BOONE COUNTY, INDIANA
Daniel Boone Biography
Daniel Boone [October 22 (November 2
new style), 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. Boone is most famous for his exploration and
settlement of what is now the U.S. state of Kentucky, which was then
beyond the western borders of the Thirteen Colonies. Despite resistance
from American Indians, for whom Kentucky was a traditional hunting
ground, in 1775 Boone blazed the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland
Gap and into Kentucky. There he founded Boonesborough, one of the first
English-speaking settlements beyond the Appalachian Mountains. Before
the end of the 18th century, more than 200,000 people entered Kentucky
by following the route marked by Boone.
Boone was a Militia officer during
the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783), which in Kentucky was
fought primarily between settlers and British-allied American Indians.
Boone was captured by Shawnees in 1778 and adopted into the tribe, but
he escaped and continued to help defend the Kentucky settlements. He
was elected to the first of his three terms in the Virginia General
Assembly during the war, and fought in the Battle of Blue Licks in
1782, one of the last battles of the American Revolution. Boone worked
as a surveyor and merchant after the war, but he went deep into debt as
a Kentucky land speculator. Frustrated with legal problems resulting
from his land claims, in 1799 Boone resettled in Missouri, where he
spent his final years.
Boone remains an iconic, if
imperfectly remembered, figure in American history. He was a legend in
his own lifetime, especially after an account of his adventures was
published in 1784, making him famous in America and Europe. After his
death, he was frequently the subject of tall tales and works of
fiction. His adventures—real and legendary—were influential in creating
the archetypal Western hero of American folklore. In American popular
culture, he is remembered as one of the foremost early frontiersmen,
even though the mythology often overshadows the historical details of
his life.
Youth
Daniel 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, 1734 (the
"New Style" date), although Boone used the October date.[4] He was the
sixth of eleven children in a family of Quakers. His father, Squire
Boone, Sr. (1696–1765), had immigrated to Pennsylvania from the small
town of Bradninch, Devon, England in 1713. Squire Boone's parents
George and Mary Boone followed their son to Pennsylvania in 1717. In
1720, Squire, who worked primarily as a weaver and a blacksmith,
married Sarah Morgan (1700–1777), whose family members were Quakers
from Wales, and settled in Towamencin Township, Pennsylvania in 1708.
In 1731, the Boones built a log cabin in the Oley Valley, now the
Daniel Boone Homestead in Berks County, Pennsylvania, where Daniel was
born.
Daniel Boone spent his early years on
what was then the western edge of the Pennsylvania frontier. There were
a number of American Indian villages nearby. The pacifist Pennsylvania
Quakers generally had good relations with the Indians, but the steady
growth of the white population compelled many Indians to relocate
further west. Boone received his first rifle at age 12 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 was hunting in the woods with
some other boys. The scream of a panther scattered the boys, except for
Boone, who calmly cocked his squirrel gun and shot the animal through
the heart just as it leaped 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, Boone's
parents were compelled to publicly apologize after their eldest child
Sarah married John Wilcoxson, a "worldling" (non-Quaker), while she was
visibly pregnant. When Boone's oldest brother Israel also 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. Perhaps as a result of this
controversy, in 1750 Squire sold his land and moved the family to North
Carolina. Daniel Boone did not attend church again, although he
considered himself a Christian and had all of his children baptized.
The Boones eventually settled on the Yadkin River, in what is now Davie
County, North Carolina, about two 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 Boone's
education, but Boone'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.
Historian John Mack Faragher cautions that the folk image of Boone as
semiliterate is misleading, however, arguing that Boone "acquired a
level of literacy that was the equal of most men of his times." 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.
Hunter, Husband and Soldier
As a young man, Boone served with the
British military 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, 1756, he married Rebecca Bryan, a neighbor in the
Yadkin Valley. The couple initially 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 his hunting expeditions deep into Cherokee territory
beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains separated him 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, his wife reproved him saying, "You'd had better
have stayed home and got it yourself." Boone was understanding and did
not blame Rebecca. Whatever the truth of the tale, Boone raised Jemima
as his own and favorite child. Boone's early biographers knew this
story, but did not publish it.
Boone's chosen profession also made
for long absences from home. He supported his growing family in these
years as a market 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 best-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 spelled his name with the final "e",
and the inconsistency of an 1803 date east of the Mississippi after
Boone moved to Missouri in 1799, these particular inscriptions may be
forgeries, part of a long tradition of phony Boone relics.
In 1762 Boone and his wife and four
children moved back to the Yadkin Valley from Culpeper. By mid-1760s,
with peace made with the Cherokees, immigration into the area
increased, and Boone began to look for a new place to settle, as
competition 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's death in 1765, Boone traveled with
his brother Squire and 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. According to a family story, Boone
purchased land in Pensacola, but Rebecca refused to move so far away
from friends and family. The Boones instead moved to a more remote area
of the Yadkin Valley, and Boone began to hunt westward into the Blue
Ridge Mountains.
Kentucky
Boone first reached Kentucky in the
fall of 1767 when on a long hunt with his brother Squire Boone, Jr.
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. 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.
On May 1, 1769, Boone began a
two-year hunting expedition in Kentucky. On December 22, 1769, he 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 white 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 September 25, 1773, Boone packed
up his family and, with a group of about 50 emigrants, began the first
attempt by British colonists to establish a settlement in Kentucky.
Boone was still an obscure hunter and trapper at the time; 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 eldest 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. Following the Treaty of Fort
Stanwix, American Indians in the region had been debating what to do
about the influx of settlers. This group had 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
shock waves along the frontier, and Boone's party abandoned its
expedition.
George Caleb Bingham's Daniel Boone
Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap (1851–52) is a famous
depiction of Boone.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 (1,300 km)
in two months in order to warn those who had not already fled the
region. Upon his return to Virginia, Boone helped defend colonial
settlements along the Clinch River, earning a promotion to captain in
the militia as well as acclaim from fellow citizens. After the brief
war, which ended soon after Virginia's victory in the Battle of Point
Pleasant in October 1774, Shawnees relinquished their claims to
Kentucky.
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, Henderson
purchased the Cherokee claim to Kentucky in order to establish a colony
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. 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 September 8, 1775.
American Revoltion
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 colonists. Isolated settlers and
hunters became the frequent target of attacks, convincing many to
abandon Kentucky. By late spring of 1776, fewer than 200 colonists
remained in Kentucky, primarily at the fortified settlements of
Boonesborough, Harrodsburg, and Logan's Station.
This 1877 illustration, entitled The
rescue of Jemima Boone and Betsey and Fanny Callaway, kidnapped by
Indians in July 1776, is one of many depictions of the famous event.On
July 14, 1776, Boone's daughter Jemima and two other teenage girls were
captured outside Boonesborough by an Indian war party, who 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, a British
Lieutenant Governor of Canada, began to recruit American Indian war
parties to raid the Kentucky settlements. On April 24, Shawnees led by
Chief Blackfish attacked Boonesborough. A bullet struck Boone's ankle,
smashing the bone, but he was carried back inside the fort amid a
flurry of bullets by Simon Kenton, a recent arrival at Boonesborough.
Kenton became Boone's close friend as well as a legendary frontiersman
in his own right.
While Boone recovered, Shawnees kept
up their attacks outside Boonesborough, destroying the surrounding
cattle and crops. With the food supply 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
February 7, 1778, when Boone was 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. Instead, Boone promised that Boonesborough
would surrender willingly to the Shawnees the following spring. Boone
did not have an opportunity to tell his men that he was bluffing in
order to prevent an immediate attack on Boonesborough, however. Boone
pursued this strategy so convincingly that many of his men concluded
that he had switched his loyalty to the British.
Boone and his men were taken to
Blackfish's town of Chillicothe where they were made to run the
gauntlet. As was their custom, the Shawnees adopted some of the
prisoners into the tribe to replace fallen warriors; the remainder were
taken to Hamilton in Detroit. Boone was adopted into a Shawnee family
at Chillicothe, perhaps into the family of Chief Blackfish himself, and
given the name Sheltowee ("Big Turtle"). On June 16, 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 (260 km) 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
successfully defend Boonesborough against a 10-day siege led by
Blackfish, which began on September 7, 1778.
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
(according to tradition) the family of Abraham Lincoln's grandfather.
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 after Virginia created Kentucky County, and so
settlers needed to file new 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 American Revolutionary
War continued. Boone joined General George Rogers Clark's invasion of
the Ohio country in 1780, fighting in the Battle of Piqua on August 7.
In October, when Boone was hunting with his brother Ned, Shawnees shot
and killed Ned. Apparently thinking that they had killed 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
British dragoons under Banastre Tarleton captured Boone and several
other legislators near Charlottesville. The British released Boone 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 in August 1782 fought in the
Battle of Blue Licks, in which his son Israel was killed. In November
1782, Boone took part in another Clark expedition into Ohio, the last
major campaign of the war.
Businessman on the Ohio
After the Revolution, Boone resettled
in Limestone (renamed Maysville, Kentucky in 1786), then a booming Ohio
River port. In 1787, he was elected to the Virginia state assembly as a
representative from Bourbon County. In Maysville, he kept a tavern and
worked as a surveyor, horse trader, 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 became something of a celebrity
while living in Maysville: in 1784, on Boone's 50th birthday, historian
John Filson published The Discovery, Settlement And present State of
Kentucke, a book which included a chronicle of Boone's adventures.
Although the Revolutionary War had
ended, the border war with American Indians north of the Ohio River
soon resumed. In September 1786, Boone took part in a military
expedition into the Ohio Country led by Benjamin Logan. Back in
Limestone, Boone housed and fed Shawnees who were captured during the
raid and helped to negotiate a truce and prisoner exchange. Although
the Northwest Indian War escalated and would not end until the American
victory at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, the 1786 expedition
was the last time Boone saw military action.
Boone began to have financial
troubles while living in Maysville. According to the later folk image,
Boone the trailblazer was too unsophisticated for the civilization
which followed him and which eventually defrauded him of his land.
Boone was not the simple frontiersman of legend, however: he engaged in
land speculation on a large scale, buying and selling claims to tens of
thousands of acres. The land market in frontier Kentucky was chaotic,
and Boone's ventures ultimately failed because his investment strategy
was faulty and because his sense of honor made him reluctant to profit
at someone else's expense. According to Faragher, "Boone lacked the
ruthless instincts that speculation demanded."
Frustrated with the legal hassles
that went with land speculation, in 1788 Boone moved upriver to Point
Pleasant, Virginia (now West Virginia). There he operated a trading
post and occasionally worked as a surveyor's assistant. When Virginia
created Kanawha County in 1789, Boone was appointed lieutenant colonel
of the county militia. In 1791, he was elected to the Virginia
legislature for the third time. He contracted to provide supplies for
the Kanawha militia, but his debts prevented him from buying goods on
credit, and so he closed his store and returned to hunting and trapping.
In 1795, he and Rebecca moved back to
Kentucky, living in present Nicholas County on land owned by their son
Daniel Morgan Boone. The next year, Boone applied to Isaac Shelby, the
first governor of the new state of Kentucky, for a contract to widen
the Wilderness Road into a wagon route, but the governor did not
respond and the contract was awarded to someone else. Meanwhile,
lawsuits over conflicting land claims continued to make their way
through the Kentucky courts. Boone's remaining land claims were sold
off to pay legal fees and taxes, but he no longer paid attention to the
process. In 1798, a warrant was issued for Boone's arrest after he
ignored a summons to testify in a court case, although the sheriff
never found him. That same year Kentucky named Boone County in his
honor.
Missouri
In 1799, Boone moved out of the
United States to Missouri, which was then part of Spanish Louisiana.
The Spanish, eager to promote settlement in the sparsely populated
region, did not enforce the legal requirement that all immigrants had
to be Catholics. Boone, looking to make a fresh start, emigrated with
much of his extended family to what is now St. Charles County. The
Spanish governor appointed Boone "syndic" (judge and jury) and
commandant (military leader) of the Femme Osage district. The many
anecdotes of Boone's tenure as syndic suggest that he sought to render
fair judgments rather than to strictly observe the letter of the law.
Boone served as syndic and commandant
until 1804, when Missouri became part of the United States following
the Louisiana Purchase. Because Boone's land grants from the Spanish
government had been largely based on verbal agreements, he once again
lost his land claims. In 1809, he petitioned Congress to restore his
Spanish land claims, which was finally done in 1814. Boone sold most of
this land to repay old Kentucky debts. When the War of 1812 came to
Missouri, Boone's sons Daniel Morgan Boone and Nathan Boone took part,
but by that time Boone was too old for militia duty.
spent his final years in Missouri,
often in the company of children and grandchildren. He hunted and
trapped as often as his failing health allowed. According to one story,
in 1810 or later Boone went with a group on a long hunt as far west as
the Yellowstone River, a remarkable journey at his age, if true. Other
stories of Boone around this time have him making one last visit to
Kentucky in order to pay off his creditors, although some or all of
these tales may be folklore. American painter John James Audubon
claimed to have gone hunting with Boone in the woods of Kentucky around
1810. Years later, Audubon painted a portrait of Boone, supposedly from
memory, although skeptics have noted the similarity of this painting to
the well-known portraits by Chester Harding. Boone's family insisted
that he never returned to Kentucky after 1799, although some historians
believe that Boone visited his brother Squire near Kentucky in 1810 and
have therefore reported Audubon's story as factual
Boone died on September 26, 1820, at
Nathan Boone's home on Femme Osage Creek. His last words were, "I'm
going now. My time has come." He was buried next to Rebecca, who had
died on March 18, 1813. The graves, which were unmarked until the
mid-1830s, were near Jemima (Boone) Callaway's home on Tuque Creek,
about two miles (3 km) from present day Marthasville, Missouri. In
1845, the Boones' remains were disinterred and reburied in a new
cemetery in Frankfort, Kentucky. Resentment in Missouri about the
disinterment grew over the years, and a legend arose that Boone's
remains never left Missouri. According to this story, Boone's tombstone
in Missouri had been inadvertently placed over the wrong grave, but no
one had corrected the error. Boone's Missouri relatives, displeased
with the Kentuckians who came to exhume Boone, kept quiet about the
mistake and allowed the Kentuckians to dig up the wrong remains. There
is no contemporary evidence that this actually happened, but in 1983, a
forensic anthropologist examined a crude plaster cast of Boone's skull
made before the Kentucky reburial and announced that it might be the
skull of an African American. Black slaves were also buried at Tuque
Creek, so it is possible that the wrong remains were mistakenly removed
from the crowded graveyard. Both the Frankfort Cemetery in Kentucky and
the Old Bryan Farm graveyard in Missouri claim to have Boone's remains
Cultural Legacy
Daniel Boone remains an iconic figure
in American history, although his status as an early American folk hero
and later as a subject of fiction has tended to obscure the actual
details of his life. The general public remembers him as a hunter,
pioneer, and "Indian-fighter", even if they are uncertain when he lived
or exactly what he did. Many places in the United States are named for
him, including the Daniel Boone National Forest, the Sheltowee Trace
Trail, and two counties: Boone County, Missouri and Boone County,
Kentucky. His name has long been synonymous with the American outdoors.
For example, the Boone and Crockett Club was a conservationist
organization founded by Theodore Roosevelt in 1887, and the Sons of
Daniel Boone was the precursor of the Boy Scouts of America.
Emergence as a legend
Boone emerged as a legend in large
part because of John Filson's "The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boon",
part of his book The Discovery, Settlement And present State of
Kentucke. First published in 1784, Filson's book was soon translated
into French and German, and made Boone famous in America and Europe.
Based on interviews with Boone, Filson's book contained a mostly
factual account of Boone's adventures from the exploration of Kentucky
through the American Revolution. However, because the real Boone was a
man of few words, Filson invented florid, philosophical dialogue for
this "autobiography". Subsequent editors cut some of these passages and
replaced them with more plausible—but still spurious—ones. Often
reprinted, Filson's book established Boone as one of the first popular
heroes of the United States.[29]Today there are schools named after
Daniel Boone in Birdsboro Pennsylvania, Douglassville Pennsylvania, and
Chicago Illinois.
Like John Filson, Timothy Flint also
interviewed Boone, and his Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone, the
First Settler of Kentucky (1833) became one of the bestselling
biographies of the 19th century. Flint greatly embellished Boone's
adventures, doing for Boone what Parson Weems did for George
Washington. In Flint's book, Boone fought hand-to-hand with a bear,
escaped from Indians by swinging on vines (as 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.
Much of Daniel Boone's life was
covered by William Henry Bogart in his book Daniel Boone and the
hunters of Kentucky.
Three American actors claim ancestry
to Boone: singer Pat Boone, Richard Boone (1917-1981) of the CBS Have
Gun, Will Travel televison series, and Randy Boone, one of the regulars
on NBC's western series, The Virginian.
In Chuck Jones's 1953 cartoon Duck!
Rabbit! Duck!, Daffy Duck hears from Elmer Fudd that the latter lacks a
license to shoot "fricasseeing rabbits" (a term that Bugs Bunny has
made up). So, Daffy tells Elmer "Don't go away, Daniel Boone. I'll be
back in a jiffy." Daffy returns with a piece of paper to create a
license (although Bugs tricks Daffy into writing a license to shoot
"fricasseeing ducks").
Symbol and stereotype
Thanks to Filson's book, in Europe
Boone became a symbol of the "natural man" who lives a virtuous,
uncomplicated existence in the wilderness. This was most famously
expressed in Lord Byron's epic poem Don Juan (1822), which devoted a
number of stanzas to Boone, including this one:
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.
Byron's poem celebrated Boone
as someone who found happiness by turning his back on civilization. In
a similar vein, many folk tales depicted Boone as a man who migrated to
more remote areas whenever civilization crowded in on him. In a typical
anecdote, when asked why he was moving to Missouri, Boone supposedly
replied, "I want more elbow room!" Boone rejected such an
interpretation of his life, however. "Nothing embitters my old age," he
said late in life, like "the circulation of absurd stories that I
retire as civilization advances…."
Existing simultaneously with the
image of Boone as a refugee from society was, paradoxically, the
popular portrayal of him as civilization's trailblazer. Boone was
celebrated as an agent of Manifest Destiny, a pathfinder who tamed the
wilderness, paving the way for the extension of American civilization.
In 1852, critic Henry Tuckerman dubbed Boone "the Columbus of the
woods", comparing Boone's passage through the Cumberland Gap to
Christopher Columbus's voyage to the New World. In popular mythology,
Boone became the first to explore and settle Kentucky, opening the way
for countless others to follow. In fact, other Americans had explored
and settled Kentucky before Boone, as debunkers in the 20th century
often pointed out, but Boone came to symbolize them all, making him
what historian Michael Lofaro called "the founding father of westward
expansion".
In the 19th century, when Native
Americans were being displaced from their lands and confined on
reservations, Boone's image was often reshaped into the stereotype of
the belligerent, Indian-hating frontiersman which was then popular. In
John A. McClung's Sketches of Western Adventure (1832), for example,
Boone was portrayed as longing for the "thrilling excitement of savage
warfare." Boone was transformed in the popular imagination into someone
who regarded Indians with contempt and had killed scores of the
"savages". The real Boone disliked bloodshed, however. According to
historian John Bakeless, there is no record that Boone ever scalped
Indians, unlike other frontiersmen of the era. Boone once told his son
Nathan that he was certain of having killed only one Indian, during the
battle at Blue Licks, although he believed that others may have died
from his bullets in other battles. Even though Boone had lost two sons
in wars with Indians, he respected Indians and was respected by them.
In Missouri, Boone often went hunting with the very Shawnees who had
captured and adopted him decades earlier. Some 19th century writers
regarded Boone's sympathy for Indians as a character flaw and therefore
altered his words to conform to contemporary attitudes
Fiction
Boone's adventures, real and
mythical, formed the basis of the archetypal hero of the American West,
popular in 19th century novels and 20th century films. The main
character of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, the first
of which was published in 1823, bore striking similarities to Boone;
even his name, Nathaniel Bumppo, echoed Daniel Boone's name. As
mentioned above, The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Cooper's second
Leatherstocking novel, featured a fictionalized version of Boone's
rescue of his daughter. After Cooper, other writers developed the
Western hero, an iconic figure which began as a variation of Daniel
Boone.
In the 20th century, Boone was
featured in numerous comic strips, radio programs, and films, where the
emphasis was usually on action and melodrama rather than historical
accuracy. These are little remembered today; probably the most
noteworthy is the 1936 film Daniel Boone, with George O'Brien playing
the title role. Audiences of the "baby boomer" generation are more
familiar with the Daniel Boone television series, which ran from 1964
to 1970. In the popular theme song for the series, Boone was described
as a "big man" in a "coonskin cap", and the "rippin'est, roarin'est,
fightin'est man the frontier ever knew!"[36] This did not describe the
real Daniel Boone, who was not a big man and did not wear a coonskin
cap. Boone was portrayed this way because Fess Parker, the tall actor
who played Boone, was essentially reprising his role as Davy Crockett
from an earlier TV series. That Boone could be portrayed as a Crockett,
another American frontiersman with a very different persona, was
another example of how Boone's image could be reshaped to suit popular
tastes
Source: From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
