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. Up to that time, the Alleghany Mountains had marked a boundary beyond which white settlers dared not go, for to the west lay great reaches of forest, uninhabited except for wild beasts and still wilder bands of roving Indians. Into this forest, Boone and his companions plunged, and after some weeks of wandering, emerged into the beautiful and fertile country of Kentucky--a country not owned by any Indian tribe, but visited only by wandering war- and hunting-parties from the nations living north of the Ohio or south of the Tennessee. The party found game in abundance, especially great droves of buffalo, and spent some months in hunting and exploring. A roving war-party stumbled upon one of Boone's companions, and forthwith killed him; a second soon met the same fate, and Boone himself had more than one narrow escape. The danger grew so great, that the other members of the party returned over the mountains, and Boone was, for a time, left alone, as he himself put it, "without company of any fellow-creature, or even a horse or dog."