BOONE, DANIEL (1734-1820), most famous of American pioneers and backwoodsmen, was born probably on Nov. 2, 1734, near the present city of Reading (Pa.), but moved to the Yadkin valley with his family in his youth. A wagoner and blacksmith in Braddock's disastrous expedition, a wandering hunter and trapper who in 1765 visited Florida and bought a lot intending to settle there, by a strange trick of tradition he has been extolled as the discoverer and founder of Kentucky and has more than any other individual moulded the frontier legend. Many white men had traversed the "dark and bloody ground" before Boone, including John Finley, Boone's guide, Dr. Thomas Walker and Christopher Gist ; many land speculators had coveted the fertile forests and plains of Kentucky before Judge Richard Henderson, one of the most enterprising of them, engaged Boone in 1769 to explore the country thoroughly, to assist in negotiating the purchase of the immense tract from the Cherokees, and finally to open up the Wilderness road and escort settlers to the new colony of Transyl vania. There is no doubt that Boone displayed immense resource fulness, daring and perseverance in his explorations, in the estab lishment of the border posts, and in the struggles with the Indians. Henderson himself wrote, "It was owing to Boone's confidence in us and the people's in him that a stand was ever attempted in order to wait for our coming." Nevertheless, the inability of Hen derson to have his purchase declared valid and Boone's own care lessness about titles and taxes caused him to lose all the choice tracts which he had marked out for himself and in his old age to seek the open prairies in the Spanish territory west of the Mississippi (at La Charette in the present State of Missouri). Even there, of ter the Louisiana purchase, his title was found to be defective, although Congress, as a result of his pathetic peti tion and the intervention of the Kentucky legislature, confirmed the grant with praise for the pioneer who had "opened the way to millions of his fellow men." From it he made occasional long trap ping expeditions into Kansas and once (1814) to the Yellowstone. He died in the latter part of September (probably Sept. 26) 182o, even then the object of veneration and pilgrimage. In 1845 his and his wife Rebecca's remains were removed to Frankfort (Ky.), where a monument was erected to his memory. Doubtless the germ of the Boone legend was the so-called autobiography, the production of John Filson; but to it have contributed scores of poets, travellers, novelists, and historians including writers as di verse as Lord Byron in Don Juan and the obscure Kentucky versifier, Daniel Bryan, in The Mountain Muse (1813) .