Daniel Boone

For the television series, see Daniel Boone (TV series). For the award-winning children's book, see Daniel Boone (book).

This 1820 oil painting by Chester Harding is the only portrait of Daniel Boone made from life. Boone, 84 years old and just months away from death, had to be steadied by a friend while the artist worked.

Daniel Boone (October 22, 1734 – September 26, 1820) was an American pioneer and hunter whose frontier exploits made him one of the first folk heroes of the United States. In 1775, Boone blazed the trail known as the "Wilderness Road" into what is now the U.S. state of Kentucky and founded Boonesborough, one of the first English-speaking settlements in that region. During the American Revolutionary War, Boone helped to defend the Kentucky settlements from American Indian attempts to drive them out. After the war Boone engaged in various business ventures, mostly unsuccessful, and eventually resettled in Missouri, where he spent the final years of his life. Boone became a legend in his own lifetime, so much so that it is not possible to entirely separate the actual events of his life from the folklore.

Youth

Boone was born on October 22, 1734. Because the Gregorian calendar was adopted during Boone's lifetime, his birth date is sometimes given as November 2, 1732 (the "New Style" date), although Boone always used the October date. He was the sixth of eleven children in a family of Quakers. His father, Squire Boone (1696–1765) had emigrated to Pennsylvania from the small town of Bradninch, England in 1713. Squire Boone's parents George and Mary Boone followed their son to Pennsylvania in 1717. {George and Mary Boone were also the common ancestors of singer Loretta Lynn and her husband}. In 1720, Squire, who worked primarily as a weaver and a blacksmith, married Sarah Morgan (1700–1777), whose family were Quakers from Wales. In 1731, the Boones built a log cabin in the Oley Valley in what is now Berks County, Pennsylvania, near present Reading, Pennsylvania, where Daniel was born.

Daniel Boone grew up on what was then the western edge of the Pennsylvania frontier. There were a number American Indian villages nearby—the pacifist Pennsylvania Quakers generally had good relations with Native Americans—but the steady growth of the white population was compelling many Indians to relocate further west. Boone received his first rifle in 1747 and picked up hunting skills from local whites and Indians, beginning his lifelong love of hunting. Folk tales often emphasized Boone's skills as a hunter. In one story, the young Boone is hunting in the woods with some other boys. The scream of a panther scatters the boys, except for Daniel, who calmly cocks his squirrel gun and shoots the beast through the heart just as it leaps at him. As with so many tales about Boone, the story may or may not be true, but it was told so often that it became part of the popular image of the man.

In Boone's youth, his family became a source of controversy in the local Quaker community. In 1742, Daniel's parents were compelled to publicly apologize after their eldest child Sarah married a "worldling", or non-Quaker, while she was visibly pregnant. When Daniel's oldest brother Israel married a "worldling" in 1747, Squire Boone stood by his son and was therefore expelled from the Quakers. Although his wife continued to attend monthly meetings with her children, in 1750 Squire sold his land and moved the family to North Carolina. Daniel Boone did not attend church again, although he always considered himself a Christian. The Boones eventually settled on the Yadkin River, in what is now Davie County, North Carolina, about 2 miles (3 km) west of Mocksville.

Because he spent so much time hunting in his youth, Boone received little formal education. According to one family tradition, a schoolteacher once expressed concern over Daniel's education, but Daniel's father was unconcerned, saying "let the girls do the spelling and Dan will do the shooting...." Boone received some tutoring from family members, though his spelling remained unorthodox. However, historian John Mack Faragher cautions that the folk image of Boone as semiliterate is misleading. In fact, Boone regularly took reading material with him on his hunting expeditions—the Bible and Gulliver's Travels were favorites—and he was often the only literate person in groups of frontiersmen. Boone would sometimes entertain his hunting companions by reading to them around the evening campfire.

French and Indian War era

As a young man, Boone served with the British during the French and Indian War (1754–1763), a struggle for control of the land beyond the Appalachian Mountains. In 1755, he was a wagon driver in General Edward Braddock's attempt to drive the French out of the Ohio Country, which ended in disaster at the Battle of the Monongahela. Boone returned home after the defeat, and on August 14, 1755, he married Rebecca Bryan, a neighbor in the Yadkin Valley. At first, they lived in a cabin on his father's farm. They would eventually have ten children.

In 1759, a conflict erupted between British colonists and Cherokee Indians, their former allies in the French and Indian War. After the Yadkin Valley was raided by Cherokees, many families, including the Boones, fled to Culpeper County, Virginia. Boone served in the North Carolina militia during this "Cherokee Uprising", and was separated from his wife for about two years. According to one story, Boone was gone for so long that Rebecca assumed he was dead, and began a relationship with his brother Edward ("Ned"), giving birth to daughter Jemima in 1762. Upon his return, the story goes, Boone was understanding and did not blame Rebecca. Whether the tale is true or not is uncertain, but Boone raised Jemima as his own child. Boone's early biographers knew this story but did not publish it.

This engraving by Alonzo Chappel (c. 1861) depticts an elderly Boone hunting in Missouri.

Boone's chosen profession also made for long absences from home. He supported his growing family in these years as a hunter. Almost every autumn Boone would go on "long hunts", which were extended expeditions into the wilderness lasting weeks or months. Boone would go on long hunts alone or with a small group of men, accumulating hundreds of deer skins in the autumn, and then trapping beaver and otter over the winter. The long hunters would return in the spring and sell their take to commercial fur traders. In this business, buckskins came to be known as "bucks", which is the origin of the American slang term for "dollar".

Frontiersmen often carved messages on trees or wrote their names on cave walls, and Boone's name or initials have been found in many places. One of the most well-known inscriptions was carved into a tree in present Washington County, Tennessee which reads "D. Boon Cilled a. Bar [killed a bear] on [this] tree in the year 1760". A similar carving is preserved in the museum of the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Kentucky, which reads "D. Boon Kilt a Bar, 1803." However, because Boone always spelled his name with the final "e", these particular inscriptions may be forgeries, part of a long tradition of phony Boone relics.

In the mid-1760s, Boone began to look for a new place to settle. The population was growing in the Yadkin Valley after the end of the French and Indian War, which inevitably decreased the amount of game available for hunting. This meant that Boone had difficulty making ends meet; he was often taken to court for nonpayment of debts, and he sold what land he owned to pay off creditors. After his father died in 1765, Boone traveled with a group of men to Florida, which had become British territory after the end of the war, to look into the possibility of settling there. Instead of Florida, however, he moved his family to a more remote area of the Yadkin Valley, and began to hunt farther westward into the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Exploration and settlement of Kentucky

"Capture of Boone and Stuart" from Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone by Cecil B. Hartley (1859)

Boone first reached Kentucky in the fall of 1767 when on a long hunt with his brother Squire Boone, Jr. (1744–1815). While on the Braddock expedition years earlier, Boone had heard about the fertile land and abundant game of Kentucky from fellow wagoner John Findley, who had visited Kentucky to trade with American Indians. In 1768, Boone and Findley happened to meet again, and Findley encouraged Boone with more tales of Kentucky. At the same time, news had arrived about the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, in which the Iroquois had ceded their claim to Kentucky to the British. This, as well as the unrest in North Carolina due to the Regulator movement, likely prompted Boone to extend his exploration. In May 1769, Boone began a two-year hunting expedition in Kentucky. On 22 December 1769, Boone and a fellow hunter were captured by a party of Shawnees, who confiscated all of their skins and told them to leave and never return. The Shawnees had not signed the Stanwix treaty, and since they regarded Kentucky as their hunting ground, they considered American hunters there to be poachers. Boone, however, continued hunting and exploring Kentucky until his return to North Carolina in 1771, and returned to hunt there again in the autumn of 1772.

On 25 September 1773, Boone packed up his family and, with a group of about 50 emigrants, began the first attempt by Americans to establish a settlement in Kentucky. Boone was at the time still an obscure hunter; the most prominent member of the expedition was William Russell, a well-known Virginian and future brother-in-law of Patrick Henry. On October 9, Boone's oldest son James and a small group of men and boys who had left the main party to retrieve supplies were attacked by a band of Delawares, Shawnees, and Cherokees. Ever since the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, American Indians had been debating what do to about American settlers pouring into the region. This group of Indians decided, in the words of historian John Mack Faragher, "to send a message of their opposition to settlement...." James Boone and William Russell's son Henry were captured and gruesomely tortured to death. The brutality of the killings sent shockwaves along the frontier, and Boone's party abandoned their expedition.

The massacre was one of the first events in what became known as Dunmore's War, a struggle between Virginia and primarily Shawnees of the Ohio Country for control of what is now West Virginia and Kentucky. In the summer of 1774, Boone volunteered to travel with a companion to Kentucky to notify surveyors there about the outbreak of war. The two men journeyed more than 800 miles in two months in order to warn those Americans who had not already fled the region. Upon his return to Virginia, Boone helped defend American settlements along the Clinch River, earning a promotion to captain in the militia as well as acclaim from fellow citizens. The war was brief, ending soon after Virginia's victory in the Battle of Point Pleasant on 10 October 1774. In the peace treaty that followed, Shawnees under Chief Cornstalk relinquished their claims to Kentucky.

George Caleb Bingham's Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap (1851–52) is a famous depiction of Boone.

Following Dunmore's War, Richard Henderson, a prominent judge from North Carolina, hired Boone to travel to the Cherokee towns in present North Carolina and Tennessee and inform them of an upcoming meeting. In the 1775 Treaty of Sycamore Shoals, Henderson purchased the Cherokee claim to Kentucky in order to establish a colony to be called Transylvania. Afterwards, Henderson hired Boone to blaze what became known as the Wilderness Road, which went through the Cumberland Gap and into central Kentucky. Along with a party of about thirty workers, Boone marked a path to the Kentucky River, where he established Boonesborough, near present-day Lexington, Kentucky, which was intended to be the capital of Transylvania. Other settlements, notably Harrodsburg, were also established at this time. Despite occasional Indian attacks, Boone returned to the Clinch Valley and brought his family and other settlers to Boonesborough on 8 September 1775.

American Revolution

Violence in Kentucky increased with the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783). Native Americans who were unhappy about the loss of Kentucky in treaties saw the war as a chance to drive out the Americans. Isolated settlers and hunters became the frequent target of attacks, convincing many to abandon Kentucky. By late spring of 1776, fewer than 200 Americans remained in Kentucky, primarily at the fortified settlements of Boonesborough, Harrodsburg, and Logan's Station.

The rescue of Jemima Boone and Betsey and Fanny Callaway, kidnapped by Indians in July 1776 (1877)

On 14 July 1776, Boone's daughter Jemima and two other teenage girls were captured outside Boonesborough by a war party of two Cherokee and three Shawnee men. The Indians, led by the Cherokee Hanging Maw, carried the girls north towards the Shawnee towns in the Ohio country. Boone and a group of men from Boonesborough followed in pursuit, finally catching up with them two days later. Boone and his men ambushed the Indians while they were stopped for a meal, rescuing the girls and driving off their captors. The incident became the most celebrated event of Boone's life. James Fenimore Cooper created a fictionalized version of the episode in his classic book The Last of the Mohicans (1826).

In 1777, Henry Hamilton, the British Lieutenant Governor of Canada, began recruiting and arming Native American war parties to raid the American settlements in Kentucky. On 24 April, Boone was wounded in an attack on Boonesborough led by Chief Blackfish of the Shawnees. Boone's life was saved during the battle by Simon Kenton, who would become Boone's close friend as well as a legendary frontiersman in his own right. Because the Indians had destroyed the cattle and crops around Boonesborough, the food supply was running low. The settlers needed salt to preserve what meat they had, and so in January 1778 Boone led a party of thirty men to the salt springs on the Licking River. On 7 February 1778, when Boone was out hunting meat for the expedition, he was surprised and captured by warriors led by Blackfish. Because Boone's party was greatly outnumbered, he convinced his men to surrender rather than put up a fight.

Blackfish wanted to continue to Boonesborough and capture it, since it was now poorly defended, but Boone convinced him that the women and children were not hardy enough to survive a winter trek as prisoners. Instead, Boone promised that Boonesborough would surrender willingly to the Shawnees the following spring. Boone was improvising, saying anything to keep the Shawnees from attacking Boonesborough. He did not have an opportunity to tell his men what he was doing, however, and many of them concluded that he had switched his loyalty to the British.

Illustration of Boone's ritual adoption by the Shawnees, from Life & Times of Col. Daniel Boone, by Cecil B. Hartley (1859)

Boone and his men were taken to Blackfish's town of Chillicothe where they were made to run the gauntlet. As was the practice of Shawnees, some of the prisoners (at least ten of the 27 men captured) were adopted into the tribe to replace fallen warriors; the remainder were taken to Detroit, where Indians received a bounty from Governor Hamilton for each prisoner (or scalp) taken. Boone was adopted into a Shawnee family at Chillicothe, perhaps into the family of Chief Blackfish himself, and given the name Sheltowee ("Big Turtle"). Like most of the other adoptees, Boone was watched closely but eventually escaped. On 16 June 1778, when he learned that Blackfish was about to return to Boonesborough with a large force, Boone eluded his captors and raced home, covering the 160 miles to Boonesborough in five days on horseback and, after his horse gave out, on foot.

During Boone's absence, his wife and children (except for Jemima) had returned to North Carolina, fearing that he was dead. Upon his return to Boonesborough, some of the men expressed doubts about Boone's loyalty, since after surrendering the salt making party he had apparently lived quite happily among the Shawnees for months. Boone responded by leading a preemptive raid against the Shawnees across the Ohio River, and then by helping to defend Boonesborough against a siege led by Blackfish, which began on 7 September 1778. The siege was repelled after 10 days.

After the siege, Captain Benjamin Logan and Colonel Richard Callaway—both of whom had nephews who were still captives surrendered by Boone—brought charges against Boone for his recent activities. In the court-martial that followed, Boone was found "not guilty" and was even promoted after the court heard his testimony. Despite this vindication, Boone was humiliated by the court-martial, and he rarely spoke of it.

After the trial, Boone returned to North Carolina in order to bring his family back to Kentucky. In the autumn of 1779, a large party of emigrants came with him, including the grandfather of Abraham Lincoln. Rather than remain in Boonesborough, Boone founded the nearby settlement of Boone's Station. Boone began earning money at this time by locating good land for other settlers. Transylvania land claims had been invalidated in 1776 when Virginia made Kentucky into one of its counties, and so settlers needed to file land claims with Virginia. In 1780, Boone collected about $20,000 in cash from various settlers and traveled to Williamsburg to purchase their land warrants. While he was sleeping in a tavern during the trip, the cash was stolen from his room. Some of the settlers forgave Boone the loss; others insisted that he repay the stolen money, which took him several years to do.

A popular image of Boone which emerged in later years is that of the backwoodsman who had little affinity for "civilized" society, moving away from places like Boonesborough when they became "too crowded". In reality, however, Boone was a leading citizen of Kentucky at this time. When Kentucky was divided into three Virginia counties in November 1780, Boone was promoted to lieutenant colonel in the Fayette County militia. In April 1781, Boone was elected as a representative to the Virginia General Assembly, which was held in Richmond. In 1782, he was elected sheriff of Fayette County.

Meanwhile, the war continued. Boone joined General George Rogers Clark's invasion of the Ohio country in 1780, fighting in the Battle of Piqua on 7 August. In October, when Boone was hunting with his brother Ned, Shawnees shot and killed Ned. Thinking they had killed the famous Daniel Boone, the Shawnees beheaded Ned and took the head home as a trophy. In 1781, Boone traveled to Richmond to take his seat in the legislature, but was captured by British troops, who released him on parole several days later. During Boone's term, Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown in October 1781, but the fighting continued in Kentucky unabated. Boone returned to Kentucky and fought in one of the last battles of the war, the Battle of Blue Licks, on 19 August 1782. His second-oldest son, Israel, was killed in that battle. In November 1782, Boone took part in another Clark expedition into Ohio, the last major campaign of the war.

Later years

File:Cole Thomas Daniel Boone Sitting at the Door of His Cabin on the Great Osage Lake Kentucky 1826.jpg

Thomas Cole's Daniel Boone Sitting at the Door of His Cabin on the Great Osage Lake (1826) reflected a popular image of Boone's rejection of "civilized" society.

After the Revolution, Boone resettled in Limestone (now Maysville, Kentucky), where he ran a tavern and worked as a surveyor and land speculator. He was initially prosperous, owning seven slaves by 1787, a relatively large number for Kentucky at the time, which was dominated by small farms rather than large plantations. Boone's descendants were slaveholders until the end of the American Civil War.

Problems with creditors prompted Boone to move out of Kentucky, and, in 1788, Boone settled at Point Pleasant on the Ohio River, in Kanawha County, Virginia (now West Virginia), where he worked as a surveyor and was appointed Lieutenant Colonel of Kanawha County's first militia.

In 1799, with his son Daniel Morgan Boone, he moved to Missouri, which was at that time still part of the Louisiana Territory and under Spanish control. His son had met with Spanish Lieutenant Governor Don Z. Trudeau and had been invited to bring the Boone family to settle here. When asked why he was moving, Boone is reported to have said he needed more elbow room. On June 11, 1800, Boone was appointed "syndic" (a judicial magistrate) and commandant of the Femme Osage region of Missouri. He held this position until the Louisiana Territory became part of the United States. Boone once again lost all of his land titles.

Rebecca Boone died on March 18, 1813, at their home in the Femme Osage Valley St. Charles County, Missouri.

Boone's land claims were later restored by the Congress in 1814. Boone and his family also owned a significant plot of land in central Missouri, buying it because of its numerous salt licks. These licks were later named "Boone's Lick". The surrounding areas also hold the Boone name, such as Boone County; Boonville, Boonesboro, and Boone's Farm.

Daniel Boone died September 26, 1820 at the home of his son Nathan Boone on Femme Osage Creek, St. Charles County, Missouri. This site is about 1.5 miles (2.4 km) from present day Marthasville in Warren County, Missouri. Boone was buried on his farm nearby.

In 1845, what was believed to be his remains and those of his wife were moved to Frankfort, Kentucky in Franklin County. There is some uncertainty, however, as to whose remains exactly were moved, and both Frankfort Cemeteries in Kentucky and the Old Bryan Farm in Missouri claim to have the bodies of Boone and his wife. There are also those who say that Boone would not have wanted to be buried in Kentucky because he never wanted to go back there.

Folklore and popular culture

Many heroic exploits and chivalrous adventures are related to me which exist only in the regions of fancy. With me the world has taken great liberties, and yet I have been but a common man.

Daniel Boone

Two early biographies greatly contributed to the popular image of Daniel Boone. Both were written by authors who, although they personally interviewed Boone, embellished his story. In 1784, John Filson made Boone famous in America and Europe with "The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boon", part of his book The Discovery, Settlement And present State of Kentucke. Because the real Boone was a man of few words, Filson invented long, florid speeches for this Boone "autobiography". Subsequent editors cut some of these passages and replaced them with more plausible—but still spurious—ones. Filson's depiction of Boone formed the basis of what was to become the archetypal American Western hero, who tames the wilderness and paves the way for civilization.

Timothy Flint also interviewed Boone, and in his Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone, the First Settler of Kentucky (1833), he did for Boone what Parson Weems did for George Washington. Flint's Boone fought hand-to-hand with a bear, escaped from Indians by swinging on vines (like Tarzan would later do), and so on. Although Boone's family thought the book was absurd, Flint greatly influenced the popular conception of Boone, since these tall tales were recycled in countless dime novels and books aimed at young boys.

In the age of Romanticism, Boone became a symbol of the "natural man" who turns his back on civilization in favor of a more virtuous wilderness existence. This was most famously expressed in Lord Byron's epic poem Don Juan (1822), which devoted a number of stanzas to Boone:

Of the great names which in our faces stare,

The General Boon, back-woodsman of Kentucky,

Was happiest amongst mortals any where;

For killing nothing but a bear or buck, he

Enjoyed the lonely vigorous, harmless days

Of his old age in wilds of deepest maze.

Contrary to his depiction in early books, in several films, and in television shows, he did not wear a coonskin cap. This error was greatly reinforced in the public mind by the TV series "Daniel Boone"; there was confusion between Daniel Boone, and another American trailblazer, Davy Crockett, both played on popular television shows by the same actor, Fess Parker.

See also

• Sheltowee Trace Trail
• Boone contains a partial list of the many places named for Daniel Boone
• Sons of Daniel Boone, precursor of the Boy Scouts of America
• Boone and Crockett Club, conservationist organization founded by Theodore Roosevelt
• A proposed genealogy may be found on its own page.

References

• Bakeless, John. Daniel Boone: Master of the Wilderness. Originally published 1939, reprinted University of Nebraska Press, 1989. The definitive Boone biography of its era, it was the first to make full use of the massive amount of material collected by Lyman Draper.
• Draper, Lyman. The Life of Daniel Boone, edited by Ted Franklin Belue. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1998. Belue's notes provide a modern scholarly perspective to Draper's unfinished 19th century biography.
• Elliott, Lawrence. The Long Hunter: A New Life of Daniel Boone. New York: Reader's Digest Press, 1976.
• Faragher, John Mack. Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer. New York: Holt, 1992. The standard scholarly biography, examines both the history and the folklore.
• Lofaro, Michael. Daniel Boone: An American Life. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2003. A brief biography, previously published (in 1978 and 1986) as The Life and Adventures of Daniel Boone.

Further reading

• Aron, Stephen. How the West was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. ISBN 080185296X.
• Slotkin, Richard. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973. ISBN 0819540552.
• Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950.
• Sweeney, J. Gray. The Columbus of the Woods: Daniel Boone and the Typology of Manifest Destiny. St. Louis, Mo.: Washington University Gallery of Art, 1992. ISBN 0936316144.
• Thwaites, Reuben Gold. Daniel Boone. The first modern biography, originally published in 1902 and often reprinted.

External links

Primary sources

• "The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon" (sic) Filson's "autobiographical" memoir
• Personal papers of Daniel Boone at the Wisconsin Historical Society 32-volume collection of Boone manuscripts and correspondence. Forms part of the Lyman Draper collection

Secondary material

• Daniel Boone: Myth and Reality in American Consciousness
• Biographical sketch at Boone County, Missouri
• The Kentucky Highlands Project

Other material

• Missouri gravesite
• Kentucky gravesite
• Daniel Boone birthplace, Berks County website
• Daniel Boone Wilderness Trail
• "Daniel Boone, The Extraordinary Life Of A Common Man"