Classic Poem

BY FREDERICK W. THOMAS .

Here once Boone trod — the hardy Pioneer —
The only whiteman in the wilderness:
Oh! how he loved, alone, to hunt the deer,
Alone at eve, his simple meal to dress;
No mark upon the tree, nor print, nor track,
To lead him forward, or to guide him back:
He roved the forest, king by main and might,
And looked up to the sky and shaped his course aright.

That mountain, there, that lifts its bald high head
Above the forest, was, perchance, his throne;
There has he stood and marked the woods outspread,
Like a great kingdom, that was all his own;
In hunting shirt and moccasins arrayed,
With bear-skin cap, and pouch, and needful blade.
How carelessly he lean'd upon his gun!
That sceptre of the wild, that had soften won.

Those western Pioneers an impulse felt,
Which their less hardy sons scarce comprehend;
Alone, in Nature's wildest scenes they dwelt;
Where crag, and precipice, and torrent blend,
And stretched around the wilderness, as rude
As the red rovers of its solitude,
Who watched their coming with a hate profound,
And fought with deadly strife for every inch of ground.

To shun a greater ill sought they the wild?
No, they left happier lands behind them far,
And brought the nursing mother and her child
To share the dangers of the border war;
The log-built cabin from the Indian barred,
Their little boy, perchance, kept watch and ward,
While father ploughed with rifle at his back,
Or sought the glutted foe through many a devious track.

How cautiously, yet fearlessly, that boy
Would search the forest for the wild beast's lair,
And lift his rifle with a hurried joy,
If chance he spied the Indian lurking there:
And should they bear him prisoner from the fight,
While they are sleeping, in the dead midnight,
He slips the thongs that bind him to the tree,
And leaving death with them, bounds home right happily.

Before the mother, bursting through the door,
The red man rushes where her infants rest;
O God! he hurls them on the cabin floor!
While she, down kneeling, clasps them to her breast.
How he exults and revels in her woe.
And lifts the weapon, yet delays the blow;
Ha! that report! behold! he reels! he dies!
And quickly to her arms the husband — father — flies.