Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

by Kurt Andersen

A century after the first English settlers came west to a howling wilderness, a family of persecuted English Quakers came and built a cabin farther west, to avoid persecution by Quakers who’d preceded them, in the howling wilderness of Pennsylvania, and then moved deeper into the wilderness, to North Carolina. From there, one of their middle-aged middle sons led settlers even farther west into a fresh piece of wilderness. On his fiftieth birthday, an eight-thousand-word memoir of his first dozen years living on the new frontier was published, possibly written by him. “No populous city, with all the varieties of commerce and stately structures, could afford so much pleasure to my mind, as the beauties of nature” in “Kentucke, lately an howling wilderness…become a fruitful field.” The little book made Daniel Boone world famous, turning him into an emblematic American, a real-life superhero. Another bestselling as-told-to memoir featured him wrestling a bear and escaping natives by swinging on vines. Boone lived thirty-seven years as a celebrity, surviving and thriving on the edge of the American wilderness as he made it progressively less wild, more pastoral. His English contemporary Lord Byron, the romantic poet, devoted four stanzas to Boone in his final masterwork in the 1820s: “When they built up unto his darling trees,— / He moved some hundred miles off, for a station / Where there were fewer houses and more ease.” Which was just the kind of stuff Boone claimed to despi...