Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly vol. 1.djvu/370

348 greater number of them were pioneers by nature and occupation, as their fathers had been before them. In childhood the story of their ancestors' migrations from the east to the west, and then to the newer west was their handbook of history. Homer or Virgil, of whom few of them had ever heard, could have rehearsed no epic half so thrilling to their ears as the narratives of daring adventure and hairbreadth escapes, which, half true and half false, ever form the thread of frontier history. They knew nothing of Hector and Achilles, but they knew of Daniel Boone, who, Lord Byron said, 'was happiest among mortals anywhere,' whom civilization drove out of Pennsylvania by destroying the red deer and black bear, and who, after some years of solid comfort in his log cabin amid the wilds of Kentucky, was again pursued and overtaken by the same relentless enemy and compelled to retire into the Missouri wilderness, beyond the Mississippi; and who, even in that distant retreat, was soon forced to say to his friend and companion, according to current anecdote, 'I was compelled to leave Kentucky because people came and settled so close around me I had no room to breathe. I thought when I came out here I should be allowed to live in peace; but this is all over now. A man has taken up a farm right over there, within twenty-five miles of my door.' Of Boone. and such as Boone, most of them who founded the commonwealth of Oregon, knew much more than of the great names of literature, statesmanship, or arms, and their minds dwelt fondly on the exploits of the frontiersman, whether in the contests with the savages or the chase. More familiar with the log cab'in than with the palace, with the rifle than with the spindle and loom, with saddle than with the railway, they felt cramped when the progress of empire in its westward way put