Serene and unworldly to the last, and with slight premonition of the end, Daniel Boone passed from this life upon the twenty-sixth of September, 1820, in the eighty-sixth year of his age. The event took place in the home of his son Nathan, said to be the first stone house built in Missouri. The convention for drafting the first constitution of the new State was then in session in St. Louis. Upon learning the news, the commonwealth-builders adjourned for the day in respect to his memory; and as a further mark of regard wore crape on their left arms for twenty days. The St. Louis Gazette, in formally announcing his death, said: "Colonel Boone was a man of common stature, of great enterprise, strong intellect, amiable disposition, and inviolable integrity—he died universally regretted by all who knew him.... Such is the veneration for his name and character."

Pursuant to his oft-repeated request, he was buried by the side of his wife, upon the bank of Teugue Creek, about a mile from the Missouri. There, in sight of the great river of the new West, the two founders of Boonesborough rested peacefully. Their graves were, however, neglected until 1845, when the legislature of Kentucky made a strong appeal to the people of Missouri to allow the bones to be removed to Frankfort, where, it was promised, they should be surmounted by a fitting monument. The eloquence of Kentucky's commissioners succeeded in overcoming the strong reluctance of the Missourians, and such fragments as had not been resolved into dust were removed amid much display. But in their new abiding-place they were again the victims of indifference; it was not until 1880, thirty-five years later, that the present monument was erected.

BOONE'S MONUMENT AT FRANKFORT, KENTUCKY.

We have seen that Daniel Boone was neither the first explorer nor the first settler of Kentucky. The trans-Alleghany wilds had been trodden by many before him; even he was piloted through Cumberland Gap by Finley, and Harrodsburg has nearly a year's priority over Boonesborough. He had not the intellect of Clark or of Logan, and his services in the defense of the country were of less importance than theirs. He was not a constructive agent of civilization. But in the minds of most Americans there is a pathetic, romantic interest attaching to Boone that is associated with few if any others of the early Kentuckians. His migrations in the vanguard of settlement into North Carolina, Kentucky, West Virginia, and Missouri, each in their turn; his heroic wanderings in search of game and fresh lands; his activity and numerous thrilling adventures during nearly a half-century of border warfare; his successive failures to acquire a legal foothold in the wilderness to which he had piloted others; his persistent efforts to escape the civilization of which he had been the forerunner; his sunny temper amid trials of the sort that made of Clark a plotter and a misanthrope; his sterling integrity; his serene old age—all these have conspired to make for Daniel Boone a place in American history as one of the most lovable and picturesque of our popular heroes; indeed, the typical backwoodsman of the trans-Alleghany region.

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