9. Even among his foes; he is almost the only American praised by Lt.-Gov. Henry Hamilton of Detroit, for instance (see Royal Gazette, July 15, 1780).
10. John Finley.
11. "The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boon, formerly a hunter"; nominally written by Boon himself, in 1784, but in reality by John Filson, the first Kentucky historian,—a man who did history good service, albeit a true sample of the small hedge-school pedant. The old pioneer's own language would have been far better than that which Filson used; for the latter's composition is a travesty of Johnsonese in its most aggravated form. For Filson see Durrett's admirable "Life" in the Filson Club Publications.
12. The Nieblung Lied tells of Siegfried's feats with bear, buffalo, elk, wolf, and deer:
"Danach schlug er wieder einen Buffel und einen Elk
Vier starkes Auer nieder und einen grimmen Schelk,
So schnell trug ihn die Mahre, dasz ihm nichts entsprang;
Hinden und Hirsche wurden viele sein Fang.
……. ein Waldthier furchterlich,
Einen wilden Baren."
Siegfried's elk was our moose; and like the American frontiersmen of to-day, the old German singer calls the Wisent or Bison a buffalo—European sportsmen now committing an equally bad blunder by giving it the name of the extinct aurochs. Be it observed also that the hard fighting, hard drinking, boastful hero of Nieblung fame used a "spur hund," just as his representative of Kentucky or Tennessee used a track hound a thousand years later.
13. His name was John Stewart.
14. His remaining absolutely alone in the wilderness for such a length of time is often spoken of with wonder; but here again Boon stands merely as the backwoods type, not as an exception. To this day many hunters in the Rockies do the same. In 1880, two men whom I knew wintered to the west of the Bighorns, 150 miles from any human beings. They had salt and flour, however; but they were nine months without seeing a white face. They killed elk, buffalo, and a moose; and had a narrow escape from a small Indian war party. Last winter (1887-88) an old trapper, a friend of mine in the days when he hunted buffalo, spent five months entirely alone in the mountains north of the Flathead country.
15. Deposition of Daniel Boon, September 15, 1796. Certified copy from Deposition Book No. I, page 156, Clarke County Court, Ky. First published by Col. John Mason Brown, in "Battle of the Blue Licks," p. 40 (Frankfort, 1882). The book which these old hunters read around their camp-fire in the Indian-haunted primaeval forest a century and a quarter ago has by great good-luck been preserved, and is in Col. Durrett's library at Louisville. It is entitled the "Works of Dr. Jonathan Swift, London, MDCCLXV," and is in two small volumes. On the title-page is written "A. Neelly, 1770"
Frontiersmen are often content with the merest printed trash; but the better men among them appreciate really good literature quite as much as any other class of people. In the long winter evenings they study to good purpose books as varied as Dante, Josephus, Macaulay, Longfellow, Parton's "Life of Jackson," and the Rollo stories—to mention only volumes that have been especial favorites with my own cowboys and hunters.