By Tom Morrow
One of America’s first folk heroes was Daniel Boone, born, Nov. 2, 1734, the sixth of 11 children. The Daniel Boone Homestead was four miles from the Mordecai Lincoln House, who was great-great-grandfather of future president Abraham Lincoln.
Boone is most famous for his exploration and settlement of what is now Kentucky. It was still considered part of Virginia but was on the western side of the Appalachian Mountains. As a young adult, Boone supplemented his farm income by hunting and trapping game, and selling their pelts in the fur market.
Because Boone grew up on the frontier, he had little formal education, but gained deep knowledge of the woods. Boone received some tutoring from family members, though his spelling remained unorthodox.
In 1775, Boone blazed his “Wilderness Road” through the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachian Mountains from North Carolina and Tennessee into Kentucky. There, he founded the village of Boonesborough, Kentucky, one of the first American settlements west of the Appalachian Mountains.
On July 5, 1776, Boone’s daughter Jemima and two other teenaged girls were captured outside Boonesborough by an Indian war party, who carried the girls north towards the Shawnee towns in the Ohio country. Boone and a group of men from Boonesborough followed in pursuit, finally catching up with them two days later. The incident became the most celebrated event of Boone’s life. James Fenimore Cooper created a fictionalized version of the episode in his classic novel The Last of the Mohicans (1826).
Boone served as a militia officer during the Revolutionary War (1775–83), which, in Kentucky, was fought primarily between the American settlers and British-allied Indians. Boone was captured by Shawnee warriors in 1778, escaping in time to alert Boonesborough of an Indian attack.
Following the war, Boone worked as a surveyor and merchant, but fell deeply into debt through failed Kentucky land speculation. Frustrated with the legal problems resulting from his land claims, in 1799, Boone emigrated to eastern Missouri, where he spent most of the last two decades of his life (1800-20).
Boone remains an iconic figure in American history. He was a legend in his own lifetime, especially after an account of his adventures was published in 1784, framing him as the typical American frontiersman. After his death, he was frequently the subject of heroic “tall tales” and works of fiction.
Historian John Mack Faragher cautions the folk image of Boone as semiliterate is misleading, and argues that he “… acquired a level of literacy that was the equal of most men of his times.” He often was the only literate person in groups of frontiersmen.
Boone was not the simple frontiersman of legend, however: he engaged in land speculation on a large scale, buying and selling claims to tens of thousands of acres. The land market in frontier Kentucky was chaotic, and Boone’s ventures ultimately failed because his investment strategy was faulty and because his sense of honor made him reluctant to profit at someone else’s expense. According to historian Faragher, “Boone lacked the ruthless instincts that speculation demanded.”
Boone lived much of the last part of his life with the family of his son Nathan in this home near present-day Defiance, Missouri. He often spent time in the company of children and grandchildren, where he continued to hunt and trap as much as his health and energy levels permitted.
Daniel Boone died of natural causes on Sept. 26, 1820, five weeks short of his 86th birthday.
Boone was the subject of a TV series that ran on NBC from 1964 to 1970. In the theme song for the series, Boone was described as a “big man” in a “coonskin cap.” This did not describe the real Boone, who was not a big man and did not wear a coonskin cap. Boone was portrayed this way because Fess Parker, the tall actor who played him, was essentially reprising his role as Davy Crockett from an earlier TV series. That Boone could be portrayed the same way as Crockett, another American frontiersman with a very different personality, was another example of how Boone’s image was reshaped to suit popular tastes.
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