1 8 THE WILDERNESS HUNTER. 



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 preceding the out- 

 break of the Revolution that the most adven- 

 turous hunters, the vanguard of the hardy 

 army of pioneer settlers, first 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 Wyandott and wrought 

 huge havoc among the herds of game with 

 which the forest teemed. While the first Con- 

 tinental Congress was still sitting, Daniel 

 Boone, the archetype of the American hunter, 

 was leading his bands of tall backwoods rifle- 

 men to settle in the beautiful country of Ken- 

 tucky, 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 wan- 

 derers, 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 



