opens with daniel boone's 16-year-old son, james, bleeding out, he's been gut shot from an indian ambush, cherokee, delaware shawnee and he's about to die anyway. and the leader of the ambush, a shawne named big jim, who actually had died eating at the house is just gratuitously plucking out one by one his fingernails and then his toenails. and then we come almost full circle to later in the book very late in the book where daniel boone's son -- his other son -- one of his other sons, israel, dies in boone's arms. he's got an indian musket ball lodged in his heart. in his dying breath, he's spewing gouts of blood. so, yes this book is not for the faint of heart i suppose. one historian called the era that we write about in the mid 18th century, mid 1700s, i want to get this straight, a whirlwind of blood and carnage. this was the era when the first stirrings of what was later to be called manifest destiny were sprouting up among the colonists who were stuck on the east coast by the appalachian mountains, the appalachians as they call them down there. they were anxious to complete what they thought was their own manifest destiny, a phrase by the way which wasn't even coined for 50 y