“Two darling sons and a brother have I lost by savage hands … Many dark and sleepless nights have I been a companion for owls, separated from the cheerful society of men, scorched by the summer’s sun, and pinched by the winter’s cold—an instrument ordained to settle the wilderness.”
— Daniel Boone
America loves its heroes—and one of our earliest and most revered national icons is frontiersman and trailblazer Daniel Boone. For nearly two centuries, beginning during his own lifetime, Americans have enshrined Boone as a larger-than-life knight of the forests and our first and greatest conqueror of the wilderness. Yet, by definition, legends tend to dehumanize their subjects. They erase the flaws and inconsistencies, glossing over or ignoring entirely the very traits that allow us to clearly see the real person within.
Boone has been the subject of countless books, paintings, plays and films. In the mid-1960s, after the success of his Davy Crockett miniseries, Walt Disney followed with a six-year run of Daniel Boone television episodes, the themes of which were mostly the product of his screenwriters’ imaginations. TV viewers came to equate “Dan’l” with the imperturbable persona of 6-foot, 6-inch actor Fess Parker. (The series’ own theme song touts Boone as “tall as a mountain,” when in fact, he barely stood a stocky 5 feet, 8 inches.)
There is no disputing that Boone was indeed a remarkable man. But as a historical figure, he was a product of his time with his share of contradictions. He was a slave owner who treasured personal freedom. He cherished his family, yet left his wife to manage their home and children—once, for two years—while he went on his “long hunts.” He was an American Indian fighter when the situation called for it, and yet, by his own statement, he never hated Native Americans, despite losing two sons and a brother-in-law to them. He loved the wilderness but welcomed development if a profit stood to be made. Often the first to open new lands to a westering nation, he failed to capitalize financially on his initiative. Although supremely woods-savvy, he fell victim to swindlers and crooked politicians, resulting in the loss of his land and the assumption of crippling debt. Ever anxious to succeed in business, he nonetheless failed as a surveyor, land speculator, trader and tavern keeper. And when he finally succumbed in his son Nathan’s house at the advanced age of 85, he died owning none of the millions of acres that he had opened to settlement.
Nonetheless, Boone’s understanding and mastery of the wilderness were unparalleled. He introduced the western frontier to a new and restless generation, blazing trails and building settlements beyond the borders of white civilization. He was, in fact, a genuine legend in his own time, and his place in the pantheon of American superstars was well and fairly earned.
Beginnings
Daniel Boone was born in the fall of 1734—the exact date is in dispute—near Reading, in southern Pennsylvania’s Oley Valley, on the fringe of what was then America’s western frontier. He was born to Quakers—the sixth of Squire and Sarah Boone’s 11 children—and in all likelihood, he received his rudimentary education from his mother. When he was 15, Boone moved with his family to the forks of the Yadkin River, in what has been described as the “western back country” of North Carolina. For Daniel, it was to be the first of many moves that would take him ever deeper into the forested wilderness.
First Blood
Five years later, Daniel, having briefly served in the Colonial militia, was driving a supply wagon as a teamster for the British army. At the time, the French and British were fighting for control of the continent, and each side boasted Native American allies. To further complicate matters, there were American Indians unallied with either side, simply fighting to keep all white interlopers from their ancestral lands.
Just the year before, the French had constructed Fort Duquesne at the hotly contested junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, where the city of Pittsburgh now stands. Shortly thereafter, the French successfully defended it, handing a young Virginia colonel named George Washington his first defeat. The British Crown answered by dispatching an aging Gen. Edward Braddock, at the head of two regiments of regulars to take command of its forces in America. On July 9, 1755, Braddock—who was blatantly ignorant of frontier warfare and too arrogant to learn—was leading a 4-mile-long, 2,000-man combined column of redcoat troops and Colonial frontiersmen toward Fort Duquesne, widening a Native American path into a passable road as they marched. Perched on his wagon seat among the other teamsters of the North Carolina frontier company was 20-year-old Daniel Boone.
Despite the advice of experienced locals, including a chastened Washington, Braddock refused to employ American Indian scouts. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the English, who were struggling to haul their cannon and mortars across the Monongahela, the French garrison at Duquesne—in company with their Native American allies—had come out to meet them. Canadian troops effectively blocked the rough road, as their unseen Native confederates fired down upon the column from the woods on both sides.
Experienced in American Indian fighting, the Colonial woodsmen immediately ran for the woods, while Braddock’s forces—reflecting the mind-numbing obtuseness of their officers—remained in formation. Boone and his fellow drivers were ordered to stay in position, their horses pointed to the front in anticipation of an advance that would never happen. While some obeyed, others jumped on their horses and rode to safety. Boone later stated that he stayed on his wagon, even as unseen, screaming foes rained death all about. Recalled one survivor, “The yell of the Indians is fresh on my ear, and will haunt me until the hour of my dissolution.”
More than 900 men fell within a short time, including Braddock, as confusion reigned among the British. Retreat was impossible, since the teamsters’ wagons blocked the path, and those who ran for the river only made easy targets for the rifles of the French and their allies. Boone finally cut a horse from its traces and galloped away from the carnage, as Native Americans broke from the woods to scalp the dead and wounded. Many who were captured suffered torture and a fiery death. The French and their allies claimed as spoils of war the British guns, and the wagons and all they contained.
Throughout his life, Boone would blame the slaughter on Braddock for refusing to use Native scouts or deploy flank guards, which might well have saved his column and his life. As it was, young Boone had experienced his first wilderness battle, and it was, as one biographer wrote, “one of the bloodiest and most disastrous British defeats of the eighteenth century.”
Shortly thereafter, Boone was accosted by a large, drunken brave on the bridge that spanned the Juniata River Gorge in Pennsylvania. Given no choice but to fight and determined that the brave had killed for the final time, Boone dispatched the man by throwing him off the bridge to the rocks below.
Later in life, Boone recalled the incident to a friend but dismissed the reports that he had slain countless other Native Americans as well: “I never killed but three.” By his own account, throughout his life, Boone respected American Indians, even those who had sworn to kill him.
Many of Boone’s words and recollections purportedly were related to young writer John Filson, who included them in his book, The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke, as an appendix titled, “The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone, Containing a Narrative of the Wars of Kentucke.” Filson, it should be mentioned, had invested in property in Kentucky, and he wrote the book in the hope of inducing bold Easterners to move there—and hopefully buy his land. The book made an instant hero of Boone, whose printed quotes might or might not reflect his actual words. According to contemporary sources, Filson faithfully adhered to the nature and spirit of his subject, if not his exact comments.
Marital Bliss
The year following Braddock’s disastrous defeat, Boone courted and wed Rebecca Bryan, the 17-year-old daughter of a well-to-do local landowner. With her black hair, dark eyes and tall, erect bearing, she was, according to one family member, “one of the handsomest persons” she had ever seen. By all reports, theirs was a love match.
Daniel and Rebecca settled on a small farm on her father’s land, where they spent the first 10 years of marriage in an 18- by 22-foot log home that Boone built. It featured a huge fireplace, separate summer kitchen and, eventually, an oaken floor, elevating it from a log cabin to a log house. Boone provided for his wife, and later his family, through subsistence farming, stock-raising, blacksmithing and wagon-driving. But he relied primarily on his woods skills as a hunter and trapper for food and marketable skins. Hunts, however, would often take him, and others of his ilk, away for weeks, months and sometimes years at a time, leaving the wife as the family’s sole support.
By all reports, Rebecca was a woman of uncommon strength at a time and in a place where such fortitude was all that stood between survival and utter ruin. When Daniel was off on a hunt, she was solely responsible for the family as well as the house, property and livestock.
A woman’s lot along the frontier was a hard one. One Boone biographer describes it in detail: “There was, of course, the cooking and cleaning, spinning and weaving, and washing and sewing … water to be fetched each day from the spring … wood to be chopped, gardens to be tended, and cows to be milked. There were fields to be cultivated and crops to be harvested as well. Needing fresh meat for the stew pot, many was the time that Rebecca herself hunted for small game in the woods near the house.”
Help was not always near at hand. Observed a missionary of the period, “The wife of the nearest neighbor lives half a mile, perhaps several miles away, and she has her own children, her cattle, her own household to care for …”
Women generally married in their teens and spent the rest of their productive years bearing children. The Boones’ first child arrived just nine months after their wedding, and three more would follow by the time Rebecca was 20. In all, during the first 25 years of their 56-year marriage, she would bear 10 children, as had her mother before her. Daniel’s own mother had borne 11. And Boone’s three married brothers and their wives spawned 35 offspring.
“Boone’s Party” by William Tylee Ranney, circa 1850. The painting is on display at Duncan Tavern in Paris.
Life on the Frontier
Because of the remoteness of the settlements, lawlessness was a constant problem, with the laws often enforced by the settlers themselves. When a young girl was taken by an outlaw band, young Daniel joined the posse that set out after them. They safely retrieved the girl and captured three men of the gang, who were taken to jail and, in short order, hanged.
Native American attacks were an ever-present danger, and in late 1759, after settlers and British soldiers had raped, murdered and scalped several members of their tribe, the Cherokee rose up against the Colonists. When some of Boone’s neighbors were slaughtered the following year, he moved his family back to Virginia. He soon returned alone to hunt again in North Carolina, and he might or might not have participated in the war against the Cherokee. (If he had, it would be difficult to believe his purported statement that he had killed only three American Indians in his entire life.) The war lasted well into 1763, with depredations committed by both sides, until the Native American sued for peace.
Throughout the 1760s, Boone returned to hunt and trap the bountiful woods and mountains, growing ever more familiar with the country. He soon developed an unparalleled reputation as a hunter and pathfinder, to the extent that other skillful hunters were referred to as “Boones.” Apparently, he had an extraordinary sense of direction and place, and, as a contemporary said, “He never crossed a route he had once traversed without at once recognizing the place and knowing that he was crossing one of his former trails.” Once, when asked if he had ever been lost in the wilderness, he famously replied, “No, I can’t say as ever I was lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.” His sense of direction was a skill that would serve him well when dealing with hostile tribes.
On one occasion, while hunting in eastern Tennessee, he was surprised and captured by a party of Cherokee. Reportedly, Boone showed no fear but invited them to share his camp. “He never quaked in the presence of Indians,” wrote one biographer, “but always looked them directly in the eye, speaking with a tone of respect yet determination.” Although they relieved him of his furs, they parted on peaceful terms. It would not be the first time Boone became a “guest” of American Indians and walked or ran away with a whole skin.
By 1765, the region around Boone’s home on the upper Yadkin had grown considerably more crowded, which to Boone meant anyone building within 10 or 12 miles of him. The game was effectively being driven from the area, and he moved his family farther upriver to the foothills of the Blue Ridge, just a short jaunt from his favorite hunting grounds. Their oldest son, James, was 10 at the time, and Boone began taking him along on his hunts, teaching the boy his invaluable woods skills.
There, Rebecca bore their sixth and seventh children. But if she harbored any hopes that her peripatetic husband might stay closer to home, they were soon dashed. Despite the fact that Boone had settled near his ideal hunting area, the siren call of good virgin land beckoned. As Boone himself later stated, “It was on the first of May, in the year 1769, that I resigned my domestic happiness for a time, and left my family and peaceful habitation … to wander through the wilderness of America, in quest of the country of Kentucke.”
Gathering several friends and fellow adventurers, including his brother-in-law, John Stewart, he set out once again. He would not return for two years.
Some historians have suggested that, at the time, Boone was in the employ of Richard Henderson, a lawyer and land speculator who formed a company to acquire vast tracts of land in Kentucky. Presumably, Boone was secretly acting as Henderson’s scout and land agent, and Henderson and his associates, in turn, bankrolled Boone’s two-year junket. Whether Boone knew or worked for Henderson at this juncture, he certainly would in the future.
Boone and his party crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains and took the Great Warriors Path west over several Appalachian peaks, then south to a tight gap in the mountains that a Virginia land outfit had dubbed Cumberland Gap. Boone has been credited as the first man to negotiate the narrow pass; in fact, Native Americans had been using it for centuries, and a handful of whites had traveled it for several years as well. However, it was Boone whom nearly a third of a million westering settlers would ultimately follow through the Cumberland Mountains toward their new lives.
Boone’s party continued its journey of discovery until, in his words, “[F]rom the top of an eminence, we saw with pleasure the beautiful level of Kentucke. We found everywhere abundance of wild beasts of every sort, through this vast forest. The buffalo were more frequent than I have seen cattle in the settlements … We are as rich as Boaz of old, having the cattle of a thousand hills.”
Kanta-ke: The Legend Grows
According to oral tradition, Daniel Boone was the first American to explore the “country of Kentucke”; he was not. This rich land of legend, teeming with wild game and blessed with navigable rivers, fresh springs and precious salt licks, was known to European explorers and settlers for decades before Boone’s birth, and American Indian traders were actively plying their wares there for years. It was a subject much discussed by hunters, trappers and land speculators, and Boone himself had known of it since the time of Braddock’s defeat more than 15 years earlier. Yet, although he was far from the first, his was the name that would be forever linked to it.
The name itself derived from Native American usage, although its exact translation and tribal origin are much contested. It presumably was from an Iroquois word or term, either Ken-tah-ten, which translates to “land of tomorrow,” or Kanta-ke, meaning “meadow.” Or perhaps it was from the Shawnee, for “place of Blue Licks,” a common term for salt springs. And the Wyandot also have a claim on the name, from a tribal word meaning “a plain.”
The spelling was as variable as the name’s possible sources and meanings. Besides Kanta-ke, it was spelled Kentucke, Cantucky and Kaintuck, to list just a few iterations. Whatever the source and spelling of its name, Kentucky offered both great opportunities and hazardous challenges to those bold enough to venture there. The former came in the seemingly endless stretches of rich, available land; the latter, from the tribe that would prove a constant challenge to Boone, his friends, followers and family.
The Shawnee had been pushed around and driven from place to place since the late 1600s. An Algonquin tribal group from the southern Great Lakes area, the Shawnee were forced from their homeland between the Ohio and the Cumberland in the 1680s by Iroquois seeking to expand their fur trade. Some of them chose to relocate in Pennsylvania, but by the early 1700s, American Colonists and their burgeoning settlements edged them out again.
By this time, they were joined by outcasts from several other tribes. Building a number of towns along the Ohio River, they understandably sought to distance themselves as far as possible from the doings of the French, British and Colonials as well as other tribal groups. Their most remote settlement, which housed upwards of a thousand people, was called Blue Lick Town, built at a junction of the Kentucky and Red rivers.
Unfortunately, independence from outside forces soon became an impossibility, and conflict would prove inevitable. For Boone, it began with a warning. While walking in the woods, he and John Stewart found themselves surrounded by a band of irate Shawnee. As Boone recalled it, after pilfering all their pelts and provender, the Shawnee let them go with an advisory:
“Go home and stay there … [T]his is the Indians’ hunting ground, and all the animals, skins and furs are ours. And if you are so foolish as to venture here again, you may be sure the wasps and yellow-jackets will sting you.”
More bold than sensible, the two pursued the Shawnee and took back their horses as the party slept. However, they were soon recaptured, bound and force-marched toward the Ohio for a solid week. Breaking their bonds, they managed to escape, working their way back to their base camp. While some of their party had had enough and turned for home, Boone and a few others remained, trapping beaver and hunting bison throughout the winter, naming various landmarks, creeks and salt licks as they went. Boone was known to take books along on his hunting trips, and on this foray, he entertained his companions by reading aloud from Gulliver’s Travels.
One day, Stewart, who was as much a friend as an in-law to Boone, disappeared. He would not be found for another five years, when one of Boone’s crew on the Wilderness Road discovered a skeleton in the hollow of a sycamore. It bore the signs of a bullet wound in one arm, and Stewart’s initials on the powder horn. Presumably, he had hidden in the trunk after being wounded and subsequently bled to death.
Soon after, the rest of Boone’s party turned for home. Boone remained alone in Kentucky for another three months, finally growing desperate for the company of his family. In May 1771, he returned to Rebecca and the children. According to oral tradition, he appeared at a dance, hirsute and unrecognizable, and asked Rebecca for a dance. Disgusted, she turned away from the bearded stranger. “You need not refuse,” he laughed, “for you have danced many a time with me.” A mighty hug reunited the loving couple. It makes for a homey story and, apocryphal though it might be, the homecoming was reportedly a happy one.
Meanwhile, over the previous two years, the desire for new, cheap land had built to a frenzy. Land companies were forming, as surveyors were sent forth in droves, their little telltale red flags extending south and west into the lands of increasingly anxious tribes. Kentucky, observed Boone in classic understatement, “had drawn the attention of many adventurers.”
Despite the Shawnees’ warning, Boone returned to Kentucky the following year. He hunted, trapped and returned home in May 1773, in time to see the birth of his eighth child. When next he traveled to Kentucky, it was at the head of a train of immigrants, including Rebecca, their children, several of Daniel’s and Rebecca’s relatives, and other would-be settlers with their stock and property—including slaves. They took no wagons; the way was often too narrow and too rough. All the possessions they could take with them—tools, clothing and a few personal items—were tightly packed on horses that progressed slowly and in single file.
On the night of Oct. 9, 1773, disaster struck. The column had broken up into two sections, with Daniel at the head of the lead group, and his son, 16-year-old James, with the second. They had camped at the edge of Powell Valley, Virginia, when, without warning, a combined party of Cherokee, Shawnee and Delaware attacked the second group. James was wounded and horribly tortured before finally succumbing to war club and tomahawk blows. In all, six perished, including a slave whom the tribes had taken with them. He was found 40 miles away, his head split by a hatchet.
Thus far, Boone’s obsession with the “country of Kentucke” had cost him his brother-in-law and close companion, John Stewart, and his oldest, closest son. It would levy a higher tariff still on Boone and his family in the years to come.
Part II in the November issue will examine Daniel Boone’s unfortunate involvement in Richard Henderson’s ambitious and ill-fated land company, the construction and defense of the frontier settlement of Boonesborough, the death of another son, the rescue of a wounded Daniel by the legendary woodsman Simon Kenton, and a war with the regional tribes that seemed to go on forever.
RECOMMENDED READING
Daniel Boone - Autobiography of Colonel Daniel Boone
John Mack Faragher - Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer
Michael A. Lofaro - Daniel Boone: An American Life
Robert Morgan - Boone: A Biography