458 The Wilderness Hunter. 



prowess. He was strongly drawn to those field sports 

 which demand in their follower the exercise of the manly 

 virtues courage, endurance, physical address. As a young 

 man, clad in the distinctive garb of the backwoodsman, the 

 fringed and tasselled hunting-shirt, he led the life of a 

 frontier surveyor ; and like his fellow adventurers in wil- 

 derness exploration and Indian campaigning, he was often 

 forced to trust to the long rifle for keeping his party in 

 food. When at his home, at Mount Vernon, he hunted 

 from simple delight in the sport. 



His manuscript diaries, preserved in the State Depart- 

 ment at Washington, are full of entries concerning his 

 feats in the chase ; almost all of them naturally falling in 

 the years between the ending of the French war and the 

 opening of the Revolutionary struggle against the British, 

 or else in the period separating his service as Command- 

 er-in-chief of the Continental armies from his term of 

 office as President of the Republic. These entries are 

 scattered through others dealing with his daily duties in 

 overseeing his farm and mill, his attendance at the Vir- 

 ginia House of Burgesses, his journeys, the drill of the 

 local militia, and all the various interests of his many-sided 

 life. Fond though he was of hunting, he was wholly in- 

 capable of the career of inanity led by those who make 

 sport, not a manly pastime, but the one serious business 

 of their lives 



The entries in the diaries are short, and are couched 

 in the homely vigorous English, so familiar to the readers 

 of Washington's journals and private letters. Sometimes 

 they are brief jottings in reference to shooting trips ; such 



