Although forever associated with the settlement of Kentucky, Daniel Boone was in fact born in Pennsylvania, close to present-day Reading, on November 2, 1734. Boone was the sixth child of Sarah Morgan and Squire Boone, a Quaker blacksmith and weaver from England. Although young Daniel did not receive a formal education, his mother taught him to read and write, and his father first tutored him in the outdoors skills and knowledge that would become Daniel Boone’s hallmark. Daniel Boone received his first rifle at the age of twelve, and he was famously said to have killed a bear while still a boy. The Boones moved to North Carolina when Daniel was fifteen, and the young Boone developed a reputation as a skilled hunter even at that tender age. Daniel Boone began his military service in 1755 during the French and Indian War, and drove a wagon for General Braddock, famously escaping the ambush at Turtle Creek near modern-day Pittsburgh.
Daniel Boone married Rebecca Bryan in 1756. Although the couple began their life together in North Carolina near Boone’s parents, Daniel’s wanderlust would soon lead them west into the North Carolina backcountry. In 1767, Boone led an expedition along the Big Sandy River in present-day West Virginia and Kentucky. Two years later he led a team of explorers through the Cumberland Gap, marking and effectively opening the way for large-scale migration into Kentucky. Six years later, in 1775, Boone led a group of settlers to land that he claimed as Boonesborough, Kentucky. Working under the auspices of the Transylvania Company, Boone built a fort on the location and brought his own family to live on the frontier. Boone’s establishment of permanent residence and a military encampment on the site raised the ire of the Shawnee and Cherokee in the region, and hostilities soon broke out.
Covered Wagon
No single icon represents the movement west and the doctrine of Manifest Destiny more succinctly in the American imagination than the covered wagon. Perhaps most indelibly emblazoned in the collective consciousness in the past half century by the adventures of Ma and Pa Ingalls of Little House on the Prairie fame, the covered wagon was both transportation and shelter for families on the way to the western frontier. Often called “prairie schooners,” such wagons were a variation on the structure of the classic Conestoga wagon, which was generally used for cargo. The image of covered wagons, generally hauled by teams of oxen, bouncing along established ruts across the Great Plains is, to the mind of many Americans, the very epitome of “how the West was won,” and reproductions of prairie schooners provide popular tourist photo opportunities to this day.
C. Fee
If one single event could be said both to encapsulate and launch Daniel Boone’s status as an icon of American folklore and legend, it would probably be Boone’s rescue of his daughter Jemima and her friends, who were captured by a Shawnee raiding party in July 1776. The Native Americans in the vicinity of Fort Boonesborough, already upset by the establishment of a fortified settlement in their territory, were further enticed by British bounties on the scalps of American settlers. Terrified by the violence and lack of stability on the frontier, many families retreated to the more settled areas. Daniel Boone and his family remained, however, and Jemima and her friends were captured by a raiding party when they wandered too far from the security of the fort.
When news of the abduction reached the settlement, Daniel Boone sprang into action, dividing the available searchers into search parties. Leading a group on the trail of the captured girls, Daniel was able to follow them with his prodigious abilities as a tracker. Some sources suggest that Jemima and her companions, confident that they would be followed, managed to leave a number of signs of their passage. Boone’s reputation for almost mythical prowess on the trail was established, however, because Boone reportedly left the trail of the Shawnee and their captives to take a shortcut that enabled him to catch up and come upon the raiders unawares, suddenly attacking them and rescuing the girls unharmed.
In this episode, Daniel Boone put the life of his own daughter into hazard by taking a calculated risk, but the fact that he guessed so accurately made him seem almost more than human and raised him to legendary status in American lore. This episode resonated strongly with the frontier families of the time, as well as with their contemporary relatives and friends and their later descendants. The dangers of the frontier, and specifically the terrors associated with the Native Americans, imparts to the episode its importance, its drama, and its suspense. Given traditional prejudices against Native Americans, however—especially concerning race-mixing—it is not incidental to the story’s power that it is a young daughter who is snatched from the safety of the settlement. Moreover, Daniel Boone emerges from this episode an almost superhuman American frontier hero, embodying in the popular American mind the skills, fortitude, and nerve necessary to tame the wilderness.
Daniel Boone was himself famously captured by the Shawnee, and his eventual escape and return to Boonesborough would add to his legend. The winter of 1777–1778 was a harsh one, and it was made all the more so by the constant threat of attack by the Shawnee, who were allied with the British during the American Revolution. As the winter wore on, the people of Fort Boonesborough began to run low on salt, without which the colonists would soon be in trouble. During colonial times, salt was a precious commodity necessary for preserving meat and flavoring food. The most common way to obtain salt on the Kentucky frontier during those days was to visit a salt lick, a natural deposit of salt where animals would gather to lick the salty residue, hence the descriptive name. Settlers boiled down large quantities of salty water to extract the salt they needed. Despite the danger of leaving the fort largely unprotected, a sizable group of men was dispatched to the nearest salt spring, several dozen miles away. There the party gathered salt for a number of weeks.
While out hunting in early February, Boone was captured by a large war party of Shawnee on their way to attack Fort Boonesborough. Boone was able to dissuade his captors from their intent, however, by convincing the other members of his party to surrender peacefully and to return with the Shawnee to their encampment. Once there, Boone was quickly assimilated into the village life of the Shawnee, who were reportedly impressed by the manliness, fortitude, and skills of their captive. Boone played his role so well, the story goes, that the Shawnee chief adopted Daniel into his own family, while Boone’s fellow prisoners became convinced that he was in league with their enemies. Boone bided his time in this manner until the Shawnee prepared to attack Fort Boonesborough the following summer. Knowing that the settlement could not survive such an onslaught, Boone chose an opportune moment to escape, hastening ahead of pursuit across rugged terrain for several days to reach the fort in time. Although Boone was suspected of complicity with the Shawnee, he was able to help Fort Boonesborough to survive a siege by the attackers, was eventually cleared of suspicion, and subsequently returned to North Carolina to reunite with his family, which had presumed him dead. In this story, Boone’s legendary woodcraft is matched with peerless guile and cunning, rendering a portrait of an American hero who is in this tale a blend of Natty Bumppo and Nathan Hale, with just a whiff of Benedict Arnold added for spice.
Due to an unfortunate financial episode, the people of Boonesborough soured on the founder of their settlement, and Daniel Boone moved on. Money troubles plagued Boone throughout his life. In fact, he never profited as much as others, even though he opened the frontier for the myriad settlers who followed him. Boone left Kentucky for Point Pleasant, Virginia, which is now part of West Virginia. He served his new community as both a militia officer and an elected representative before moving on to Missouri, where he would spend the remainder of his life, which he largely dedicated to hunting. He did take part in some expeditions further west, and his reputation became ever more burnished in that regard.
Nathan Boone founded a salt works at Boone’s Lick, and although Daniel himself was not involved in the operation, the Boone name drew many settlers to the region. This phenomenon underscores a fundamental irony of Daniel Boone’s life and legacy: although he is credited with opening the way through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky, and although his name had the currency to entice many families to take their chances on the frontier across the Alleghenies, Daniel Boone himself was never successful there in the long term as a settler and landowner. The same proved true in the Missouri country, where Boone acquired great prestige and the Boone name drew many more settlers, but the man himself eventually saw his claims to property and title invalidated. One could argue that Daniel Boone’s legacy in legend also illustrates this trend. For all the heroic trappings and folkloric power associated with the name of Daniel Boone, the flesh-and-blood man himself saw his hopes and dreams dashed again and again.
There is also an implicit irony in Daniel Boone’s love of the wilderness and especially in his habit, late in life, of reminiscing about the Kentucky frontier of his youth: that which he loved best was destroyed through his own efforts as a trailblazer, as settlement and civilization followed where Daniel Boone led. Like a latter-day Moses in the Promised Land of the frontier of the New World, Daniel Boone was not ultimately able to enjoy the fruits of his labors, although those who followed him into the land of plenty were able to do so. Daniel Boone died in what is now Missouri on September 26, 1820. Some decades later he was exhumed and reinterred on the site of his beloved Boonesborough, Kentucky.
Little House on the Prairie
The name of the most popular of a series of autobiographical children’s novels by Laura Ingalls Wilder (1867–1957), Little House on the Prairie provided an iconic image of growing up on the rapidly disappearing American frontier. Absorbed more or less as gospel by generations of American children, the Little House books offer an idyllic vision of homesteading that validates and perpetuates prevailing uncritical early twentieth-century views of the courage, righteousness, and nobility of American frontier families. That the wanderlust of Pa Ingalls might in some measure reflect troubling aspects of Manifest Destiny is often overlooked, as is Ma Ingalls’s stated antipathy toward Native Americans. That the Little House stories and the myths they transmit continued to be in accord with commonplace American notions of “how the West was won” well after Wilder’s death, moreover, is evidenced by the extremely popular Little House on the Prairie television series, which ran from the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s.
C. Fee
The legacy of Daniel Boone as a legendary figure began well before his death. Indeed, in 1816, Daniel Bryan, the cousin of Boone’s wife, published a monumental book-length poem entitled The Mountain Muse, which was said to have been far too fictional and flowery for Boone’s own taste. Perhaps most enduringly, James Fenimore Cooper based his portrait of Natty Bumppo, the protagonist—by different names—of his epic novels of the frontier, on Boone. Indeed, the Leatherstocking hero’s various names and eponyms in the books—“Hawkeye,” the “Deerslayer,” the “Trapper,” and perhaps most notably, the “Pathfinder”—all speak to fundamental facets of the legend of Daniel Boone. Cooper was the first American author to win international acclaim, and his hero Natty Bumppo helped to export overseas the mythic mountain man of early Appalachia and beyond.
In 1822, Lord Byron eulogized and immortalized Daniel as “General Boone” in Don Juan. Byron’s Boone represented the embodiment of the Romantic notion of the Natural Man in complete accord with the unfettered wilderness, and although Byron’s is hardly the text most closely associated with Boone, this portrayal is in close accord with the legend of Boone as it would come to fullest flower: the frontier man of the New World wilderness who lived in perfect balance with the world around him. Such a figure provided a stark contrast to the decadent Old World that the settlers’ forebears had left behind. Daniel Boone thus became the iconic figure of the frontier of the early republic, just as Washington was for the battlefields of the Revolution and Jefferson and Franklin were for the Declaration of Independence.
The works of Emerson and Thoreau, in particular, may be thought to distill and encapsulate the legendary spirit of Daniel Boone. By the heyday of those writers Boone was already a familiar, looming presence in the background of any American vision of an identity rooted in independence and solitude, especially as these might be found in a quiet existence in harmony with the natural world. Indeed, even without calling Boone by name, the titles of Emerson’s 1836 work Nature or 1839’s “Self-Reliance,” for example—not to mention Thoreau’s self-described desire to go to the woods “to live deliberately” in the opening of his most well-known work, 1854’s Walden, or Life in the Woods—invite even the most unexamined and cursory reader to wonder about the debt they owed to Daniel Boone. Even in his own lifetime, Boone’s association with those same values was a folkloric commonplace, and his legendary status in that regard only grew greater with time. In fact, one can persuasively argue that, in the American consciousness, in many ways Daniel Boone is the epitome of the self-reliant individual who lived deliberately at one with nature.
Boone also was immortalized through the work of many painters, perhaps most notably in Thomas Cole’s 1826 work depicting Boone’s frontier homestead, Daniel Boone at His Cabin at Great Osage Lake, or George Caleb Bingham’s interpretation of Boone’s iconic status as the Pathfinder Hero in Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap, completed in 1852. Indeed, the entire Hudson River school of artists has often been cited as Boone’s spiritual descendants in their love of the natural world in general and, in particular, their passionate appropriation of the wilderness as a motif for the liberty and vitality of the New World.
Daniel Boone has continued to capture the popular American imagination, and he remains an icon of American lore to this day. In 1905, the Sons of Daniel Boone was founded by Daniel Carter Beard. An outdoors-oriented club based on principles aligned with those of the newly formed Boy Scouts, the Sons of Daniel Boone merged with the Boy Scouts in 1910. Daniel Boone was also an extremely popular television series starring Fess Parker in the title role, which ran for 165 episodes from 1964 to 1970. Daniel Boone, Trail Blazer, a feature film starring Bruce Bennett, was released in 1956. Even during his own lifetime, Daniel Boone provided an image of the rugged American individualist to which Americans gladly cleaved; although his achievements as an outdoorsman were indeed noteworthy, Americans have painted onto the Boone canvas a self-portrait, as it were, of everything they would like to believe about the country’s forebears on the frontier. This figure is necessarily one of contradictions—the solitary nature-lover who destroys that which he loves through his acts of trailblazing—but that speaks too, perhaps, of complexities in the American character that are not as easily resolved as one would like to believe. In any case, it is certainly true that—for good or for ill—the legendary, mythic, and folkloric faces attributed to Daniel Boone continue to shape American understanding of the settlement of the frontier to this very day.
C. Fee
See also Crockett, Davy; Lewis and Clark Expedition; Mountain Men
Further Reading
“Daniel Boone.” 2014. Biography.com website. http://www.biography.com/people/daniel-boone-9219543. Accessed August 24, 2015.
Farmer, Bill. 2014. “Daniel Boone and the History of Fort Boonesborough.” Fort Boonesboro Living History website. http://www.fortboonesboroughlivinghistory.org/html/daniel_boone.html. Accessed August 24, 2015.
Hammon, Neal O. 2013. My Father, Daniel Boone: The Draper Interviews with Nathan Boone. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.
McCormick, Charlie T., and Kim Kennedy White. 2011. Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music, and Art. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.
Morgan, Robert. 2007. Boone: A Biography. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.