SOME FACTS
ABOUT DANIEL BOONE
G'day folks,
Daniel Boone was an American pioneer, explorer, a woodsman, and a
frontiersman, whose frontier exploits made him one of the first folk
heroes of the United States.
Daniel Boone’s name is synonymous with the American
frontier, which he explored and helped open to settlement. A skilled hunter and
trapper, Boone blazed trails through the wilderness, fought and befriended
Native Americans and witnessed America’s transformation from 13 colonies to 23
states over the course of his lifetime. Get the facts on the legendary
frontiersman, including how he became internationally famous and what he really
thought of coonskin caps.
His family came to America to escape religious persecution.
In 1713,
Boone’s father, a weaver and blacksmith, journeyed from his hometown of
Bradninch, England, to the colony of Pennsylvania, established by William Penn
in 1681 as a haven for religious tolerance. Like Penn, Squire Boone belonged to
the Society of Friends, or Quakers, a group whose members faced persecution in
England for their beliefs. In 1720, Squire married fellow Quaker Sarah Morgan
and Daniel, the sixth of the couple’s 11 children, was born in 1734 in present-day
Berks County, Pennsylvania. In the 1740s, two of the oldest Boone children wed
“worldlings,” or non-Quakers, and were disowned by the local Quaker community.
After Squire Boone refused to publicly apologize for the second of these two
marriages, he too was kicked out of the Quakers. He subsequently left
Pennsylvania with his family in 1750 and traveled by wagon to the colony of
North Carolina, where in 1753 he purchased two tracts of land near present-day
Mocksville.
Boone blazed a trail to Transylvania.
In 1775,
Boone and a group of some 30 woodsmen left to complete a 200-mile trail through
the wilderness to the Cumberland Gap—a natural break in the rugged Appalachian
Mountains—and into Kentucky. Boone had been hired for the job by Richard Henderson,
a North Carolinian who along with a group of investors planned to establish a
colony called Transylvania in an area comprising much of present-day Kentucky
and part of present-day Tennessee. After Boone blazed the trail, which became
known as the Wilderness Road, he helped establish one of Kentucky’s earliest
settlements, Boonesborough, which became Transylvania’s capital. The
Transylvania colony was short-lived; in 1778, the Virginia General Assembly
voided the deal Henderson had struck with the Cherokees for the land.
Nevertheless, the Wilderness Road became the gateway by which an estimated
200,000 settlers journeyed to the western frontier by the early 19th century.
Among those emigrants was Abraham Lincoln’s grandfather, who in 1779 traveled
the Wilderness Road from Virginia to Kentucky, where America’s 16th president
was born in 1809.
Boone was held captive by Native Americans.
In
February 1778, while Boone was traveling with a group of Boonesborough men
along Kentucky’s Licking River, he was captured by a group of Shawnees. The
Indians took him to their village in Ohio, where he was adopted by Shawnee
chief Blackfish to take the place of one of his sons who’d been killed. Boone,
who was given the name Sheltowee, or Big Turtle, was treated relatively well by
his captors—he was allowed to hunt and may have had a Shawnee wife—but they
kept a close eye on him. In June 1778 he managed to escape and make his way
back to Boonesborough, where he warned residents that the natives, upset
because settlers had moved onto their Kentucky hunting grounds, were planning
to attack. That September, over the course of nine days and nights, a group of
Shawnees and other Native Americans laid siege to Boonesborough, but the
outnumbered settlers managed to hold them off. The victory at Boonesborough
helped spark a new wave of emigrants to Kentucky, some of them personally
recruited and led there by Boone.
He was an international celebrity during his lifetime.
Boone was
transformed from a local hero into someone who was internationally famous when
his story was included in a book, “The Discovery, Settlement and Present State
of Kentucke,” published in 1784. The book was written by John Filson, a
Pennsylvania schoolteacher turned Kentucky land speculator, in an effort to lure
settlers to Kentucky. The author, who interviewed Boone, presented the
frontiersman’s adventures in what were supposedly his own words, although the
embellished language belonged to Filson. The book proved popular in both
America and Europe, where readers were captivated by Boone’s story. After
Boone’s death in 1820, his legend continued to grow with the publication of
such best-selling works as “The Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone, the First
Settler of Kentucky,” released in 1833. In this sensationalized account of
Boone’s life, author Timothy Flint portrayed him as a ferocious Indian slayer
who engaged in hand-to-hand combat and swung on vines to elude capture; in
reality, Boone had friendly relationships with a number of Native Americans and
claimed to have killed just a few of them.
Boone was unlucky when it came to real estate.
Although
Boone helped open up Kentucky to thousands of settlers, he ultimately was
unsuccessful when it came to securing his own piece of the pie. During the
1780s and 1790s, he worked as a surveyor in Kentucky while also investing in
real estate. However, his efforts as a land speculator failed to make him rich.
Boone ended up getting swindled in some deals and in other cases failed to
properly register his land claims. He got hit with lawsuits for selling
property to which he didn’t have valid title and also got sued for producing
faulty surveys. Boone even received death threats after his testimony in
various court cases resulted in people losing their land claims. Boone tried,
but largely failed, at other business ventures as well. He owned a store and
tavern in Limestone (present-day Maysville); served as a supplier of ginseng
root (the market eventually collapsed, leaving him in debt); and bought horses
with the intention of reselling them (before this could happen a number of the
animals escaped). By the late 1790s, Boone had soured on Kentucky and decided
to leave.
Later in life, he left the U.S.
In 1799,
Boone, then in his mid-60s, moved with his extended family from Kentucky, which
achieved statehood in 1792, to present-day Missouri, then under Spanish control
and known as Upper Louisiana. The Spanish, who wanted to encourage settlement
in the area, welcomed Boone with military honors and granted him 850 acres of
land in the Femme Osage district, west of St. Louis. They also waived the
requirement that all immigrants had to be Roman Catholic and made Boone a
syndic, or magistrate, of the Femme Osage district, responsible for settling
disputes among settlers.
In 1800,
the Spanish ceded the Louisiana Territory to France, and three years later the
U.S. gained control of it with the Louisiana Purchase. Boone subsequently lost
his land claims because he hadn’t followed the proper procedures to gain
permanent title to the land. After the frontiersman petitioned Congress,
President James Madison signed a bill into law in 1814 giving Boone his 850
acres; however, he soon had to sell the property to pay off Kentuckians who’d
heard the news about the grant and traveled to Missouri to collect on old
debts. Missouri became America’s 24th state in 1821, a year after Boone’s
death.
He didn’t wear coonskin caps.
Boone has
often been portrayed sporting a hat made from the skin and fur of a raccoon,
but in fact the frontiersman thought this type of headgear was unstylish and
instead donned hats made from beaver. According to Boone biographer John Mack
Faragher, the myth of the coonskin cap can be traced to a full-length portrait
of Boone made in 1820 by Chester Harding, who authentically depicted the
frontiersman wearing leggings, moccasins and a fringed hunting shirt and
holding a beaver hat. The painting was displayed in the Kentucky capitol for
several decades until it deteriorated. Harding later cut out Boone’s head and
pasted it onto a different background; however, a record of Boone’s outfit was
preserved thanks to artist James Otto Lewis, who had produced an engraving of
Harding’s original painting. Lewis hired an actor, Noah Ludlow, to help sell
prints made from the engraving, and when Ludlow later performed a show that
required him to dress like a frontiersman he modeled his costume after Boone’s
wardrobe in the engraving. Unable to find a beaver hat, he substituted it with
a coonskin cap. Ludlow’s performances were a success and the coonskin cap’s
association with Boone stuck.
Boone might not be buried in his official grave.
Boone
died on September 26, 1820, in present-day Defiance, Missouri. He remained
active into old age, unsuccessfully volunteering to fight in the War of 1812
and going on his last big hunt just a few years before he passed away. Boone
was buried in a graveyard near Marthasville, Missouri, next to his wife,
Rebecca. In 1845, the owners of a cemetery in Frankfort, Kentucky, convinced
the Boones’ descendants to allow Daniel and Rebecca’s remains to be reinterred
in the Bluegrass State. The Frankfort cemetery was new and its owners were
interested in drumming up publicity; they also promised to erect a monument to
Boone at the new burial site.
An
elaborate reinterment ceremony was held, featuring the governor of Kentucky and
other dignitaries. However, charges eventually surfaced that Boone’s Missouri
grave had been poorly marked and the wrong remains were dug up and reburied in
Kentucky. In 1983, a forensic anthropologist examined a cast made of Boone’s
supposed skull before the reburial and announced it was possibly that of an
African-American man rather than a Caucasian one. When a second forensics
expert later studied the cast of the skull, though, she decided it wasn’t in
good enough condition to serve as the basis for any scientific conclusions.
Clancy's comment: I remember watching a television series about this guy when I was a kid. It opened my eyes to nature, and was one of many shows that inspired me to see the world. And ... I did, and never regretted it.
I'm ...
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