But his Welsh mother's legacy is seen in the black
hair that hangs long and loose in the hunter's fashion to his
shoulders. We can think of Daniel Boone only as exhilarated by
this plunge into the Wild. He sees ahead--the days of his great
explorations and warfare, the discovery of Kentucky? Not at all.
This is a boy of sixteen in love with his rifle. He looks ahead
to vistas of forest filled with deer and to skies clouded with
flocks of wild turkeys. In that dream there is happiness enough
for Daniel Boone. Indeed, for himself, even in later life, he
asked little, if any, more. He trudges on blithely, whistling.
Chapter II. Folkways
These migrations into the inland valleys of the Old South mark
the first great westward thrust of the American frontier. Thus
the beginnings of the westward movement disclose to us a feature
characteristic also of the later migrations which flung the
frontier over the Appalachians, across the Mississippi, and
finally to the shores of the Pacific. The pioneers, instead of
moving westward by slow degrees, subduing the wilderness as they
went, overleaped great spaces and planted themselves beyond, out
of contact with the life they had left behind. Thus separated by
hundreds of miles of intervening wilderness from the more
civilized communities, the conquerors of the first American
"West," prototypes of the conquerors of succeeding "Wests,"
inevitably struck out their own ways of life and developed their
own customs.
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