Daniel Boone's First View of Kentucky
While he was with Braddock's army Daniel had met a man named John Finley, who fired his imagination with stories of his wanderings in the west. He was a fur-trader, and his passion for hunting had already led him into the Kentucky wilderness as far as the Falls of the Ohio River, where Louisville now stands. He had had countless adventures with Indians, with wild animals, and with the perils of stream and forest. Young Boone drank in the stories eagerly, and resolved that some day he would himself go out to explore the west.
Daniel had now come to manhood. For a time he stayed in the Yadkin Valley, but the call to follow the trail of the buffaloes and the westward moving Shawnese was clear in his ears. Dangerous days of Indian fighting on the border held him close at home, but the time came when he could resist the call no longer. He left home and took his way through the uncharted hills and forests to Kentucky.
At times he fought for his life with roving Indians, and at times he captained some small English garrison beset by the same red men. He won great renown as an Indian fighter, as a hunter, as an intrepid explorer. The little town of Boonesborough was named for him, and he defended it through a long and perilous siege. But so soon as men came and built homes and staked out farms Boone must be moving west. What he sought was the wilderness; he was happiest in the great recesses of the woods, or blazing his own trail across untrodden prairies.
He led the vanguard into North Carolina, into West Virginia, into Kentucky, and then into Missouri. He is a splendid example of the man who must go first to prepare the way for others, in every way the best type of those brave, hardy pioneers who were claiming the continent for English-speaking people. The things he had most desired as a boy he most desired in manhood, the rough life of a new country and the struggle to overcome the perils of the wild.
VIII
John Paul Jones
The Boy of the Atlantic: 1747-1792
The summer afternoon was fair, and the waves that rolled upon the north shore of Solway Firth in the western Lowlands of Scotland were calm and even. But the tide was coming in, and inch by inch was covering the causeway that led from shore to a high rock some hundred yards away. The rock was bare of vegetation, and sheer on the landward side, but on the face toward the sea were rough jutting points that would give a climber certain footholds, and near the top smooth ledges.