PIONEER FOREST RANGERS. 217 



utmost, and required a person to be of iron nerve to 

 live unmoved in the midst of them. For a man never 

 could tell, when he went out for the day, whether he 

 would return home at night in safety; nor could he 

 be certain that on his return he might not find his log 

 cabin a heap of ashes and his wife and children mutil- 

 ated corpses. It therefore became quite a common 

 thing to drink to the safety of a man's scalp upon the 

 frontier, and the usual form of toast was, " The hair 

 on your head; and long may it wave there " in allusion 

 of course to the possibility of its being any day " lifted." 

 Nevertheless there were not wanting plenty of daring 

 spirits who preferred the frontier to more settled dis- 

 tricts, in spite of the chances of sudden death, and 

 also those of being carried off and put to death by 

 the slow ordeal of torture, which followed almost as a 

 matter of course upon capture when the Indians were 

 excited by losses of members of their tribe in action, 

 or any other uncommon event. Some of these men 

 lived in the depths of the wilderness, several days' 

 march in advance of the regular recognised frontier, 

 and thus lived all their days with their lives in their 

 hands; of these daring pioneers of course the majority 

 in the end met their deaths at the hands of the Indians. 

 Few indeed lived to die in their beds at their natural term 

 of existence: yet some few successfully combatted all 

 dangers, and passed their days in almost continual 

 warfare. One of these was the celebrated Daniel Boone 

 of whom we have already spoken. He was a tall, spare, 

 sinewy man, with eyes like an eagle's, and muscles that 

 never tired; and he lived, as we have said, for 86 years, 

 a hunter and Indian fighter to the end of his days, and 

 died in his bed surrounded by friends and family after all. 



