TOEFL Practice Test - 10
Hero Tales from American History
By: Henry Cabot Lodge and Theodore Roosevelt
reference: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1864/1864-h/1864-h.htm
Daniel Boone will always occupy a unique place in [American]
history as the archetype of the hunter and wilderness wanderer. He was a
true pioneer, and stood at the head of that class of Indian-fighters, game-
hunters, forest-fellers, and backwoods farmers who, generation after
5 generation, pushed westward the border of civilization from the Alleghanies
to the Pacific. As he himself said, he was "an instrument ordained of God to
settle the wilderness." Born in Pennsylvania, he drifted south into western
North Carolina, and settled on what was then the extreme frontier. There
he married, built a log cabin, and hunted, chopped trees, and tilled the
10 ground like any other frontiersman. The Alleghany Mountains still marked a
boundary beyond which the settlers dared not go; for west of them lay
immense reaches of frowning forest, uninhabited save by bands of warlike
Indians. Occasionally some venturesome hunter or trapper penetrated this
immense wilderness, and returned with strange stories of what he had seen
15 and done.
In 1769 Boone, excited by these vague and wondrous tales,
determined himself to cross the mountains and find out what manner of
land it was that lay beyond. With a few chosen companions he set out,
making his own trail through the gloomy forest. After weeks of wandering,
20 he at last emerged into the beautiful and fertile country of Kentucky, for
which, in after years, the red men and the white strove with such obstinate
fury that it grew to be called "the dark and bloody ground." But when
Boone first saw it, it was a fair and smiling land of groves and glades and
running waters, where the open forest grew tall and beautiful, and where
25 innumerable herds of game grazed, roaming ceaselessly to and fro along
the trails they had trodden during countless generations. Kentucky was not
owned by any Indian tribe, and was visited only by wandering war-parties
and hunting-parties who came from among the savage nations living north
of the Ohio or south of the Tennessee.
30 A roving war-party stumbled upon one of Boone's companions and
killed him, and the others then left Boone and journeyed home; but his
brother came out to join him, and the two spent the winter together. Self-
reliant, fearless, and the frowning defiles of Cumberland Gap, they were
attacked by Indians, and driven back-two of Boone's own sons being slain.
35 In 1775, however, he made another attempt; and this attempt was
successful. The Indians attacked the newcomers; but by this time the
parties of would-be settlers were sufficiently numerous to hold their own.
They beat back the Indians, and built rough little hamlets, surrounded by
log stockades, at Boonesborough and Harrodsburg; and the permanent
40 settlement of Kentucky had begun.
The next few years were passed by Boone amid unending Indian
conflicts. He was a leader among the settlers, both in peace and in war. At
one time he represented them in the House of Burgesses of Virginia; at
another time he was a member of the first little Kentucky parliament itself;
45 and he became a colonel of the frontier militia. He tilled the land, and he
chopped the trees himself; he helped to build the cabins and stockades
with his own hands, wielding the longhandled, light-headed frontier ax
as skilfully as other frontiersmen. His main business was that of surveyor, for
his knowledge of the country, and his ability to travel through it, in spite of
50 the danger from Indians, created much demand for his services among
people who wished to lay off tracts of wild land for their own future use.
But whatever he did, and wherever he went, he had to be sleeplessly on
the lookout for his Indian foes. When he and his fellows tilled the stump-
dotted fields of corn, one or more of the party were always on guard, with
55 weapon at the ready, for fear of lurking savages. When he went to the
House of Burgesses he carried his long rifle, and traversed roads not a mile
of which was free from the danger of Indian attack. The settlements in the
early years depended exclusively upon game for their meat, and Boone was
the mightiest of all the hunters, so that upon him devolved the task of
60 keeping his people supplied. He killed many buffaloes, and pickled the
buffalo beef for use in winter. He killed great numbers of black bear, and
made bacon of them, precisely as if they had been hogs. The common game
were deer and elk. At that time none of the hunters of Kentucky would
waste a shot on anything so small as a prairie-chicken or wild duck;
65but they sometimes killed geese and swans when they came south in winter
and lit on the rivers.
