"Both of these conceptions of the character of the Pioneer Fathers are, to a certain extent, correct as regards _individuals_ among them; but the pictures which have often been given us, even when held up beside such _individuals_, will prove to be exaggerations in more respects than one. Daniel Boone is an individual instance of a man plunging into the depths of an unknown wilderness, shunning rather than seeking contact with his kind, his gun and trap the only companions of his solitude, and wandering about thus for months," "'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.