PREFACE

In his old age, though in no spirit of boastfulness, Daniel Boone declared that "the history of the western country has been my history." Undoubtedly, of all the men who took part in the winning of the early West, none played so conspicuous a role as Boone, or a role of such extensive usefulness. His services to his country began in the bitter struggle of the French and Indian War, that colossal conflict which definitely eliminated France as a factor in New World colonization. It was he, more than any other man, who made England's colonists acquainted with the beauty and fertility of the vast and well-nigh unoccupied region between the Alle-ghanies and the Mississippi. To his bold pioneering the United States owes one of its greatest highways of empire     the famous Wilderness Road, along which so many thousands of home-seekers passed in the first peopling of the West. Throughout the stormy years of the Revolution, he was preeminent in the defence of the infant settlements which he had

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