On one of
his hunting trips he explored a part of Kansas; and in 1814, when
he was eighty, he hunted big game in the Yellowstone where again
his heart rejoiced over great herds as in the days of his first
lone wanderings in the Blue Grass country. At last, with the
proceeds of these expeditions he was able to pay the debts he had
left behind in Kentucky thirty years before. The story runs that
Daniel had only fifty cents remaining when all the claims had
been settled, but so contented was he to be able to look an
honest man in the face that he was in no disposition to murmur
over his poverty.
When after a long and happy life his wife died in 1813, Boone
lived with one or other of his sons* and sometimes with Flanders
Calloway. Nathan Boone, with whom Daniel chiefly made his home,
built what is said to have been the first stone house in
Missouri. Evidently the old pioneer disapproved of stone houses
and of the "luxuries" in furnishings which were then becoming
possible to the new generation, for one of his biographers speaks
of visiting him in a log addition to his son's house; and when
Chester Harding, the painter, visited him in 1819 for the purpose
of doing his portrait, he found Boone dwelling in a small log
cabin in Nathan's yard. When Harding entered, Boone was broiling
a venison steak on the end of his ramrod.
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