The Winning of the West, Volume 1: From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776Roosevelt, Theodore
History
The Winning of the West, Volume 1: From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776
Roosevelt, Theodore
Northwest, Old -- History; United States -- Territorial expansion; West (U.S.) -- History
Siegfried's elk was our moose; and like the American frontiersmen of
to-day, the old German singer calls the Wisent or Bison a
buffalo--European sportsmen now committing an equally bad blunder by
giving it the name of the extinct aurochs. Be it observed also that the
hard fighting, hard drinking, boastful hero of Nieblung fame used a
"spur hund," just as his representative of Kentucky or Tennessee used a
track hound a thousand years later.
13. His name was John Stewart.
14. His remaining absolutely alone in the wilderness for such a length
of time is often spoken of with wonder; but here again Boon stands
merely as the backwoods type, not as an exception. To this day many
hunters in the Rockies do the same. In 1880, two men whom I knew
wintered to the west of the Bighorns, 150 miles from any human beings.
They had salt and flour, however; but they were nine months without
seeing a white face. They killed elk, buffalo, and a moose; and had a
narrow escape from a small Indian war party. Last winter (1887-88) an
old trapper, a friend of mine in the days when he hunted buffalo, spent
five months entirely alone in the mountains north of the Flathead
country.
15. Deposition of Daniel Boon, September 15, 1796. Certified copy from
Deposition Book No. I, page 156, Clarke County Court, Ky. First
published by Col. John Mason Brown, in "Battle of the Blue Licks," p. 40
(Frankfort, 1882). The book which these old hunters read around their
camp-fire in the Indian-haunted primaeval forest a century and a quarter
ago has by great good-luck been preserved, and is in Col. Durrett's
library at Louisville. It is entitled the "Works of Dr. Jonathan Swift,
London, MDCCLXV," and is in two small volumes. On the title-page is
written "A. Neelly, 1770"
Frontiersmen are often content with the merest printed trash; but the
better men among them appreciate really good literature quite as much as
any other class of people. In the long winter evenings they study to
good purpose books as varied as Dante, Josephus, Macaulay, Longfellow,
Parton's "Life of Jackson," and the Rollo stories--to mention only
volumes that have been especial favorites with my own cowboys and
hunters.
16. MS. diary of Benj. Hawkins, 1796. Preserved in Nash. Historical Soc.
In 1796 buffalo were scarce; but some fresh signs of them were still
seen at licks.
17. Haywood, p. 75, etc. It is a waste of time to quarrel over who first
discovered a particular tract of this wilderness. A great many hunters
traversed different parts at different times, from 1760 on, each
practically exploring on his own account. We do not know the names of
most of them; those we do know are only worth preserving in county
histories and the like; the credit belongs to the race, not the
individual.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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