There are many good books on American big game, but, rather curiously, they are for the most part modern. Until within the present generation Americans only hunted big game if they were frontier settlers, professional trappers, Southern planters, army officers, or explorers. The people of the cities of the old States were bred in the pleasing faith that anything unconcerned with business was both a waste of time and presumably immoral. Those who travelled went to Europe instead of to the Rocky Mountains. Throughout the pioneer stages of American history, big game hunting was not merely a pleasure, but a business, and often a very important and in fact vital business. At different times many of the men who rose to great distinction in our after history took part in it as such: men like Andrew Jackson and Sam Houston, for instance. Moreover, aside from these pioneers who afterward won distinction purely as statesmen or soldiers, there were other members of the class of professional hunters—men who never became eminent in the complex life of the old civilized regions, who always remained hunters, and gloried in the title—who, nevertheless, through and because of their life in the wilderness, rose to national fame and left their mark on our history. The three most famous men of this class were Daniel Boone, David Crockett, and Kit Carson, who were renowned in every quarter of the Union for their skill as game-killers, Indian-fighters, and wilderness explorers, and whose deeds are still stock themes in the floating legendary lore of the border. They stand for all time as types of the pioneer settlers who won our land; the bridge-builders, the road-makers the forest-fellers, the explorers, the land-tillers, the mighty men of their hands, who laid the foundations of this great commonwealth.