AUDUBON AND BOONE. 163 
and agility of a.young panther—was not a turbulent one. He 
rebelled against the life of usages—that we call society—not 
because he lacked the strength or the firmness to battle with 
it—but because he lacked the will or desire to do so. He 
was too young and too healthy for misanthropy; and, if he 
had been older and less healthy, the social conditions with 
which he was fainiliar were too simple for him to have realized 
that contar-ination of vice which sometimes goes far to breed 
distrust, disgust aid hate in even strong natures. 
No !—if ever a wild creature—gentle, and yet terrible in 
gentleness—went on two feet through the shadowed heart of 
forests, the young Boone was one! He knew nothing of any 
world but God’s world—of any law but the right—of any 
conscience but his own—of any Power but that which dwelt 
above—in nature, and in his own good right arm and unerring 
vifle. 
In a word, he was the Patriarch of that “Wild Turkey 
breed” of tameless wanderers peculiar to this Continent; and 
from the restless and wary instincts of which our progress 
towards almost boundless empire upon the hemisphere takes 
origin. 
“He might have been civilized!” as a gentleman, of 
Chestnut or Broadway—inspecting through an eye-glass his 
powerful frame and ruddy cheeks—may be supposed to lisp! 
—but that would have spoiled a man/!—a man of might! 
the father of a State. 
You could not have tamed such a man as Daniel Boone 
into the mere conventional slave while there was “elbow 
room,” as he memorably termed it, in the world. If he had 
been chained, that dogged perseverance—that invincible self- 
reliance—that deathless love for the natural and the free 
would have made him a most formidable galley slave;—under 
any institutions he would have been a terrible agent of revo 
lution and overthrow. 
Indeed, one great cause of the solidity of our government 
