Читать книгу Daniel Boone - Reuben Gold Thwaites - Страница 3

Table of Contents

Poets, historians, and orators have for a hundred years sung the praises of Daniel Boone as the typical backwoodsman of the trans-Alleghany region. Despite popular belief, he was not really the founder of Kentucky. Other explorers and hunters had been there long before him; he himself was piloted through Cumberland Gap by John Finley; and his was not even the first permanent settlement in Kentucky, for Harrodsburg preceded it by nearly a year; his services in defense of the West, during nearly a half century of border warfare, were not comparable to those of George Rogers Clark or Benjamin Logan; as a commonwealth builder he was surpassed by several. Nevertheless, Boone's picturesque career possesses a romantic and even pathetic interest that can never fail to charm the student of history. He was great as a hunter, explorer, surveyor, and land-pilot—probably he found few equals as a rifleman; no man on the border knew Indians more thoroughly or fought them more skilfully than he; his life was filled to the brim with perilous adventures. He was not a man of affairs, he did not understand the art of money-getting, and he lost his lands because, although a surveyor, he was careless of legal forms of entry. He fled before the advance of the civilization which he had ushered in: from Pennsylvania, wandering with his parents to North Carolina in search of broader lands; thence into Kentucky because the Carolina borders were crowded; then to the Kanawha Valley, for the reason that Kentucky was being settled too fast to suit his fancy; lastly to far-off Missouri, in order, as he said, to get "elbow room." Experiences similar to his have made misanthropes of many another man—like Clark, for instance; but the temperament of this honest, silent, nature-loving man only mellowed with age; his closing years were radiant with the sunshine of serene content and the dimly appreciated consciousness of world-wide fame; and he died full of years, in heart a simple hunter to the last—although he had also served with credit as magistrate, soldier, and legislator. At his death the Constitutional Convention of Missouri went into mourning for twenty days, and the State of Kentucky claimed his bones, and has erected over them a suitable monument.

There have been published many lives of Boone, but none of them in recent years. Had the late Dr. Lyman Copeland Draper, of Wisconsin, ever written the huge biography for which he gathered materials throughout a lifetime of laborious collection, those volumes—there were to be several—would doubtless have uttered the last possible word concerning the famous Kentucky pioneer. Draper's manuscript, however, never advanced beyond a few chapters; but the raw materials which he gathered for this work, and for many others of like character, are now in the library of the Wisconsin State Historical Society, available to all scholars. From this almost inexhaustible treasure-house the present writer has obtained the bulk of his information, and has had the advantage of being able to consult numerous critical notes made by his dear and learned friend. A book so small as this, concerning a character every phase of whose career was replete with thrilling incident, would doubtless not have won the approbation of Dr. Draper, whose unaccomplished biographical plans were all drawn upon a large scale; but we are living in a busy age, and life is brief—condensation is the necessary order of the day. It will always be a source of regret that Draper's projected literary monument to Boone was not completed for the press, although its bulk would have been forbidding to any but specialists, who would have sought its pages as a cyclopedia of Western border history.

Through the courtesy both of Colonel Reuben T. Durrett, of Louisville, President of the Filson Club, and of Mrs. Ranck, we are permitted to include among our illustrations reproductions of some of the plates in the late George W. Ranck's stately monograph upon Boonesborough. Aid in tracing original portraits of Boone has been received from Mrs. Jennie C. Morton and General Fayette Hewitt, of Frankfort; Miss Marjory Dawson and Mr. W. G. Lackey, of St. Louis; Mr. William H. King, of Winnetka, Ill.; and Mr. J. Marx Etting, of Philadelphia.

R. G. T.

Madison, Wis., 1902.