1 of 2
Courtesy of The State Historical Society of Missouri
Daniel Boone Crosses the Cumberland Gap
2 of 2
Daniel Boone Crosses the Cumberland Gap
As Franklin, Jefferson and Washington were enshrined as founders of the American Republic and exemplars of man in civil society, their contemporary Daniel Boone won fame at the beginning of the westward movement as a man in a state of nature, a son of the wilderness guided by virtue and natural wisdom. An enduring American icon, Boone is the wearer of many hats, including the coonskin cap depicted in Enid Yandel’s popular sculpture of the frontier hero at the entrance to Cherokee Park in Louisville, a chapeau that in life he never wore. Like Walt Whitman’s persona in “Leaves of Grass,” Boone “contains multitudes,” some of them creating inconsistencies and contradictions—an indication of the multiple roles the iconic Boone plays in American culture.
At root, Boone the pioneer has been viewed as a variant of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s eighteenth-century “natural man,” a Noble Savage, the idealization of uncivilized man, an emblem of the innate goodness of men freed from the corrupting influence of civilization. This Boone of the wilds is fictionalized in James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, a figure similarly unsullied by civilization and its corrupting tendencies. In the five Leather-Stocking novels written between 1823 and 1841, Bumppo moves through incarnations of Deerslayer and Pathfinder to full-fledged Pioneer. These novels of search and rescue are the first of the popular genre of westerns. Though their locus moves west, as did Boone’s, they might more accurately be called eastern westerns, and to some degree they prescribe the conventions of the modern genre of western hero—the laconic and lone figure who is a Euro-American knight on the prairie, overcoming adversity, never really falling for the allure of material riches or domesticity.
John Filson’s The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke, published in 1784 and later reprinted in French and German editions, is the first, perhaps least accurate, and most memorable glorification of the frontiersman’s life. Biographer, historian, cartographer, explorer and early publicist John Filson (1753-1788) was born in Pennsylvania, educated in Maryland, and was believed to have been killed by Indians. Boone’s narrative, though written in Filson’s ornate language and elaborate locutions alien to Boone himself, represent the birth of Boone in the public consciousness, the first in a long list of books that have had a perennial market in America and beyond.
Boone’s own narrative history of his life, started in old age after he had immigrated to Missouri, was lost in a move when a canoe carrying his goods capsized. Had it survived, some of the mythic scale of his life might have been trimmed more modestly to size, the record set straight. Hyperbole was simply not congruent with his character. What may have been the other great corrective to the Boone myth, the book projected by Lyman C. Draper (1815-91), who faithfully collected Boone material for most of a lifetime, was still unwritten at the time of the collector’s death. Since little that Boone said or wrote has come down to us intact, much of the well we draw from is tainted by hearsay, hagiography and other varieties of distortion, including weak memories and feeble strands of oral transmission. Some of what has been written is well-intentioned apocrypha, some of it outright lies.
Compared to others who have been elevated to mythic status, Boone, the most authoritative source of matters relating to his life, is virtually silent—maybe in part achieving his mythic status because of that silence. Others stepped in to fill the void. To this day, the name Boone guarantees robust sales, a testimonial to the persistence of the Boone apotheosis in the American pantheon. If there were a frontier hall of fame, Boone would be its centerpiece. Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, lesser writers churned out paler imitations of wilderness archetypes—of Davy Crockett, Kit Carson, and Simon Kenton—but Boone predominates, especially in books for young readers, specifically boys. The cottage industry of books in print about Boone at the time of this writing exceeds 100. Who knows how many have been superseded and are out of print.
Many books cast in what might be called the heroic mold were written for adoption in the classroom, as, for example, Francis M. Perry and Katherine Beebe’s Four American Pioneers: A Book for Young Americans (1900), which also contained selective biographies of George Rogers Clark, Davy Crockett, and Kit Carson, Boone’s fellow travelers in the frontier caravan. Their presence in the public schools accounts in large part for the pervasiveness in the nation of Boone as an all-purpose utility for American values.
Though the proliferation of such books accelerated early in the twentieth century during an upsurge of American nationalism, their predecessors appeared decades before the Civil War in such books as Timothy Flint’s Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone, the First Settler of Kentucky (1833). In this book Boon was portrayed, according to John Mack Faragher, as a “providential pathfinder for civilization.” Others include John Peck’s Daniel Boone (1847) in Jared Sparks’ Library of American Biography series; W.H. Bogart’s Daniel Boone and the Hunters of Kentucky (1854); and George Canning Hill’s Daniel Boone, the Pioneer of Kentucky (1860). Such nsineteently-century biographies spawned an appetite for Boone adventure books in the early 20th century, a growing industry that in this century shows few signs of waning.
For more that a hundred years, the popular image of Daniel Boone has been appropriated as a model for American youth, especially through the outdoors movement, whose strongest proponent was Dan Beard (1850-1941). Surveyor, writer, and illustrator, he founded the Sons of Daniel Boone in 1905, the earliest precursor to the Boy Scouts of America. Beard, who grew up on the banks of the Ohio in Covington, Kentucky, eventually moved to New York and wrote more than a dozen handicraft books for boys “to encourage conservation, love of the outdoors, and the pioneering spirit.” He went on to found the Boy Pioneers of America, an organization that influenced the formation of boy-scout movements in England and America.
Beard’s books reflect the times, contemporary and compatible with Theodore Roosevelt’s popularization of fitness, the robust outdoor life as a means to develop character, and efforts to dedicate national parks as a means of preserving the last wilderness lands of America. In his Winning of the West books (1889-96), Roosevelt himself idealized Boone as an embodiment of the pioneer spirit. In Boone he recognized a symbol of the rugged individual able to survive the frontier’s harsh environment and draw moral nourishment from it, an individual schooled in the ways of nature, possessing the values of self-reliance and stewardship that nature came to represent for those who questioned its despoilment during the high tide of American industrialization.
These forces and a revival of nationalism in American culture spawned dozens of Boone biographies and popular adventure books for boys, including Scouting with Daniel Boone (1914) by Everett T. Tomlinson, a fictional, character-building book that was part of the Every Boy’s Literary Series authorized by Boy Scouts of America. Other fictional renderings of Boone’s life followed, including Stewart Edward White’s Daniel Boone: Wilderness Scout (1922), with stunning color illustrations by James Daugherty, who later would produce his own Boone book. In his introductory chapter, White outlines the connections between the idealized Boone and scouting:
If the Boy Scouts would know a man who in his attitude toward the life to which he was called most nearly embodied the precepts of their laws let them look on Daniel Boone. Gentle, kind, modest, peace-loving, absolutely fearless, a master of Indian warfare, a mighty hunter, strong as a bear and active as a panther, his life was lived in daily danger, almost perpetual hardship and exposure; yet he died in his bed at nearly ninety years of age.
So intent were these writers on creating a hero that they failed in most instances to do justice to the depth and contradictions of human personality. More often than not, they were more concerned with shaping an image than probing the complexities of Boone’s character. White unquestioningly accepted the paradox of the peace lover who excelled in violence, the gentle man hardened by necessity, the refined man whose physical agility and prowess were comparable to those of beasts.
A slightly different take on Boone is found in Daniel Henderson’s Boone of the Wilderness: A Tale of Pioneer Adventure and Achievement in ‘The Dark and Bloody Ground’ (1921). Adopting the view of Boone as a bold bearer of civilization rather than an escapee from it like Natty Bumppo, Henderson introduced his book with a poem that accents Boone’s heroic mission to tame the wilds:
“You dare not cross the Cumberlands!”
the voices said to him;
“You may not tread the azure grass
beyond the mountain’s rim!
No white man’s foot may follow
the deer and buffalo—
The red men guard the ranges!”
but Boone replied, “I go!”
James Daugherty, who had illustrated Stewart Edward White’s work and whose dramatic, swirling lithographs of Boone brought the Kentucky frontier alive for me in Louisville’s Crescent Hill Public Library, addresses Boone in the invocation that begins his Daniel Boone (1939) as “a living flame, ever young in the heart and bright dream of America marching on.” Depicting Boone in this juvenile biography as a foot soldier in the march of progress, nationalism and democracy, Daugherty called for transferring the spirit of the frontier to a new generation of youth, “That you may have the enduring courage to cut a clean straight path for a free people through the wilderness of oppression and aggression.” Written as clouds of war were darkening Europe, Daugherty’s bravado today would spark objections from revisionists who might describe Boone less as a pioneer taking a first step in the movement west than an accessory to Manifest Destiny and the decimation of America’s Native peoples.
In her fictionalized biography Daniel Boone (1945) in The American Adventure Series, Edna McGuire reaffirmed this view of Boone as a foot soldier in the advance column of civilization, describing him as a “freedom-loving” and “home-seeking” pioneer who fought bravely in defense of his home and faced the hardships of the frontier with “high courage.” My own favorite early portrayal of Boone was Louisville native John Mason Brown’s Daniel Boone: The Opening of the Wilderness (1952) in the popular Landmark series of American history, a series that fueled among many of my generation a love of history.
There are two central archetypes that these depictions of Boone seem to reinforce. One focuses on place, an Adamic figure’s longed-for-return to Eden, that unspoiled reserve where nature predominates and man can recover his lost innocence.
The world from which he is redeemed is not only the established civilization of the Eastern colonies but the Old World itself. A new man supplants the guilt and moral jadedness of eighteenth-century Europe, what R.W.B. Lewis in his book of that title described as an “American Adam.” The other, almost in its opposite, is an archetypal image of “the man who copes”—Boone as a kind of North American Robinson Crusoe: bold, self-reliant, resourceful, and more than equal to the hardships and dangers posed by wilderness and the Native peoples who inhabited it. Reflecting conventional sentiment of the time, this model found fault with the Native American’s stubborn defense of his homeland, identifying him as a Manichean counterpart of the bringers of light and civilization, a devil. Revisionist historians and the rise of the Native American movement of the 1960s have done much to reexamine these views and temper their extremism and racial bias.
A more accurate symbolic location for Boone would be in a kind of no-man’s land between the wilderness that is and the settlement that will be, neither a builder nor a farmer but a hunter, a Nimrod providentially equipped to explore the vast cipher of the continent and mark a trail for others. This image of Boone is embodied in George Caleb Bingham’s Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap (1851-52), a painting that depicts Moses-like Boone with confident stride leading pioneer families through the Cumberland Gap to the Promised Land. He is also the image of Jefferson’s sturdy yeoman whose legions are the vanguard that will transform the wilderness into farms and market towns. Boone was, in fact, by profession a surveyor, a good one who platted thousands of acres for those that would become the yeoman farmers that Jefferson envisioned populating the West. He was also a legislator and would-be government contractor. For a time he also kept a tavern and trading post at Limestone (Maysville, Kentucky), one of the primary points of debarkation on the Ohio. Behind this romanticized leader is the provider, a man with a family who increasingly felt the economic press of mouths to feed. An inventory of Boone’s resume should refer to these livelihoods in addition to his popular pastimes as hunter, explorer and Indian fighter.
It is not so much the particulars of Daniel Boone’s life that raised him to the rank of America's quintessential pioneer as it is the larger-than-life image that others have created in children’s histories, biographies, statues, paintings, engravings, movies, television serials, and the unapologetic hagiography accorded to those associated with the Westward Movement. After all, the lives of James Harrod and Simon Kenton both equal Boone’s adventures and exploits and even surpass Boone’s in terms of lasting accomplishments. The settlements they founded, Harrodsburg and Maysville, survive as modern-day communities, unlike Boonesborough, which is now a state park with a replica of the original fort. General George Rogers Clark, founder of Louisville and conqueror of the Northwest Territory during the Revolution, has cut a much wider notch in American history. Other less-well-known figures, including John Floyd, William Fleming, Benjamin Logan and even Boone’s own brother Squire, in many ways match or surpass Daniel in their actual contributions.
Though I heard stories about the frontier hero from a time beyond memory, my first printed encounter with Daniel Boone was in my fourth-grade reader, Adventures in Pioneering, by Mary Browning. Written to introduce children to Kentucky history, Browning’s narrative presents the frontier through “Grandma,” one of the first generation of pioneers, who describes the exploits of James Harrod and Daniel Boone to Jimmy Fisher and his sister Sally, her grandchildren. Under the old oak tree, she tells the “story” of Boone’s capture at Blue Licks, his adoption and escape from the Shawnee, and his bravery at the siege of Boonesborough. In such books, Boone was perceived as a peaceable man forced to defend himself and his neighbors to make Kentucky safe for settlement. If he is not the bringer of culture to the wilderness in the popular depiction, he is the safe-keeper of settlement, both the point man and bodyguard, so to speak, of civilization.
In the popular imagination, the bundle of virtues he possessed included valor, foresight, resourcefulness, pureness of spirit, benevolence in peace, ferocity in war—qualities that do not differ substantially from America’s most hopeful assessment of itself. To a great degree, Boone is presented as a kind of wilderness saint, a St. Francis with flintlock, his virtues highlighted in a series of parables and homilies, all sweetness and light, as he carved a pathway to Paradise. This heroic view of Boone is reflected in William Ranney’s painting Boone’s First View of Kentucky (1849). It depicts Boone and five companions in 1769, gazing out at the “beautiful level of Kentucke.” An adaption of this critical moment, with its threshold of promise and unanticipated suffering, is the subject of Gilbert White’s large lunette in the Kentucky statehouse.
The four panels in the monument at Boone’s gravesite above the Kentucky River are an idealized, if over-simplified, synopsis of his life. In milky marble they depict Boone’s grappling with a tomahawk-wielding Indian, Boone resting beside a downed buck, Boon, his rifle at rest, instructing a behaved slave whose eyes are respectfully downcast, and a woman, presumably Rebecca, milking a cow. In this scene of home Boone, as was so often the case, is absent.
Any deep probing reveals that Boone was more ambiguous and complex than textbooks or popular imagination portrays. For example, Boone the Quaker pacifist was also touted as a great Indian fighter. During his long life, Boone was in fact certain of killing only two Indians. One was at Blue Licks shortly before his son Israel was killed. The other killing he acknowledged was less justifiable, less often mentioned, bordering on gratuitous homicide. According to his son Nathan in Lyman Draper’s interviews, Boone, in the summer of 1770 near what would become Frankfort shot a lone Indian who was fishing from a fallen tree by the Kentucky River. Although Boone did not confess outright that he murdered him, and there may have been mitigating considerations of safety that justified his doing so, in his later years he simple told his son Nathan that “while I looked at him he tumbled into the river and I saw no more of him.” About the same time, on the other hand, he met an aged Indian who had been left to die by his comrades. Boone charitably killed a deer, took only a small portion of it for himself, and presented the remainder to the old Indian. In his In the American Grain (1925), William Carlos Williams’ Boone regarded Indians not as enemies but as his role model:
To Boone the Indian was his greatest master. Not for himself surely to be an Indian, though they eagerly sought to adopt him into their tribes, but the reverse: to be himself in a new world Indianlike.
So what image of Boone should we nurture? Most of us interpret Boone according to our own predilections. Some remember him as Boone the Rescuer, referring to his pursuit of the band of Shawnee that kidnapped his daughter Jemima and two other girls as they dangled their feet from a canoe on the Kentucky River near Boonesborough one Sunday afternoon in 1776. When the alarm was sounded, Boone was in such haste to begin the pursuit that he left without moccasins on his feet. By second-guessing the kidnappers’ route north and exercising caution, he succeeded in rescuing the girls.
Others cite his deliverance of Boonesborough with his timely warning and heroic defense during the siege of 1778. Still others are taken by his stoical acceptance of conditions over which he had no control, as in his capture while boiling salt at Blue Licks in February of 1778, giving in when resistance was senseless and then persuading the party of men that accompanied him to surrender without a fight when it was clear that the odds were against them. After gaining the confidence of Blackfish, the Shawnee chief who adopted him as son and renamed him Shel-Tow-Y (“Big Turtle,” said to be a reference to his broadening girth during middle age), Boone lived quite contentedly with his captors until he learned they were preparing to attack Boonesborough, at which time he planned and cleverly executed his escape.
Skeptics cite inconsistencies in the stereotype of Boone as an unlettered son of the wilderness. For example, to name an obscure creek Lulbegrud, he drew on Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, a book that he had fetched to the wilderness and read aloud to his comrades during evenings by firelight. My own favorite is the story told by a party of long hunters in the years before settlement. Trekking in the woods, they were mystified by an unidentified caterwauling. Stealthily, they crept up to a meadow where they found Boone on his back singing as if there were not another person within a hundred miles, within all of Kentucky. This image of Boone as heedless, happy, self-sufficient and perfectly at one with nature is endearing and indelible. Equally affecting is his admission when asked by Chester Harding, the portraitist who painted the only full-figured image of him from life, if he had ever been lost in the vast spaces of Kentucky. “No,” he is supposed to have said, “but I was once bewildered for three days.”
As students of Boone have pointed out, Boone was far from being a happy harbinger of settlement. Tragically, he lost his eldest son James during his first attempt to bring his and other families to Kentucky. As the population of Kentucky surged in the 1780s and Boone was legally outmaneuvered in defending his thousands of acres in land claims, he wanted nothing more than to move beyond the settlements. In his mind, they came to represent the depletion and senseless slaughter of game, the pettifogging of land grabbers and opportunists, the whirling of the wilderness into consumable grids of freeholds and farmlands.
According to his son Nathan, when his father left Kentucky, “he did it with the intention of never stepping his feet upon Kentucky soil again.” This hardly squares with Bingham’s image of Boone proudly leading settlers into Kentucky to establish an agrarian land of plenty. Nor does it conform to later studies that indicate only a small percentage of those coming to Kentucky for land succeeded in owning any. According to Nathan, when the old frontiersman in his last years “saw strangers approaching the house, he, anticipating their prying curiosity, would take his cane and walk off to avoid them.” Historians and those who dilute history into folk traditions often paint in broad strokes, with greater emphasis and grander purpose than accuracy and nuance. Quite simply, we like our heroes pure, our culprits depraved.
Finally, Boone is the great survivor. He survived John Wilson, his first biographer, the person who more than any other fathered his legend and granted him immortality. He outlasted most of his contemporary pathfinders as well as his wife and at least two sons. In moving west, he withstood the threats of the wilderness and its rapid eclipse in Kentucky at the dawn of settlement and the industrial age. In some ways, he was a throwback to the hunter stage of human development. A kind of crypto-pantheist, he survived his Quaker upbringing and the churching of the frontier, unlike his brother Squire, who became a Baptist minister. In immigrating to Missouri, he nearly outdistanced his own celebrity. He died among his family, hunting wild game almost to the end. Significantly, the last buffalo east of the Mississippi passed at the time of his passing. Though he lacked a camouflaged poncho and a radical credo, he was a kind of eighteenth-century survivalist, but a sanguine survivalist. Fixed as an American icon, he has in a sense survived his disparate myths, which constantly are being reassessed and redefined in book after book.
As Boone biographer John Mack Faragher has pointed out, perhaps the most lasting cultural legacy of Boon is an “embodiment of American possibility.” The actual Boone, resembling but not living jp to the iconic Boone that holds so prominent a position in the American psyche, dwells somewhere on the fringes of the printed texts, far from the smoke of his neighbors’ chimneys in an undisclosed meadow of the imagination where there is sufficient elbow room. As Boone said in relation to the many extravagant stories that circulated about him, “Many heroic actions and chivalrous adventures are related to me which exist only in the region of fancy … With me the world has taken great liberties, and yet I have been but a common man.”
Chronology of Daniel Boone
- 1734 born in Pennsylvania
- 1750 moved to Linville Creek, Virginia, with parents
- 1752 arrived at Forks of the Yadkin, North Carolina
- 1755 waggoner at Braddock’s Defeat
- 1756 married Rebecca Bryan in Forks of the Yadkin
- 1759 withdrew family to Culpeper, Virginia, during Cherokee War
- 1761 returned to Forks of the Yadkin
- 1765 explored land opportunities in Florida
- 1766 moved to upper Yadkin River along base of Blue Ridge Mountains
- 1767/68 trapped in eastern Kentucky by early snow storm while hunting
- 1769 passed through Cumberland Gap to explore Kentucky for two years
- 1771 returned to North Carolina with stories of a bountiful land in Kentucky
- 1773 attempted move to Kentucky; first-born son James murdered on way
- 1774 rides into Kentucky to warn surveyors of Indian uprising; covers 800 miles in 60 days
- 1775 marks Boone Trace for settlers to follow into Kentucky
- 1776 rescues daughter Jemima, kidnapped at Fort Boonesborough
- 1777 wounded in Shawnee ambush at Fort Boonesborough
- 1778 captured by Shawnee; held for four months; escaped
- 1778 defends Fort Boonesborough during Shawnee siege; defends self in trial for treason
- 1779 brought Rebecca back to Kentucky; settles at Boone’s Station
- 1780 brother Ned killed by Shawnee; Daniel escapes
- 1782 second-born son Israel killed fighting alongside Daniel at Battle of Blue Licks
- 1784 John Filson publishes “The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon”
- 1799 moves to Missouri where he serves as Spanish syndic and judge
- 1813 Rebecca Boone dies
- 1820 Daniel Boone dies
- 1845 remains of Daniel and Rebecca returned to Kentucky, maybe
— Randell Jones