[Illustration:  BOONE’S FORT, AT BOONESBORO’, KENTUCKY.]

154.  Boone’s old age; he moves to Missouri; he begs for a piece of land; his grave.—­Boone lived to be a very old man.  He had owned a good deal of land in the west, but he had lost possession of it.  When Kentucky began to fill up with people and the game was killed off, Boone moved across the Mississippi into Missouri.  He said that he went because he wanted “more elbow room” and a chance to hunt buffalo again.

He now begged the state of Kentucky to give him a small piece of land, where, as he said, he could “lay his bones.”  The people of that state generously helped him to get nearly a thousand acres; but he appears to have soon lost possession of it.  If he actually did lose it, then this brave old hunter, who had opened up the way for such a multitude of emigrants to get farms at the west, died without owning a piece of ground big enough for a grave.  He is buried in Frankfort, Kentucky, within sight of the river on which he built his fort at Boonesboro’.

155.  Summary.—­Daniel Boone, a famous hunter from North Carolina, opened up a road through the forest, from the mountains of Eastern Tennessee to the Kentucky River.  It was called the “Wilderness Road,” and over it thousands of emigrants went into Kentucky to settle.  Boone, with others, built the fort at Boonesboro’, Kentucky, and went there to live.  That fort protected the settlers against the Indians, and so helped that part of the country to grow until it became the state of Kentucky.

Tell about Daniel Boone.  How did he help his father?  Where did he go when he became a man?  What did he cut on a beech tree?  Where did he go after that?  What is said of the Indians in Kentucky?  Tell about Indian tricks.  Tell about the two owls.  Tell about the Wilderness Road.  What is said of the fort at Boonesboro’?  Tell how Boone’s daughter and the other girls were stolen by the Indians.  What happened next?  Tell how Boone was captured by the Indians and how they adopted him.  Tell the story of the tobacco dust.  What did Boone do when he became old?  What did Kentucky get for him?  Where is he buried?

GENERAL JAMES ROBERTSON AND GOVERNOR JOHN SEVIER[1] (1742-1814; 1745-1815).

156.  Who James Robertson was; Governor Tryon; the battle of Alamance.[2]—­When Daniel Boone first went to Kentucky (1769) he had a friend named James Robertson, in North Carolina[3] who was, like himself, a mighty hunter.  The British governor of North Carolina at that time was William Tryon.  He lived in a palace built with money which he had forced the people to give him.  They hated him so for his greed and cruelty that they nicknamed him the “Great Wolf of North Carolina.”

At last many of the settlers vowed that they would not give the governor another penny.  When he sent tax-collectors to get money, they drove them back, and they flogged one of the governor’s friends with a rawhide till he had to run for his life.