Once across the Alleghanies the pathways had been pointed out by nature; beyond the Mississippi these pathways were reversed. Man had not wings like the wild bird. His pilgrimage must still be slow, his methods of locomotion clumsy. The paths no longer lay even with the currents of the streams. The adventurer into the West must, for the most part, follow the reversed pathways of the waters. Briefly, the journey of the frontiersman from Pennsylvania to the Mississippi was one of angles, the first leg running to the southwest, thence northwest, thence southwest. The pilgrimage profile from the Mississippi to the Rockies was equally angular. The line of travel did not, for the most part, run directly to the west. It angled out and upward, wherever water transportation led, and where the streams showed the way. In the story of Daniel Boone we have seen how he moved again and again, seeking ever to edge a little farther to the west than his nearest neighbors. Still another great frontiersman, Davy Crockett, beloved of the American people, gives us instance of this patient progress of the west-bound, halting, advancing, but never tiring. The life of Crockett will afford in itself a good view of the profile of the population movement, and will give as well a notion of the life and customs of those early times. Davy Crockett, backwoodsman and bear hunter, magistrate, legislator and congressman; a man who at the time of his marriage scarcely knew one letter of the alphabet from the other, yet at middle age was one of the best-known figures of the American political world, and who was even mentioned as a possibility for the presidency of the United States; a man that lived like a savage and died like a hero—one of the uncouthest gentlemen that ever breathed—such a man as this could have been the product of none but an extraordinary day. We shall do well to note the story of his life, for his is one of those colossal figures now rapidly passing into the haze of forgetfulness or the mirage of mere conjecture. In some fashion the names of Boone and Crockett are often loosely connected. They were in part contemporaneous though not coincident. Showing in common the rugged traits of the typical man of their time, they were yet distinctly unlike in many qualities. A writer who knew both men states that he considered Crockett the mental superior of Boone. After weighing carefully all the evidence obtainable—and there is much more information available concerning Crockett than in regard to Boone—one would be disposed to differ from such an opinion.