“’No mark upon the tree, nor print, nor track,
    To lead him forward, or to guide him back.’”

“contented and happy; yet, for all this, if those who knew him well had any true conception of his character, Boone was a man of ambition, and shrewdness, and energy, and fine social qualities, and extreme sagacity.  And individual instances there may have been—­though even this possibility is not sustained by the primitive histories of those times—­of men who were so far outre to the usual course of their kind, as to have afforded originals for the Sam Huggs the Nimrod Wildfires, the Ralph Stackpoles, the Tom Bruces, and the Earthquakes, which so abound in most of those fictions whose locale is the Western country.  But that naturalist who should attempt, by ever so minute a description of a pied blackbird, to give his readers a correct idea of the Gracula Ferruginea of ornithologists, would not more utterly fail of accomplishing his object, than have the authors whose creations we have named, by delineating such individual instances—­by holding up, as it were, such outre specimens of an original class—­failed to convey any thing like an accurate impression of the habits, customs, and general character of the western pioneers.

“Daniel Boone, and those who accompanied him into the wildernesses of Kentucky, had been little more than hunters in their original homes, on the frontiers of North Carolina; and, with the exception of their leader, but little more than hunters did they continue after their emigration.  The most glowing accounts of the beauty and fertility of the country northwest of the Laurel Ridge, had reached their ears from Finley and his companions; and they shouldered their guns, strapped their wallets upon their backs and wandered through the Cumberland Gap into the dense forests, and thick brakes, and beautiful plains which soon opened upon their visions, more to indulge a habit of roving, and gratify an excited curiosity, than from any other motive; and, arrived upon the head-waters of the Kentucky, they built themselves rude log cabins, and spent most of their lives in hunting and eating, and fighting marauding bands of Indians.  Of a similar character were the earliest Virginians, who penetrated these wildernesses.  The very first, indeed, who wandered from the parent State over the Laurel Ridge, down into the unknown regions on its northwest, came avowedly as hunters and trappers; and such of them as escaped the tomahawk of the Indian, with very few exceptions, remained hunters and trappers till their deaths.