Boone: A Biography (2 page)

   
Notes

   
Bibliography

   
Index

L
IST OF
M
APS

Pennsylvania

Yadkin to Cumberland Gap

Ohio Valley

Battle of the Blue Licks

Missouri

1702 George Boone III and Mary Maugridge Boone in Bradninch, Devonshire, England, join the Cullompton Meeting of the Society of Friends (Quakers).

1717 George Boone III and the rest of his family arrive in Philadelphia, following his sons George IV and Squire and daughter Sarah, who came in 1713.

1720 Squire Boone marries Sarah Morgan at Gwyneth Meeting House, September 23.

1734 Daniel Boone, sixth child of Squire and Sarah, born November 2 (October 22, Old Style).

1747 Daniel is given his first “short rifle gun” and becomes an expert hunter.

1750 Squire Boone sells his property in Pennsylvania and moves his family to Linnville Creek, near Harrisonburg, Virginia. The next year they go on to the Yadkin Valley in North Carolina.

1755 Daniel serves with the North Carolina militia in the French and Indian War and is present at Braddock’s Defeat. Meets John Findley, who has been to Kentucky.

1756 Daniel marries Rebecca Bryan August 14.

1757 James Boone, first son, born May 3.

1759 Israel Boone born January 25. Because of Indian attacks Daniel and his family move to Culpeper, Virginia. Boone returns to North Carolina to hunt and serve in the militia.

1760 Susannah Boone born November 2. Boone hunts beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains.

1762 The Boone family returns to the Yadkin after peace is made with the Cherokees. Jemima Boone born October 4.

1765 Squire Boone dies January 2. Daniel and his brother Squire II join party to explore Florida.

1766 Levina Boone born March 23.

1768 Rebecca Boone born May 26. Regulator rebellion builds in North Carolina.

1769 Daniel, John Findley, John Stewart, and three others leave for Kentucky May 1. Regulator activity increases in North Carolina. Daniel Morgan Boone born December 23.

1771 Daniel returns to the Yadkin from Kentucky in May as Regulators surrender to colonial militia.

1773 Jesse Bryan Boone born May 23. Boone and William Russell attempt to settle in Kentucky but are turned back by an Indian attack in which son James is killed.

1774 Boone and Michael Stoner ride into Kentucky to warn surveyors of Indian hostilities. Lord Dunmore’s War ends with treaty in October after the Battle of Point Pleasant.

1775 Boone leads a crew to hack a trace through Cumberland Gap for the Transylvania Company, which has purchased much of Kentucky from the Cherokees. Revolutionary War breaks out in April with the battles of Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts. William Boone born in July and dies.

1776 Jemima Boone and two Callaway girls are abducted by Indians on July 14 and later rescued. A copy of the Declaration of Independence reaches Boonesborough in August.

1777 Shawnees attack Boonesborough and Boone is wounded. His mother, Sarah, dies in North Carolina.

1778 Boone is captured by the Shawnees near the Blue Licks and is a prisoner at Chillicothe for four months. He escapes in June and defends Boonesborough successfully against a Shawnee-British raid. Afterward he is charged with treason and exonerated.

1779 On Christmas Day Boone, with family and friends, moves to Boone’s Station near future Athens, Kentucky.

1780 Boone is robbed of about twenty thousand dollars near Williamsburg, Virginia.

1781 Boone serves in the Virginia legislature. Nathan Boone born March 2. Cornwallis surrenders at Yorktown, October 17.

1782 As lieutenant colonel of the Fayette County militia Boone fights at the Battle of the Blue Licks, where his son Israel is killed.

1783–84 Boone moves to Marble Creek and meets John Filson, who publishes “The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon” in 1784.

1785–86 Boone moves his family to Limestone on the Ohio River, where he operates a store, tavern, and surveying business and is sued by former clients over disputed land claims.

1788 Boone takes a keelboat load of ginseng to Maryland, and on a visit to Pennsylvania he decides to leave Kentucky and move to Point Pleasant, Virginia, on the Ohio River.

1789 At Point Pleasant Boone keeps a small store and continues to hunt and trap.

1791 Boone serves as a lieutenant colonel in the militia and is elected to the Virginia legislature. He agrees to supply militia companies in western Virginia but fails to fulfill his contract.

1792 Boone moves to remote cabin near present Charleston, West Virginia.

1795 Boone returns to Kentucky with Rebecca and lives on Brushy Fork of Hinkston Creek in son Daniel Morgan’s cabin. He
hunts bears on the Big Sandy and is summoned to court repeatedly in land disputes.

1798 Son Daniel Morgan Boone returns to Kentucky from Missouri with invitation from Lieutenant Governor Trudeau for Boone to settle there in Spanish territory. Boone moves to the Little Sandy River to prepare for immigration to Missouri.

1799 Boone and family leave Kentucky for Femme Osage Creek in Missouri. The next year, Boone is appointed “syndic” for that region.

1800 Susannah Boone Hays dies of fever.

1802 Daughter Levina Boone Scholl dies in Kentucky.

1803 The United States negotiates the Louisiana Purchase. Boone has been given about ten thousand acres of land in Missouri but has not made improvements or completed the paperwork for the deeds.

1805 Daughter Rebecca Boone Goe dies in Kentucky.

1806 Boone learns the American government may not recognize his Missouri land claims. He continues to hunt, trap, and explore the region.

1809 Boone petitions Congress for recovery of his land claims.

1810 Boone joins a hunting expedition to the upper Missouri, going perhaps as far as the Yellowstone.

1813 Rebecca Boone dies March 18 and is buried on Tuque Creek.

1814 Boone is awarded one thousand arpents of land, most of which he has to sell to pay debts.

1820 Boone dies in his son Nathan’s large stone house and is buried beside Rebecca.

1845 Daniel’s and Rebecca’s bodies are brought to Frankfort, Kentucky, for reburial.

F
ORGET
the coonskin cap; he never wore one. Daniel Boone thought coonskin caps uncouth, heavy, and uncomfortable. He always wore a beaver felt hat to protect him from sun and rain. The coonskin-topped Boone is the image from Hollywood and television. In fact, much that the public thinks it knows about Boone is fiction. He was neither the discoverer of Kentucky nor the first settler in the Bluegrass region. He did not discover the Cumberland Gap, known to the Indians as Ouasiota, nor was he the first white man to dig ginseng in the North American wilderness. And though he held the rank of lieutenant colonel in the militia more than once, he was for the most part a reluctant soldier and Indian fighter. As one of his first biographers said, “
He never delighted in shedding human blood
, even that of his enemies in war, and avoided it whenever he could.” The real story of Daniel Boone is more complicated than the fiction, stranger, and far more interesting.

It was Emerson who said, “
All history resolves itself very easily
into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.” Certainly Boone was one of those stout and earnest individuals.

Even in his own time Boone had a number of detractors, debunkers, and critics. He was at different times accused of treason, fraud, and hypocrisy and was once court-martialed, only to be exonerated and given a promotion by the board of presiding officers. He was blamed for dishonest and incompetent land surveying, and sued again and again for debt. Yet surviving records show he was a competent surveyor, though sometimes careless with clerical and legal work. By the end of his life
he had paid off all that his accusers said he owed. He was also blamed for siding with Indians, accused of being a “white Indian,” yet he fortified and defended Boonesborough against an attack led by his adopted father, the Shawnee chief Blackfish. Boone was also accused of being a Tory, a British sympathizer, during the American Revolution, yet he fought the British-led Indian attacks on Kentucky forts again and again.

“
For me, the most striking
and surprising result of a closer look at Boone is the way his sterling moral character shines steadily through all the vicissitudes of his remarkable life,” the scholar Nelson L. Dawson wrote in 1998.

Known as a scout and hunter, Boone became a patriarch, serving in legislatures and militias and on boards of trustees. A humble person who described himself as “a common man,” Boone was famous in both America and Europe. At one time he may have owned upward of thirty thousand acres of land in Kentucky; he ran a tavern, a store, and a warehouse, and he traded furs, hides, ginseng, horses, even slaves, and land. He lost it all. A recognized leader all his life, he moved often as a gypsy. With little formal education and uncertain spelling, he read a number of books and had a flair for language, even eloquence.

Like most great figures in American history, Boone has been both lucky and unlucky in his biographers. The schoolmaster and sometime surveyor and land speculator John Filson (ca. 1747–88) made Boone famous when Boone turned fifty in 1784. Filson’s
Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke
included a long chapter called “The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon,” written in the first person as though it was autobiography. The little book, destined to become a classic, was translated into French and German and pirated and paraphrased by a number of other authors. Reprinted by Gilbert Imlay in
A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America
, published in London in 1793, the narrative made Boone famous in Britain and helped inspire such budding Romantic poets as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Robert Southey.

Only recently have we
come to appreciate how much American Romanticism may have influenced British Romanticism. But the impact of Boone’s story and legend on William Bartram, Wordsworth, Byron, and other writers of the Romantic era is only the beginning of the story of the Boone legend and biography. Few other Americans have had their lives told so often and in such a wide range of styles, combining truth, insight, myth, hearsay, and outright fabrication. Because he became a figure of American folklore even while alive, Boone has been thought by many to be virtually a fictional character, subject of tall tales like Mike Fink the Keelboatman, or even Paul Bunyan. A professor with a PhD in English and tenure at a major university once said to me, “I never realized Daniel Boone was an actual person; I thought he was a creation of folklore.” I told her that even though she was wrong she was also half right, because the Boone most people know about
is
largely the creation of folklore. It is hard to rescue figures like Daniel Boone and Johnny Appleseed from the distortions of television and Walt Disney. The folklore and legends are part of the story too but should be identified and separated from the facts. When viewed in the larger context of the colonial age, the Boone legend is in many ways typical of the way stories and figures of quest and conquest were romanticized, as Europeans conquered lands and peoples. Yet many aspects of Boone’s character are atypical, virtually unique.

While Boone more than once told visitors that Filson’s account of his life was “true, every word truth,” he was not so pleased with Daniel Bryan’s would-be epic poem
The Mountain Muse
published in 1813, which portrayed him as a ridiculously heroic figure, a kind of American Moses. “
Such productions ought to be left
until the person was put in the ground,” he is reported to have said. Of the rumor that he still went hunting at the age of eighty, he observed to Rev. John Mason Peck, “I would not believe that tale if I told it myself. I have not watched the deer’s lick for ten years.
My eyesight is too far gone
to hunt.”

During Boone’s later years many accounts of his exploits and adventures were published in newspapers in America and Britain. Most took
their details and rhetoric from Filson, and some contained an element of truth but also included rumors and fancy, often portraying the old woodsman as a fierce Indian killer, wrestling bears and panthers in hand-to-hand combat. More than once he read accounts of his own death in newspapers.

The stories that formed around Boone’s name while he was alive were only the seeds of what would come later. The Reverend Timothy Flint, who had visited Boone in 1816, published the first book-length biography,
Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone
, in 1833. The book was very popular and for its time a best seller. But while it contained some valuable information it was also filled with colorful yarns, such as the improbable story of young Daniel almost shooting his future bride, Rebecca, while fire hunting on the Yadkin. When questioned about some of the exaggerations in his narrative,
Flint is supposed to have answered
he was not writing a book “for use but to sell.” It was Flint who gave to the world the most famous Boone quote about wanting “
more elbow room
.”

Another itinerant minister who wrote about the western frontier, Rev. John Mason Peck, visited Boone in December of 1818, two years before the woodsman’s death. Expecting to find a rough backwoodsman, Peck was surprised by Boone’s calm good manners, his modesty and cheerfulness. Peck was struck by the affection in which Boone was held by his children and grandchildren and neighbors. When Peck published his
Life of Boone
in 1847, he stressed the image of Boone as peacemaker, diplomat, reluctant Indian fighter, and instrument of Manifest Destiny. Boone’s descendants much preferred Peck’s account to Flint’s. It was Peck who told the story of Boone’s journey back to Kentucky to pay his debts after he sold the land Congress had awarded him in Missouri. According to Peck, Boone then returned to Missouri with only fifty cents in his pocket. “
No one will say, when I am gone
, ‘Boone was a dishonest man,’” he quipped.