Читать книгу The First White Man of the West - Timothy Flint - Страница 19

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Our eastern brethren have entered heartily into the pious duty of bringing to remembrance the character and deeds of their forefathers. Shall we of the west allow the names of those great men, who won for us, from the forest, the savages, and wild beasts, our fair domain of fertile fields and beautiful rivers, to fade into oblivion? They who have hearts to admire nobility imparted by nature's great seal—fearlessness, strength, energy, sagacity, generous forgetfulness of self, the delineation of scenes of terror, and the relation of deeds of daring, will not fail to be interested in a sketch of the life of the pioneer and hunter of Kentucky, Daniel Boone. Contemplated in any light, we shall find him in his way and walk, a man as truly great as Penn, Marion, and Franklin, in theirs. True, he was not learned in the lore of books, or trained in the etiquette of cities. But he possessed a knowledge far more important in the sphere which Providence called him to fill. He felt, too, the conscious dignity of self-respect, and would have been seen as erect, firm, and unembarrassed amid the pomp and splendor of the proudest court in Christendom, as in the shade of his own wilderness. Where nature in her own ineffaceable characters has marked superiority, she looks down upon the tiny and elaborate acquirements of art, and in all positions and in all time entitles her favorites to the involuntary homage of their fellow-men. They are the selected pilots in storms, the leaders in battles, and the pioneers in the colonization of new countries.

Such a man was Daniel Boone, and wonderfully was he endowed by Providence for the part which he was called to act. Far be it from us to undervalue the advantages of education: It can do every thing but assume the prerogative of Providence. God has reserved for himself the attribute of creating. Distinguished excellence has never been attained, unless where nature and education, native endowment and circumstances, have concurred. This wonderful man received his commission for his achievements and his peculiar walk from the sign manual of nature. He was formed to be a woodsman, and the adventurous precursor in the first settlement of Kentucky. His home was in the woods, where others were bewildered and lost. It is a mysterious spectacle to see a man possessed of such an astonishing power of being perfectly familiar with his route and his resources in the depths of the untrodden wilderness, where others could as little divine their way, and what was to be done, as mariners on mid-ocean, without chart or compass, sun, moon, or stars. But that nature has bestowed these endowments upon some men and denied them to others, is as certain as that she has given to some animals instincts of one kind, fitting them for peculiar modes of life, which are denied to others, perhaps as strangely endowed in another way.

The following pages aim to present a faithful picture of this singular man, in his wanderings, captivities, and escapes. If the effort be successful, we have no fear that the attention of the reader will wander. There is a charm in such recitals, which lays its spell upon all. The grave and gay, the simple and the learned, the young and gray-haired alike yield to its influence.

We wish to present him in his strong incipient manifestations of the development of his peculiar character in boyhood. We then see him on foot and alone, with no companion but his dog, and no friend but his rifle, making his way over trackless and unnamed mountains, and immeasurable forests, until he explores the flowering wilderness of Kentucky. Already familiar, by his own peculiar intuition, with the Indian character, we see him casting his keen and searching glance around, as the ancient woods rung with the first strokes of his axe, and pausing from time to time to see if the echoes have startled the red men, or the wild beasts from their lair. We trace him through all the succeeding explorations of the Bloody Ground, and of Tennessee, until so many immigrants have followed in his steps, that he finds his privacy too strongly pressed upon; until he finds the buts and bounds of legal tenures restraining his free thoughts, and impelling him to the distant and unsettled shores of the Missouri, to seek range and solitude anew. We see him there, his eyes beginning to grow dim with the influence of seventy winters—as he can no longer take the unerring aim of his rifle—casting wistful looks in the direction of the Rocky Mountains and the western sea; and sadly reminded that man has but one short life, in which to wander.

No book can be imagined more interesting than would have been the personal narrative of such a man, written by himself. What a new pattern of the heart he might have presented! But, unfortunately, he does not seem to have dreamed of the chance that his adventures would go down to posterity in the form of recorded biography. We suspect that he rather eschewed books, parchment deeds, and clerkly contrivances, as forms of evil; and held the dead letter of little consequence. His associates were as little likely to preserve any records, but those of memory, of the daily incidents and exploits, which indicate character and assume high interest, when they relate to a person like the subject of this narrative. These hunters, unerring in their aim to prostrate the buffalo on his plain, or to bring down the geese and swans from the clouds, thought little of any other use of the gray goose quill, than its market value.

Had it been otherwise, and had these men themselves furnished the materials of this narrative, we have no fear that it would go down to futurity, a more enduring monument to these pioneers and hunters, than the granite columns reared by our eastern brethren, amidst assembled thousands, with magnificent array, and oratory, and songs, to the memory of their forefathers. Ours would be the record of human nature speaking to human nature in simplicity and truth, in a language always impressive, and always understood. Their pictures of their own felt sufficiency to themselves, under the pressure of exposure and want; of danger, wounds, and captivity; of reciprocal kindness, warm from the heart; of noble forgetfulness of self, unshrinking firmness, calm endurance, and reckless bravery, would be sure to move in the hearts of their readers strings which never fail to vibrate to the touch.

But these inestimable data are wanting. Our materials are comparatively few; and we have been often obliged to balance between doubtful authorities, notwithstanding the most rigorous scrutiny of newspapers and pamphlets, whose yellow and dingy pages gave out a cloud of dust at every movement, and the equally rigid examination of clean modern books and periodicals.