The end, however, was sad enough.  When Kentucky was admitted to the Union, Boone’s titles to the land he had laid out for himself were declared to be defective; it was all taken from him, and he moved first to Ohio, and then to Missouri, where he spent his last years.  He was hale and hearty almost to the end, leading a hunting-party to the mouth of the Kansas when he was eighty-two years old, and completely tiring out its younger members.  Nearly at the end of his life, Congress recognized his services to his country by granting him eight hundred and fifty acres of land in Missouri, and on this grant, the last years of his life were spent.  Chester Harding visited him just before the end and painted a portrait of him which remains the best delineation of the redoubtable old pioneer, whose striking face tells of the resolute will, and unshrinking courage which made the settlement of Kentucky possible.

Scarcely less prominent than Boone on the Kentucky frontier, and with a career in many ways even more adventurous, was Simon Kenton.  Born in Virginia in 1755, he had grown to young manhood, rough and uncultivated, and with little evidence of having been raised in a civilized community.  At the age of sixteen, he had a desperate affray with a neighbor named William Veach, during which he caught Veach around the body, whirled him into the air, and dashed him to the ground with such violence, that he thought he had broken his neck.  Not daring to return home or to linger in the neighborhood, for fear his crime would be discovered and he himself arrested and hanged, he plunged into the wilderness and made his way westward over the mountains, changing his name to Simon Butler.

The two or three years following were spent by him in roaming along the Ohio valley, sometimes alone, sometimes with two or three companions, and always surrounded by danger.  On one occasion, his camp was surprised by Indians, and he and his companion were forced to flee for their lives without weapons of any kind, and with no clothing but their shirts.  For six days and nights, they wandered without fire or food, suffering from the cold, for it was the dead of winter, and so torn and lacerated that on the last two days they covered only six miles, most of it on hands and knees.  Staggering and crawling forward, they came out at last upon the Ohio river, and by good fortune fell in with a hunting-party and were saved.

Kenton’s life was full of just such incidents.  Daniel Boone found in him a most valuable ally, incapable of fear and with a knowledge of woodcraft surpassed only by Boone himself.  Kenton was inside Boone’s fort whenever it was in danger, and on one occasion saved Boone’s life.  Let us tell the story, for it is typical of the border warfare in which both Boone and Kenton were so expert.