the dark and bloody ground." 



Boone and his fellow-hunters were the heralds of 

 the oncoming civilization, the pioneers in that con- 



