A short ways upriver from St. Louis, Hunt’s riverboat with the new recruits had stroked past a hamlet, La Charette, where an old man stood on the riverbank. Some of the party recognized him. It was eighty-four-year-old Daniel Boone, who had retired here from the too-crowded Kentucky wilderness that he’d originally opened to settlement; he still trapped for beaver pelts farther up the Missouri. Here in the flesh stood what would become a central irony in the exploration of the West—those trailblazers who marked the path for “civilization” to follow still felt an emotional tug to keep it wild
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