the future for his endeavours to collect and put in order a few of those sibylline leaves-already the sport of heedless minds-that, when properly arranged, prophesy our national greatness. A few points of defect in style and grammar do not greatly detract from the general merits of his works.

If Daniel Boone was not a remarkable man, he at least occupied a remarkable position. Upon whatever merit his fame may be supposed to rest, it will, in the language of Governor Morehead of Kentucky, "survive when the achievements of men greatly his superiors in rank and intellect will be forgotten." His name has found an enduring place in the annals of the West; and yet what title has he to rank among the great men of Atlantic America? He was not a discoverer, like Cabot and Hudson; not an explorer, of the genius and talents of Smith; not a warrior, like Lincoln, Arnold, or "mad Anthony;" not a statesman, like Vane; a man of science, like Rittenhouse; or a religionist, like Brainerd, Eliot, or Mather. He was surrounded by men of more enlarged views, greater capacity, and more liberal policy than himself. Yet posterity has decided to honour his name. And why? Our biographer has hit upon the true secret, and placed at the head of his work the most suitable, as well as the most attractive, title that could have been put there: "Daniel Boone, the PIONEER of Kentucky." Neither a discoverer, nor explorer, nor warrior, nor settler, in the exclusive sense of either term,―he is the pioneer, an embodiment of all—a character as unique as the circumstances under which it is developed. He is interesting to the world and to posterity as the representative of that style of humanity formed by the juxtaposition of civilization and barbarism. He is the Pathfinder and Leatherstocking of American romance; the half-civilized, half-savage man, who prefers the solitary woods and plenty of game to the noise and dust of towns and the luxury of confined cities. Those who make up, in their imaginations, Indian character of the sole elements of revenge, treachery, cruelty, and blood, naturally attribute to the pioneers the same, or at least a similar nature. Those who affiliate the American Indian with our common humanity, find in his subtlety and apparent blood-thirstiness, not the man, the friend, the citizen, the devoted relative, but the warrior, educated to a peculiar system of tactics, and as true to his education as to the instincts of his nature; a system which, while it was more bloody, was perhaps less to be deprecated than civilized warfare. No groans ever arose from an Indian battle-field. The friendly tomahawk reduced all to silence, and saved the agonies of hospitals and amputations, life disabilities and lingering dissolutions. Savage warfare made few widows and orphans. It kindly

consigned mother and child to the same grave with their natural protectors, and only claimed as a rightful trophy a handful of hair torn with the bleeding scalp from the head when no longer sensible to agony. With these war habits of the aboriginal American-no worse than the war habits of civilization on the whole-our pioneers rarely assimilated. Now and then a Simon Girty might be found; but Daniel Boone was no Simon Girty. Governor Morehead says he was "unsocial;" that "he had few of the sympathies that bind men and families together, and consecrate the relations of society;" that "during two whole years he abandoned his family for no other purpose than to amuse himself in the wilderness." His biographer, on the other hand, says that, "Far from possessing a ferocious temper, or exhibiting dissatisfaction with the charms of domestic and social life, he was mild, humane, and charitable: his manners were gentle, his address conciliating, and his heart open to friendship and hospitality." Again he says: "Boone was not unfeeling, or indifferent to the domestic relation." And again, that "he was as mild, humane, and affectionate, as he was bold and fearless." stantiate his own oft-repeated declarations in regard to the humanity of Boone, our author quotes from Hall's Sketches:

"We read marvellous stories of the ferocity of Western men. The name Kentuckian is continually associated with the idea of fighting, drinking, gouging. The people of whom we are now writing do not deserve this character. They live together in great harmony, with little contention, and less litigation. The backwoodsmen are a generous and peaceable race. We have no evidence that the pioneers of Kentucky were quarrelsome or cruel. Bold and daring when opposed to an enemy, they were amiable in their intercourse with each other and with strangers, and habitually inclined to peace."

"The various tales told of the prejudices of Colonel Boone against civilization and social enjoyments are fictitious. He was not antisocial in his feelings and sympathies. He loved his fellow creatures; he loved his children; he sympathized with suffering and oppressed humanity; he rejoiced in the prosperity of others, provided they were honest, industrious, and virtuous. The indolent and vicious he abhorred and despised. Yet, unquestionably, he delighted in rural frontier life. Hunting was a ruling passion. As soon as the frosts had killed the undergrowth, and the leaves of autumn had fallen, and the weather had become rainy, with occasional light snow, Boone began to feel uneasy at home. The passion for hunting had become excited: everything was unpleasant. The house was too warm, the bed too soft, and even the good wife not the most desirable companion. The chase occupied the thoughts of the hunter by day and his dreams by night."-Pp. 149, 150.

After describing his backwoods education, his biographer accords to him other than scholastic attainments in the following language:

"No Indian could poise the rifle, find his way through the pathless forests, or search out the retreats of game, more readily than Daniel Boone. In all that related to Indian sagacity, border life, or the tactics of a skilful hunter, he excelled."—P. 15.

In the summer of 1770, he was three whole months alone in the vast wilderness, without bread, salt, or sugar; without the society of even horse or dog; a position in which he himself says, he was "never before under greater necessity of exercising philosophy or fortitude.”

As the country began to grow populous, Boone was of essential service to the settlers:

Concerning Indian signs' he was an oracle. Sometimes, with one or two trusty companions, but more frequently alone, as night closed in, he would steal away noiselessly into the woods, to reconnoitre the surrounding wilderness, and in the day time stealthily would he creep along, with his trusty rifle resting on his arm, ready for the least sign of danger-his keen, piercing eyes glancing into every thicket and canebrake, or watching intently for 'signs' of the wily enemy."-P. 69.

Several times the prisoner of the Indians, he had opportunity to measure coolness and cunning with the coolest and cunningest race on the face of the earth. Boone was as cool as he was courageous. None ought to have known so well as those who lived in those days, that Indian warfare requires the utmost vigilance and caution; and yet the fool-hardy experiment of Braddock, rushing upon ambuscade contrary to the advice of the young Virginia colonel, so often repeated in the wars with the Indian tribes, was tried to the sorrow, defeat, and shame of nearly five hundred brave Kentuckians, whose officers, particularly Major M'Gary, affected to despise as cowardly, the cool caution and wary prudence which Boone counselled and exhibited when in the neighbourhood of a treacherous foe. Our author philosophizes:

"True courage consists not in rash and brutal force, but in that command of the passions by which the judgment is enabled to act with promptitude and decision in any emergency. By such rash men as Major M'Gary, Colonel Boone was charged with want of courage, when the result proved his superior wisdom and foresight. All the testimony gives Boone credit for his sagacity and correctness in judgment before the action, and for his coolness and selfpossession in covering the retreat.”—P. 130.

We have alluded to the mercilessness with which Boone's sceptical biographer has swept away the numerous fictions incorporated in former lives, such as "shining the eyes" of Rebecca Bryan, subsequently his spouse, in which the romance turns upon the conceit of his having narrowly escaped mistaking the eyes of his dear for those of a deer! The tragic definition of Kain-tuck-ee, [a favourite pronunciation of the word in the West to this day,] “dark and

bloody ground," he exchanges for the decidedly harmless one, "head of the river!" The romantic definition of Mississippi, "father of waters," he simplifies to "great water." The tradition that Stewart, one of his hunting companions, was devoured by wolves, he rejects. "The wolves of the Western forests rarely attack and kill a man. They are bountifully supplied with game."-P. 31, note. We are glad to see preserved as authentic, and vouched by the old pioneer himself, the "tobacco anecdote," so singularly illustrative of his coolness and the fruitfulness of his inventive powers in the midst of the most threatening dangers. We condense it from the Life:

away more.

"On one occasion, about this period, 1783, four Indians came to the farm of Colonel Boone, and nearly succeeded in taking him prisoner. At a short distance from his cabin, he had raised a small patch of tobacco. As a shelter for curing it, he had built an enclosure of rails, a dozen feet in height, and covered it with cane and grass. Stalks of tobacco are usually split and strung on sticks, four feet in length. The ends of these are laid on poles, placed across the tobacco house in tiers, one above another, to the roof. Boone had fixed his temporary shelter in such a manner as to have three tiers. The tobacco on the lower tier becoming dry, he had hoisted the sticks from the lower to the second tier, and was standing on the poles that supported it while raising the sticks to the upper tier, when four stout Indians, with guns, entered the low door, and called him by name: 'Now, Boone, we got you. You no get We carry you off to Chillicothe this time. You no cheat us any more.' Boone looked down upon their upturned faces, saw their loaded guns pointed at his breast, and recognising some of his old friends, the Shawanose, who had made him prisoner in 1778, coolly and pleasantly replied: Ah! old friends-glad to see you?' told them he was willing to go with them, and only begged that they would wait where they were and watch him closely until he could finish removing his tobacco. While parleying with them, inquiring after old acquaintances, and proposing to give them his tobacco when cured, he diverted their attention from his purpose until he had collected together a number of sticks of dry tobacco, and so turned them as to fall between the poles directly in their faces. At the same instant he jumped upon them with as much of the dry tobacco as he could gather in his arms, filling their mouths and eyes with its pungent dust, and blinding and disabling them from following him-rushed out and hastened to his cabin. After retreating some fifteen or twenty yards, he looked around to see the success of his achievement. The Indians, blinded and nearly suffocated, were stretching out their hands, and feeling about in all directions, calling him by name, and cursing him for a rogue and themselves for fools."-Pp. 142, 143, 144.

It has not escaped the attention of the author of the Life of Boone, that the year 1775, one of those over which his narrative extends, is deserving of peculiar notice as the period of the commencement of the revolution; and he thus moralizes upon the point:

"It is certainly singular, that at the time of the outbreak of the revolutionary war, when it would seem that every arm able to strike a blow was specially needed for the defence of the Atlantic colonies, the colonization of the vast region on the waters of the Mississippi should have commenced. Surely, wisdom and strength beyond that of men were concerned in the enterprise at such an eventful crisis."--P. 52.

It naturally occurs to us to inquire whether Boone would have been equally distinguished had he remained at his home upon the banks of the Yadkin, until the war of independence should have given him opportunity to share the fortunes of that eventful and protracted struggle? We see no reason why, with the powers he possessed, he might not have been a Putnam or a Wayne; why he might not have given sober and discreet counsels, and gained laurels in fields where so much depended upon skill in managing retreats and saving our own, and so little upon facing an enemy vastly superior in numbers, and arrogating all the advantages of military skill and military supplies. So many men, however, of shining talents were found in this field, that it is a serious question, whether, if Boone had not gone to the wilds of Kentucky, his name would ever have found a place in the annals of American Biography. As it is, his memory will descend to posterity, associated with everything that is romantic and beautiful in wild unbroken nature, in her own undisturbed, magnificent retreats; connected with all that is daring and skilful in the life of a hunter and brave; and allied to everything that is fearful and tragic in Indian tactics, war-whoops, council-fires, gauntlets, scalpings, burnings, and blood. Boone endured no more, accomplished no more, than scores of his contemporaries and successors; but there is everything in being the first man, especially the first representative of a character destined to fill so large a space in the settlement and defence of a rising empire. His claims to consideration were acknowledged both by the legislature of Kentucky and the congress of the United States, in the confirmation of titles to Spanish lands, whereby his old age was made affluent and happy: and at his death the legislature of Missouri, then in session, honoured his memory by adjourning for a day, and wearing the usual badge of mourning for thirty days.

Boone looked upon himself as "an instrument ordained to settle the wilderness." At what period these common impressions take possession of the minds of men, whether in the outset of their career, or after success has indicated them to their fellows as remarkable men in the history of their times, it is impossible to say. Governor Morehead gives Boone credit for no early conception of this sublime idea. He thinks "he came to the wilderness, not to settle and subdue it, but to gratify an inordinate passion for adventure and discovery, to hunt deer and buffalo, to roam through the woods and admire the beauties of nature; in a word, to enjoy the lovely pastimes of a hunter's life, remote from his fellow men." Boone had a true Indian regard for his place of burial. After keeping his coffin in readiness for years, he was finally laid beside his wife on a chosen spot, "over