Fifth Grade
Worksheets
Taming the Wilderness - The Life of Daniel Boone
Daniel Boone
Reading Comprehension for November 2
In the early 1700s, America was small. It was a group of tiny colonies--little more than a narrow strip of people clustered along the Atlantic coast. Settlers still had to carve farms and homes out of the forests. In 1734, a boy named Daniel Boone was born in this new land.
Daniel was the sixth of twelve children. He spent his early years on a Pennsylvania farm. Like many farm kids at the time, he never really went to school. Instead, he learned life skills like blacksmithing and farming. Later, he learned to read and write.
As he grew, the boy spent much of his time roaming the forests near the farm. He made friends with people of the native tribes in the area. He also studied the habits of wild animals. He was known as a first-rate hunter. The traits that made Daniel at home in the wild also set the path for his future. He never liked big groups of people. He was never one to stay in one place too long. He hardly ever did things the easy way.
The Boone family moved south, to a fertile valley in North Carolina. Daniel grew into a young man. His love of wild places grew with him. From time to time he went on "long hunts," vanishing into the woods for months at a time.
At that time, the Appalachian Mountains marked the outer edge of the known world. Anyone who traveled over them had to hack out his own trail. Beyond the mountains lay the untamed area of Kentucky. Daniel had heard stories about it. The stories said that its forests were alive with wildlife. As he worked on the farm, the young man dreamed of slipping like a deer through the deep forests of Kentucky.
