Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature

It is not yet fifty years since an Eastern traveler who had ventured as far as Kentucky brought back this tale of An Empty the early solitude there as it had Continent. been fifty years before that time. The first explorer, Daniel Boone, he told us, who died in 1820, used to travel absolutely alone for weeks together in the Kentucky forests with only his rifle for company. He could not take even a dog for fear of the Indians; and once he had to travel a hundred miles on a single meal. There were springs in the Licking Valley where twenty thousand buffaloes came and went, and whole Indian tribes followed their tracks. The Indians never once even saw Boone, for they did not suspect that any white man could be there; and he avoided their tracks and never saw them. After a while, there was another white explorer, Simon Kenton, whose coming into that region was unknown to Boone. They had approached the valley from opposite directions; each recognized by signs that there was a human being somewhere near, but. out of sight. Then began long hours of noiseless manceuvres on each side, spying, evading, listening, concealing, climbing, burrowing, each trying