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Meshach Browning (1781, Damascus, Montgomery County, Maryland - 19 November 1859, Garrett County, Maryland) was an early backwoodsman, hunter and explorer of the watersheds of the North Branch Potomac and Youghiogheny Rivers. His memoir is ''Forty-Four Years of the Life of a Hunter'' (1859). He has been celebrated as Maryland's most famous frontier hunter. Browning's memoir of his "hunting-fever" years (1795–1839) and other activities was originally penned with a turkey quill. Half backwoods history, half heroic adventure story, it recounts his hunting expeditions and life-threatening encounters while stalking game and records details of life in early frontier America, western Maryland folkways and early settlement life. ==Biography== Browning's father was an English soldier who escaped from Braddock's massacre (1755), deserted and settled in the highlands of Western Maryland. This community was a wholly self-subsistent one in which the men wore deer skins procured by their own rifles and dressed and tailored by themselves. The women spun and wove flax and wool. The only commodities upon which they were dependent on outsiders was gunpowder and lead for shot. Meshach Browning married Mary McMullen (1781–1839) on 13 April 1799 at Blooming Rose, Maryland. His military experience was restricted to a draft as a sergeant in a company of militia, during the War of 1812, which went into action only once, and that on the occasion of a muster when they undertook to “lick” their commander, with whom they had become disgruntled. (The mutineers apparently got the worst of it.) Browning became an expert in woodcraft and wild animal behavior and habitats. His pursuit of the abundant white-tailed deer, black bear, panthers and wolves through the "western wilderness" became legendary. This wilderness was the Allegheny Mountains, especially in Garrett County, Maryland and the surrounding regions of what is now West Virginia. After his first wife's death, he married Mary M. Smith, on 24 April 1841 in Allegany County, Maryland. Browning and his son-in-law, Dominick Mattingly, were selected to collect donations to build a church at Johnstown, Maryland. The result of their labors was St. James Church, dedicated in 1853 under the pastorate of Rev. William Lambert and prosperous for many years. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Meshach Browning」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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