That the Indians owned the country there can be no question; but civilization has never stopped to consider the claims of savage peoples, and it did not in this case.  Might made right; besides, the Indians, consisting of scattered, semi-nomadic tribes, seemed to have no use for the great territory they occupied.  Indeed, they themselves, at first, welcomed the white-skinned newcomers; but they soon grew jealous of encroachments which never ceased, and at last fought step by step for their country.  They were driven back, defeated, exterminated.  But in the early years, no settlement was safe, and every man was, in a sense, a pioneer.

The French, in their eagerness for empire, allied themselves with the Indians, supplied them with arms, and offered a bounty for scalps; and for nearly three quarters of a century, a bitter and bloody contest was waged, which ended only with the expulsion of the French from the continent.  Deprived of their ally, the Indians retreated beyond the mountains, where their war parties gathered to drive back the white invader.  Those years on the frontier developed a race of men accustomed to danger and ready for any chance; and towering head and shoulders above them all stands the mighty figure of Daniel Boone, the most famous of American pioneers.  About him cluster legends and tales innumerable, some true, many false; but one thing is certain; for boldness, cunning and knowledge of woodcraft and Indian warfare he had no equal.

Born in Pennsylvania, but moving at an early age to the little frontier settlement of Holman’s Ford, in North Carolina, the boy had barely enough schooling to enable him to read and write.  His real books were the woods, and he studied them until they held no secrets from him.  He was a born hunter, a lover of the wild life of the forest, impatient of civilization, and truly at home only in the wilderness.  The cry of the panther, the war-whoop of the Indian, were music to him; that was his nature—­to love adventure, to court danger, to welcome the thrill of the pulse which peril brings.  Understand him:  he was not the man to incur foolish risks; but he incurred necessary ones without a second thought.  He was near death no doubt a hundred times, yet lived to die in his bed.  But he was at his best, he really lived, only when the wilderness held him and when his life depended upon his care and watchfulness.

[Illustration:  Boone]

In 1755, Boone married and built a log cabin far up the Yadkin, where he had no neighbors; but as the years passed, other families settled near; the smoke of other cabins rose above the woods; his fields were bounded by rude fences; he could scarcely stir out without encountering some neighbor.  It was too crowded for Daniel Boone; he felt the same sensation that your nature lover feels to-day in the midst of a teeming city—­a sense of suffocation and disgust—­and he finally determined to move still further westward, and to cross the mountains into Kentucky, concerning whose richness many stories had reached his ears.  He persuaded six men to accompany him, and on the first day of May, 1769, set forth on the perilous journey which was to mark the beginning of his life-work.