6 The Wilderness H^tnter. 



crossed the Alleghanies, 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 Wyan- 

 dott and wrought huge havoc among the herds of game 

 with which the forests teemed. While the first Conti- 

 nental Congress was still sitting, Daniel Boone, the arche- 

 type of the American hunter, was leading his bands of 

 tall backwoods riflemen to settle in the beautiful country 

 of Kentucky, where the red and the white warriors strove 

 with such obstinate 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 conquest of 

 the wilderness which has at last been practically achieved 

 in our own day. Where they pitched their camps and 

 built their log huts or stockaded hamlets, towns grew up, 

 and men who were tillers of the soil, not mere wilderness 

 wanderers, thronged in to take and hold the land. Then, 

 ill-at-ease among the settlements for which they had 

 themselves made ready the way, and fretted even by the 

 slight restraints of the rude and uncouth semi-civilization 

 of the border, the restless hunters moved onward into 

 the yet unbroken wilds where the game dwelt and the red 

 tribes marched forever to war and hunting. Their un- 

 tamable souls ever found something congenial and beyond 

 measure attractive in the lawless freedom of the lives of 

 the very savages against whom they warred so bitterly. 



Step by step, often leap by leap, the frontier of set- 

 tlement was pushed westward ; and ever from before its 



