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“Here once Boone trod––the hardy Pioneer–– The only white man in the wilderness.” |
In a late work entitled “Sketches of Western Adventure,” a most interesting account is given of Boone, whose passion for a sylvan life was intense. Like Leather-stocking, it would seem that he always got lost in the clearing, and that only in the forest he knew his way and felt free and unincumbered. Then, like McGregor, “standing on his native heath,” he feared no difficulties or dangers. Byron, in his Don Juan, calls him “The man of Ross run wild,” and says, that he “killed nothing but a bear or buck,” but not so; he had many deadly encounters with the Indians, and was repeatedly taken prisoner by them; but he effected his escapes with great tact. The author of “Sketches of Western Adventure,” speaking of him, alone in the wilderness, says,
“The wild and solitary grandeur of the country around him, where not 43 a tree had been cut, nor a house erected, was to him an inexhaustible source of admiration and delight; and he says himself, that some of the most rapturous moments of his life were spent in those lonely rambles. The utmost caution was necessary to avoid the savages, and scarcely less to escape the ravenous hunger of the wolves that prowled nightly around him in immense numbers. He was compelled frequently to shift his lodging, and by undoubted signs, saw that the Indians had repeatedly visited his hut during his absence. He sometimes lay in canebrakes, without fire, and heard the yells of the Indians around him. Fortunately, however, he never encountered them.”
Mr. John A. McClung is the author of the above mentioned work. This gentleman is also the author of a novel, entitled “Camden,” which has not received half the notice it deserved.
Mr. Flint has now in the press a life of Boone, which will soon be published. I am indebted to him for the following graphic note, concerning Boone:
“This extraordinary man, whose birth is said to have been in Maryland, in Virginia, and in North Carolina, was in fact born in neither; but in Pennsylvania, in Buck’s County, about twenty miles from Philadelphia. When he was three years old, his father removed to a water of the Schuylkill, not far from Reading. When he was thirteen years old, his father removed thence to the South Yadkin, North Carolina; and in the midst of the bushy hills of that State the character of this Nimrod was developed.
“No historical facts are better attested, than those, to which allusion is here made. The native sagacity, the robust hardihood, the invincible courage and spirit of endurance, put forth on all occasions by the pioneer of Kentucky, were, perhaps, never surpassed by any character on record. These traits were admirably balanced and relieved by a disposition peculiarly mild and gentle. In his old age he removed from Kentucky to the banks of the Missouri. The portrait of him in the capitol is said not to be a correct likeness. He was of the middle stature, of prodigious strength and swiftness, with sandy hair, and a bright complexion, a bold, prominent forehead, aquiline nose and compressed lips. There was a peculiar brightness, an unquenchable elasticity and force visible in his forehead and his eye, even under the frost of eighty winters. His old age was not cheered by affluence, but his departure was neither unhonored, nor unsung. No American character seems to have more chained interest and attention. His life constitutes the theme of Mr. Bryant’s ‘Mountain Muse,’ and he is one among the few, whom lord Byron honored with unalloyed eulogy, in seven or eight of the happiest stanzas of Don Juan.”
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And should they bear him prisoner from the fight, While they are sleeping, in the dead midnight, He slips the thongs that bind him to the tree, And leaving death with them, bounds home right happily. |