Boone: A Biography

by Robert Morgan

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.

Of major figures in early American history, only Washington and Franklin and Jefferson have had their stories told more often and in greater detail.

The classic author I struggled with and learned most from as a young writer was Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau’s observation, knowledge, wisdom, integrity, artistry, and stubbornness remain unsurpassed in American literature and culture. And more than any other single author Thoreau expresses much that was likely the experience and aspiration and genius of Boone. Thoreau put into sentences the poetry and thought Boone had lived.

I found Boone a much more complex person than I had noticed before. Why was he remembered, romanticized, revered, and written about when many other figures on the Kentucky frontier were pretty much forgotten? I wanted to find out what it was about Daniel Boone that made him lodge in the memory of all who knew him and made so many want to tell his story. How was a scout and hunter turned into such an icon of American culture?

Squire and Sarah’s sixth child, Daniel, was born November 2, 1734 (October 22, Old Style). From the very beginning the family sensed that Daniel was different from the other children. Lively, apparently tireless, curious, when very young he helped out in the family trades of blacksmithing, milling, and farming. But family lore has it that from the very first Daniel liked to roam in the woods. Oley was mostly forest then, a green world of rolling hills and small streams, and from his childhood Daniel preferred to rove and study the ways of the wild. He seemed born to be an outdoorsman and hunter, the way John Keats was born to be a poet. One early biographer described the infant Daniel playing with his father’s powder horn and rifle where they had been laid down after a hunt.

From the beginning, the complexities and contradictions of Daniel’s character seemed evident. He loved most to spend time alone in the woods, observing and learning, tracking and trapping and killing game. Indians still lived in the neighborhood when Boone was a boy. One Indian, a close friend of George Boone, built a cabin on Boone’s land, lived to an old age, and was buried close by. The local Shawnee Indians liked him because he respected their ways and admired their knowledge of the land and forest. There was almost a Franciscan humility and reverence for life in the young Boone, yet he was a hunter, a killer of the wild animals. And though he was a Quaker, Daniel was a fighting Quaker. The stories of his youthful pranks and fights, told by Boone’s son Nathan to Lyman Draper in 1851, make it clear the young Daniel was no pacifist. Once two sisters, carrying a bucket of fish guts to empty during the shad run, saw Daniel sleeping under a tree. Unable to resist the temptation, they dumped the contents of the bucket on his face. Brushing the slimy entrails out of his hair and eyes, the young Daniel jumped up and bloodied the girls’ noses and sent them home howling. Within minutes the girls’ mother stormed into Sarah Boone’s kitchen and accused Daniel of attacking her daughters. But the peaceable Quakeress would not tolerate the tirade against her son. “If thee has not brought up thy daughters to better behavior,” she said, “it is high time they were taught good manners. An...

There were few schools in the area of Oley at the time. But the fact is all the other Boone sons received a respectable education. As far as we know only Daniel avoided school and the rules of grammar and spelling. It would seem his parents early on recognized his skills as a hunter and woodsman who provided the family with venison and turkey, squirrels and rabbits, as well as hides and furs. It was practical to let him do what he did better than anyone else.

A man’s rifle was his most important companion in the forest. The saying was he should select a rifle as carefully as a wife.

For the colonists in North America the West meant free land and independence from feudal rule and quitrents, from debt and debtor’s prison, from censures of the church and the class system, from servitude and poverty. The West was the place to rise, to become better, larger. For someone like Boone, the West was a place of mystery and shadow also, a stage on which to act a larger, more dramatic role, to play parts written on a different scale, in meadows and forests, along rivers and canebrakes, with buffalo far as the eye could reach, with flocks of passenger pigeons that filled the sky for days. From the time he returned from Braddock’s campaign, Boone began to think more and more about the land beyond the mountains, and he began to reach farther westward with each hunt, into the hills and mountains near the head of the Yadkin.

This collision between love of hunting and hunting skill, and a sustainable ecology, is at the heart of the contradiction in Boone’s life, and the history of modern America. The prowess and persistence of men like Boone made the decline of the game inevitable. There is some evidence that Boone began to understand this later in his life or at least had an inkling of the consequence of settlement and sustained hunting. In the charter of rules voted on at Boonesborough in May 1775 he urged restrictions on the wanton slaughter of game. But there is little evidence that he restrained himself in his commercial hunting for deer hides and furs. He never took part in the mass killing of buffalo for sport and for their tongues, but he was very much a part of the rush to strip the wilderness of its finest yield. In his time, of course, the wilderness and game seemed endless. The very world he sought to flee followed him and planted itself in his tracks.

Aaron Reynolds, who had been scolded by Patterson earlier for cursing, and then given a quart of whiskey for desisting, saved Patterson that day by seizing a horse and putting the wounded Patterson in the saddle and sending him across the river to safety. Reynolds planned to swim the river himself, but his buckskin pants were soaked and heavy and he sat down to take them off. While he was seated, Indians grabbed him, made him a prisoner, then left him under a single guard while the fight continued. Noticing that the guarding Indian’s rifle was not primed to fire, Reynolds knocked him out with his fists and escaped. Wearing only his shirt, Reynolds swam the river and ran all the way to Bryan’s Station to tell what had happened. Captain Patterson soon arrived on horseback and confirmed his story. In gratitude the captain awarded him two hundred acres of land, and the once foul-mouthed Reynolds settled down to become a Baptist and a farmer. It was said the story illustrated the good a well-placed gift of whiskey can do.

Let the reader understand.

After such a disaster there is a lot of blame to go around, and though Boone’s name is rarely mentioned in any of the recriminations, Boone did not let himself off so easily. He knew that losing his temper when snarled at by McGary was a serious failure of leadership at a critical moment. That his outburst was so uncharacteristic of him made the episode all the stranger and more painful. All his life he had shown calm good sense in moments of danger. Boone’s relative Abraham Scholl, who was with the company from Boone’s Station at the battle, said Boone “rather blamed himself in some degree for the Blue Licks battle.” For the rest of his life, Boone broke down and wept when he mentioned the battle. It was the greatest failure of his life. It was the occasion when his capacity for clearheadedness deserted him. His son Israel and seventy-six others had been killed as a result of his lapse. He may never have completely trusted himself again. The battle marked the end of the most important period of his life.

With the move to Marble Creek around 1783, Boone’s life entered a new phase, almost another dispensation. He was almost fifty and the events for which he would be remembered were mostly behind him: his long 1769–71 hunt into Kentucky, his negotiations with the Cherokees for the Transylvania Company, hacking Boone’s Trace and building Boonesborough in 1775, the rescue of Jemima in 1776, his adoption by the Shawnees in 1778, and his heroic escape and defense of Boones-borough. The debacle at the Blue Licks marked an end to his era of exploits, heroism, genius. And to really put a period to that phase of his life, he was about to become famous. He may have been a legend on the frontier for a dozen years already, but he was about to become even more of a legend back east, in Britain, and on the Continent. It is hard for anyone, even a man of Daniel Boone’s modesty, cheer, courtesy, and resourcefulness, to survive his own legend.

Filson elevated Boone to a celebrity from which, in J. Winston Coleman’s words, “neither the love of friends nor the hatred of enemies has . . . been able to remove him.” Filson portrayed a Boone who, according to Richard Slotkin, was “a model of the republican citizen . . . when the newly independent nation was looking for some self-image appropriate to its stature and ideology.”

However unlikely a figure he cut among his contemporaries, Filson’s writing has had a sustained influence on American history, folklore, and literature. “A man does not have to be great to be important,” Filson’s biographer says. “As an entrepreneur Filson was a failure. As a person he was uncongenial. As an intellectual he was undistinguished. But because he undertook some tedious and petty tasks, he made a substantial contribution to American history and letters: book and map sped the settlement of the West; in his tale of the adventures of Daniel Boone he created the prototype of our national hero.”

However much pleasure Boone took in Filson’s account and his new fame, neither seemed to do him much good in the years that followed. With his exceptional gifts and achievements Boone won renown, and the new recognition seemed to undermine the gifts, the faculties that had made him known. Leaving the woods to become a trader and public official, surveyor and land agent, Boone turned in directions where his talents were weakest.

Because of his Quaker upbringing, his respect for Indians, his peaceable nature, it is surprising that Boone accepted slavery so easily, owned slaves when he could afford them, and even traded in slaves. One would have thought that his experience as a captive of the Shawnees might have made him more sensitive to the issue of bondage, that his sense of fairness and honor would have led him to oppose slavery. It is a disturbing truth that even the best people tend to accept what they are familiar with, what they see practiced day after day around them.

BY 1788 the irony could not have been lost on Boone that he, as much as any other single human being, had helped create the world that was now repugnant to him, so raging and relentless in growth and greed. And he must have seen, perhaps for the first time, the contradiction and conflict at the heart of so much of his effort: to lead white people into the wilderness and make it safe for them was to destroy the very object of his quest. The paradox had been present in almost everything he had done, and yet he had ignored or misunderstood it. Whenever the recognition came to him, it must have been sobering, for he had to see that his genius and his talents virtually canceled each other out. Wherever he went, many others would follow. He wanted to enjoy and keep the object of his desire at the same time.

“Daniel Boone died . . . in the state of Missouri not owning as Much land as would make his grave.”