On one occasion, his daughter and two other girls were carried off by
Indians, and Boone, raising a small company, followed the trail of the
fugitives without resting for two days and a night; then came to where
the Indians had killed a buffalo calf and were camped around it, never
dreaming of danger. So Boone and his men crept up on them, shot down the
Indians and rescued the girls. On still another occasion, he was pursued
by Indians, who used a tracking dog to follow his trail. Boone turned,
shot the dog, and then made good his escape. Such incidents might be
related by the dozen. No wonder Boone was considered one of the most
valuable men on the frontier, and was a very tower of strength in
defending it against the Indians.
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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