Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustration. See 46227-h.htm or 46227-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/46227/46227-h/46227-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/46227/46227-h.zip) Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/lifetimesofcolda00elli [Illustration: DANIEL BOONE.] THE LIFE AND TIMES OF COL. DANIEL BOONE, HUNTER, SOLDIER, AND PIONEER. With Sketches of Simon Kenton, Lewis Wetzel, and Other Leaders in the Settlement of the West. "_Of all men Who passes for in life and death most lucky, Of the great names which in our faces stare, Is Daniel Boone, backwoodsman of Kentucky._ _Crime came not near him--she is not the child Of solitude. Health shrank not from him, for Her home is in the rarely-trodden wild._" by EDWARD S. ELLIS, Author of "The Life of Colonel David Crockett," "Ned in the Block-House," "Ned in the Woods," etc. [Illustration] Philadelphia: Porter & Coates. Copyright, 1884, By Porter & Coates. INTRODUCTION. Daniel Boone was the ideal of the American pioneer--brave, cool, self-reliant, a dead shot with his rifle, a consummate master of woodcraft, with sturdy frame, hopeful at all times, and never discouraged by disasters which caused many a weaker spirit to faint by the way. All that the pen of romance depicts in the life of one whose lot is cast in the Western forests, marked the career of Boone. In the lonely solitudes he encountered the wild animal and the fiercer wild man; and he stood on the bastions at Boonesborough through the flaming sun or the solemn hours of night, exchanging shots with the treacherous Shawanoe, when every bullet fired was meant to extinguish a human life; he was captured by Indians three times, his companions were shot down at his side, his daughter was carried away by savages and quickly rescued by himself and a few intrepid comrades, his oldest boy was shot dead before he set foot in Kentucky, and another was killed while bravely fighting at Blue Licks; the border town named after him was assaulted and besieged by overwhelming bodies of British and Indians, his brother was slain and he himself underwent all manner of hardship and suffering. Yet through it all, he preserved his honest simplicity, his unswerving integrity, his prudence and self-possession, and his unfaltering faith in himself, in the future of his country, and in God. He lived through this crucial period to see all his dreams realized, and Kentucky one of the brightest stars in the grand constellation of the Union.