Pennsylvania to watch the Indians and give notice of any threatened inroad.

In this corps, while yet a stripling, Mike acquired a reputa tion for boldness and cunning far beyond his companions. A thousand legends illustrate the fearlessness of his character. There was one which he told himself with much pride, and which made an indelible impression on my boyish memory. He had been out on the hills of Mahoning, when, to use his own words, he "saw signs of Indians about." He had discovered the recent print of the moccason in the grass; and found drops of the fresh blood of a deer on the green bush. He became cautious, skulked for some time in the deepest thickets of hazel and brier, and for several days did not discharge his rifle. He subsisted patiently on parched corn and jerk, which he had dried on his first coming into the woods. He gave no alarm to the settlements, because he discovered, with perfect certainty, that the enemy consisted of a small hunting party who were receding from the Alleghany.

As he was creeping along one morning with the stealthy tread of a cat, his eye fell on a beautiful buck, browsing on the edge of a barren spot three hundred yards distant. The temptation was too strong for the woodsman, and he resolved to have a shot, at all hazards. Repriming his gun, and picking his flint, he made his approaches in the usual noiseless manner, and at the moment he reached the spot from which he meant to take his aim, he observed a large savage, intent upon the same object, and advancing in a direction a little different from his own. Mike shrank behind a tree, with the quickness of thought, and keeping his eye fixed on the hunter, waited the result with patience. In a few moments, the Indian halted within fifty paces, and levelled his piece at the deer. In the mean while, Mike presented his rifle at the body of the savage, and at the moment that the smoke issued from the gun of the latter, the bullet of Fink passed through the red man's breast. He uttered a yell, and fell dead at the same instant with the deer. Mike reloaded his rifle, and remained in his covert for some minutes, to ascertain whether

there were more enemies at hand. He then stepped up to the prostrate savage, and satisfying himself that life was extinguished, turned his attention to the buck, and took from the carcass those pieces suited to the process of jerking.

In the mean time, the country was filling up with a white population; and in a few years, the red men, with the exception of a few fractions of tribes, gradually receded to the lakes, and beyond the Mississippi. The corps of scouts was abolished, after having acquired habits which unfitted them for the pursuits of civilized society. Some incorporated themselves with the Indians; and others, from a strong attachment to their erratic mode of life, joined the boatmen, then just becoming a distinct class. Among these was our hero, Mike Fink, whose talents were soon developed; and for many years he was as celebrated on the rivers of the west as he had been in the woods.

Some years after the period at which I have dated my visit to Cincinnati, business called me to New Orleans. On board the steamboat on which I had embarked at Louisville, I recognized in the pilot one of those men who had formerly been a patroon, or keel-boat captain. I entered into conversation with him on the subject of his former associates. "They are scattered in all directions," said he. "A few who had capacity have become pilots of steamboats. Many have joined the trading parties that cross the Rocky Mountains, and a few have settled down as farmers."

"What has become," I asked, "of my old acquaintance, Mike Fink?"

"Mike was killed at last," replied the pilot. "He had refused several good offers on steamboats. He said he could not bear the hissing of steam, and he wanted room to throw his pole. He went to the Missouri, and about a year since was shooting the tin cup when he had been drinking too much. He elevated too low, and shot his companion through the head. A friend of the deceased, suspecting foul play, shot Mike through the heart before he had time to reload his rifle."

With Mike Fink expired the spirit of the boatmen.

XLIX. PASSAGES IN THE LIFE OF DANIEL BOONE

[This sketch of Daniel Boone is mainly abridged from his Life by J. M. PECK, Con tained in the second series of SPARKS'S American Biography.]

DANIEL BOONE, the pioneer of Kentucky, was born in Bucks county, Pennsylvania, in the month of February, 1735. He was the sixth of a family of eleven children. His father, Squire Boone, was a native of England. While Daniel was yet a child, his father removed to Berks county, Pennsylvania, at that time a frontier settlement, abounding with game and exposed to Indian assaults. Here young Boone acquired those sylvan tastes which shaped the fashion of his future years. But the woodland solitudes in which he was reared were not entirely deprived of the light of knowledge. He received the rudiments of learning in one of those little log school houses which always follow in the train of our hardy pioneers of the wilderness.

When Daniel was about eighteen, his father removed his family to North Carolina, and settled on the banks of the Yadkin, a mountain stream in the north-west part of the state. Here Daniel married, and lived for many years, occupying himself with farming and hunting, in which latter employment he acquired great skill. He was an unerring marksman, capable of great bodily exertion, cool in danger, and possessed of all the knowledge which a life in the wilderness could teach.

About the year 1767, rumors came to the region where Boone lived, of a country west of the mountains, rich beyond all parallel in natural advantages-blessed with a deep, fertile soil, watered by fair streams, and abounding with game. This was the State of Kentucky, at that time a pathless wilderness, into which the foot of a white man had hardly entered. The imagination of Boone, who had become dissatisfied with the state of things around him, was fired by these accounts, and he determined to visit this terrestrial paradise. He accordingly left his home May 1, 1769, at the head of a party of five persons,

and turned his face towards the setting sun. After a toil. some march of about five weeks, the party, after surmounting a mountain range, saw spreading out before them a rich and beautiful valley, watered by the Red River, covered with stately forests, through which the deer and buffalo roamed in great numbers.

Here the adventurers rested, and passed their time in successful hunting, without any accident or molestation, till the month of December. But on the 22d day of this month, Boone and one of his companions, Stewart, were taken captives by a band of Indians, who rushed suddenly out of a canebrake upon them. Boone knew the Indian character too well to manifest either fear or anxiety to escape. He preserved his coolness and self-possession; and this caused his savage captors gradually to relax their vigilance. On the seventh night, when all were asleep, Boone gently awaked Stewart; and the two, securing their guns and a few trifling articles, left the Indians in a profound slumber, and stole away unobserved. Great caution was necessary not to awake the savages; for, had the attempt of the hunters been discovered, they would have been sacrificed on the spot. They made their way back to their old hunting camp, but, to their surprise and distress, found it plundered and deserted. Of their three companions nothing was ever after heard: they were probably slain by the Indians. Boone and Stewart continued their hunter life, and in the course of the winter were joined by Squire Boone, a brother of Daniel, and another person, both from North Carolina.

Not long after, Daniel Boone and Stewart were attacked by another band of savages, and the latter was killed. Squire Boone's companion also disappeared afterwards, and the two brothers were left alone. They passed the winter in hunting; and on the 1st of May, 1770, Squire Boone took leave of his brother and went back to North Carolina for supplies. From this time till July 27, when his brother returned, Daniel was left entirely alone. The two brothers resumed their former

way of life, and continued in it till the spring of 1771; when they went back to their families in North Carolina. Daniel Boone had been absent about two years, during which time he had tasted neither bread nor salt. He had determined to remove his family to Kentucky; but more than two years passed by before he could sell his farm and make the necessary arrangements for such a step.

On the 25th of September, 1773, the two brothers bade adieu to their friends and neighbors on the Yadkin, and, with their families, took up their march to the wilderness of Kentucky. At Powell's valley, through which their route lay, they were joined by five families and forty men, the latter well armed. They went on full of hope and spirit; but when near the Cumberland Gap, they were attacked by a band of Indians, and six of their party were killed; among them the eldest son of Daniel Boone, a youth of about seventeen. By this event the party were discouraged, and gave up the further prosecution of the enterprise for the present; returning to some settlements in the south-west of Virginia. Boone and his brother, with a few others, would have gone on; but a majority being against them, they felt bound to submit.

The next year, at the request of the governor of Virginia, Boone went to Kentucky to bring back a company of surveyors—a task which he successfully accomplished. He then took the lead of a company of settlers, by whom the fort of Boonesborough was built, in the spring of 1775, on the bank of the Kentucky River. In the summer of that year he returned to Virginia, and succeeded in removing his family to Boonesborough. His wife and daughters were the first white women that ever stood on the banks of the Kentucky River. Soon after, they were joined by three families more; and the opening of the ensuing spring brought other emigrants.

Nothing occurred beyond the usual course of pioneer life till the 14th day of July, 1776. On that day, Betsey Callaway, her sister Frances, and Jemima Boone, a daughter of Captain Boone, (such was the title he now bore,) carelessly crossed the