For the colonists in North America the West meant free land and independence from feudal rule and quitrents, from debt and debtor’s prison, from censures of the church and the class system, from servitude and poverty. The West was the place to rise, to become better, larger. For someone like Boone, the West was a place of mystery and shadow also, a stage on which to act a larger, more dramatic role, to play parts written on a different scale, in meadows and forests, along rivers and canebrakes, with buffalo far as the eye could reach, with flocks of passenger pigeons that filled the sky for
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