scaped.
Boone himself brought the furs to St. Louis, and
went back with a bag full of money and a boat full of
emigrants.
Farther and farther into his district emigrants began setting up their four-post sassafras bedsteads and scouring their pewter platters. Women walked thirty miles to hear the first piano that came into the Boone settlement.
In the last year of the war Boone's favourite grandson was killed at Charette.
"The history of the settlement of the western country is my history," said the old Colonel in his grief. "Two darling sons, a grandson, and a brother have I lost by savage hands, besides valuable horses and abundance of cattle. Many sleepless nights have I spent, separated from the society of men, an instrument ordained of God to settle the wilderness."
"You must paint Daniel Boone," said Governor Clark to Chester Harding, a young American artist fresh from Paris in the summer of 1819. The Governor was Harding's first sitter. He invited the Indians into his studio.
"Ugh! ugh! ugh!" grunted the Osage chiefs, putting their noses close and rubbing their fingers across the Governor's portrait.
In June Harding set out up the Missouri to paint Boone. In an old blockhouse of the War of 1812, he found him lying on a bunk, roasting a strip of venison wound around his ramrod, turning it before the fire.
"What? Paint my pictur'?"
"Yes, on canvas. Make a portrait, you know."
The old man consented. With amazement the frontiersman saw the picture grow,—still more amazed, his grandchildren watched the likeness of "granddad" growing on the canvas.
Ruddy and fair, with silvered locks, always humming a tune, he sat in his buckskin hunting-shirt trimmed with otter's fur, and the knife in his belt he had carried on his first expedition to Kentucky.
Every day now, in his leisure hours, the old pioneer was busily scraping with a piece of glass. "
