The wounded man got no further, for at that moment the form of a man appeared on the rocks above the shelter—a tall white man, dressed in the garb of a hunter.
“Hullo, who are you?” demanded Joe, leaping to his feet and feeling for his hunting knife.
“Why, that’s Daniel Boone!” cried the wounded man, before the newcomer could answer Joe’s question.
CHAPTER IX
DANIEL BOONE, THE PIONEER
At the time this story opens, Daniel Boone, known to history as the famous hero and pioneer of Kentucky, was about forty years of age. He was tall and well-formed, and had an eye that was as sharp as it was true. He could hit a bird on the wing, or a speeding deer with ease, and there was an old saying that if Boone drew bead on an animal the game was as good as dead.
Daniel Boone was born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, in 1735. His boyhood days were spent on the farm, and in hunting and fishing, pastimes of which he was passionately fond. He also had a strong “fever” for roaming, and more than once was missing at night, having gone on a tramp miles and miles from home.
When Boone was about thirteen years of age, his family moved to a place called Holman’s Ford, on the Yadkin River, in North Carolina. Here the youth grew to manhood and married the daughter of a neighbor, a sweet and courageous girl by the name of Rebecca Bryan. It is well to remember that name, for, as Daniel Boone was the pioneer of Kentucky, Mrs. Boone—Rebecca Bryan—was the pioneer woman of that great commonwealth. It took courage on the part of a man to penetrate the wilderness, but it took even more courage on the part of a woman with children to do the same thing.
When Daniel Boone married he still made his home on the Yadkin, but further westward than where his father was located. At first he had a wide range of territory to himself, which was just to his liking, but presently other settlers discovered the richness of this land and came to settle near him.
“We are going to be crowded out, wife,” said he to Mrs. Boone. “From our doorstep I can see the smoke of five other cabins in the valley.” This great hunter loved solitude, and he thought he was being “crowded” even when he could but see his neighbors.
Boone’s thought had often turned to the West—to that vast, mysterious land which lay beyond the Cumberland Mountains—that land which to-day forms the State of Kentucky with its many cities and towns, but which only a hundred and twenty-five years ago was an unbroken wilderness, inhabited by wandering red men and vast herds of buffalo, deer, and other wild animals. A hundred and twenty-five years! Reader, how quickly our great country has grown to be what it is!