At first he had to make his own weapons, and invented a curious implement, simply a slim, smooth-shaved sapling, with a bunch of twisted roots at the end. This he learned to throw so skilfully that he could readily kill birds, rabbits, and small game with it. A little later, however, his father gave him a rifle, and he became an expert marksman, able to provide his mother with plenty of game for food.
It was a wonderful life for a boy who loved the country. All summer he herded the cattle and roamed through the almost untrodden wilderness. In the winter his father let him hunt as soon as he had learned to handle a gun. Daniel roamed far and wide across the Neversink mountain range to the north and west of Monocacy Valley. He kept his family supplied with great stock of game, and he cured the animals' skins. When he had a sufficient store of skins he set out to market them in Philadelphia.
The city William Penn had founded on the banks of the Delaware was then a small but prosperous village. It had been designed on the plan of a checker-board, and most of the houses were surrounded by well-kept gardens and flourishing orchards. Primitive as it was, the country boy looked at it with wondering admiration. The houses, which were really very simple, were palaces to him, when he thought of his father's log cabin. The men and women, dressed in the latest importations brought from London by sailing vessels, were figures of surpassing style and elegance.
Life in Philadelphia seemed very rich to Daniel Boone; he liked to loiter along the streets and look in at the wide gardens and the comfortable white porches, and he liked to stop and watch a city chaise drive by, with a man in a claret or plum-colored suit and a woman in a bright taffeta gown. They were almost a different race from the buckskin-clad people of the wilderness from whom he came.
Yet the frontier was in fact very near to Philadelphia. A few outlying fields about the town alone separated it from the wild forest; guards were ever ready to give warning of danger from Indians on the war-path, and friendly Indians were constantly met with on the streets. There were many fur-traders, too, who brought their goods to market as Daniel did, and one was constantly meeting some rough-clad trapper in from the wilds for a few days of city life.
Daniel wandered about slowly, enjoying everything he saw with a boy's delight in the unusual, and finally exchanging the skins he had brought with him for things he needed in his hunting,—long, sharp-edged knives, flints, powder and lead for his gun.
When Daniel was fourteen his older brother married a young Quakeress who had received a better education than any of her neighbors. She liked Daniel and began to teach him to read and to figure. He was not a brilliant scholar, but he learned enough to do rough surveying work, and to write letters which expressed what he meant although spelled on a plan of his own. At about the same time Squire Boone started a blacksmith shop, and Daniel added this work to what he already did as herdsman and hunter. The work in iron gave him a chance to plan and carry out new ideas of his in regard to guns and traps.
The Pennsylvania country was gradually filling up, and in 1750, when Daniel was fifteen, Squire Boone began to wonder where his eleven children would find farming land. Directly westward rose the Alleghany Mountains, a high barrier to pioneers, and report said that the Indians who lived just beyond them were particularly fierce. Southwest, however, lay alluring valleys, broad meadows between the Appalachian ranges that stretched from Pennsylvania through Virginia and the Carolinas into far-off Georgia. Men who wanted new and bigger lands went south into the Blue Ridge country, and some near neighbors of the Boones had pushed on to the Yadkin Valley which lay in northwestern North Carolina. Reports came back of the splendid lands they found there.
Squire Boone was by nature a pioneer, a man who loved to explore new lands and build new settlements, and so he decided to venture into this new and promising country. There is a world of romance in such a journey as this the Boones now undertook, and they were but one of many thousand families who were pushing west and south, laying the foundations of a great land.
Mrs. Boone and the younger children were safely stowed away in canvas-covered wagons, such as were later known as "prairie schooners," and Squire Boone with Daniel and the older boys rode horseback, driving the cattle before them, and forming an armed guard about the caravan. They crossed the ford at Harper's Ferry and went on up the rich Shenandoah Valley. At night camp was pitched by a spring and the wagons drawn up in a circle about the cattle. A camp-fire was built and the game which Daniel as huntsman had shot was cooked for supper. Sentries were posted, and all night long father and sons took turns guarding against attack from Indians.