Many heroic actions and chivalrous adventures are related of me which exist only in the regions of fancy. With me the world has taken great liberties, and yet I have been but a common man. —Daniel Boone Happy birthday to the man behind the legends, Danel Boone, aka Sheltowee (Big Turtle), aka Nathaniel Bumppo, Hawkeye, and Leatherstocking, who in turn inspired the image of the Mountain men, then the cowboys. Daniel Boone the sixth of eleven children of a Quaker family who were expelled from the Church for marrying wordlings. The main effect of Boones religious upbringing was to make him percieve natives a fellow humans. Because he grew up on the frontier, Boone had little formal education but deep knowledge of the woods. According to one family tradition, a schoolteacher once expressed concern over Boones education, but Boones father said, Let the girls do the spelling and Dan will do the shooting…. Boone received some tutoring from family members, though his spelling remained unorthodox (D. Boon Cilled a. Bar). The historian John Mack Faragher cautions that the folk image of Boone as semi-literate is misleading, and argues that he acquired a level of literacy that was the equal of most men of his times. Boone regularly took reading material with him on his hunting expeditions (the Bible and Gullivers Travels were favorites!) He was often the only literate person in groups of frontiersmen. Boone would sometimes entertain his hunting companions by reading to them around the evening campfire. On July 14, 1776, Boones daughter Jemima and two other teenage 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. Boone and his men ambushed the Indians while they were stopped for a meal, rescuing the girls and driving off their captors. The incident became the most celebrated event of Boones life, the core around which the Pearl of his Myth formed, as James Fenimore Cooper created a fictionalized version of the episode in his classic book The Last of the Mohicans. On February 7, 1778, Boone and a hunting party were captured by warriors led by Chief Blackfish of the Chilicothe Shawnee. Because Boones party was greatly outnumbered, Boone returned the next day with Chief Blackfish and persuaded his men to surrender rather than put up a fight. Blackfish wanted to continue to Boonesborough and capture it, since it was now poorly defended, but Boone convinced him the women and children were not hardy enough to survive a winter trek. Instead, Boone promised that Boonesborough would surrender willingly to the Shawnees the following spring. Boone did not have an opportunity to tell his men he was bluffing to prevent an immediate attack on Boonesborough, however. Boone pursued this strategy so convincingly that many of his men concluded he had switched his loyalty to the British. Boone and his men were taken to Blackfishs town of Chillicothe, where they were made to run the gauntlet. As was their custom, the Shawnees adopted some of the prisoners into the tribe to replace fallen warriors; the remainder were taken to Hamilton in Detroit. Boone was adopted into a Shawnee family at Chillicothe, perhaps into the family of Chief Blackfish himself, and given the name Sheltowee (Big Turtle). Boone became celebrated in 1784, on his 50th birthday, when historian John Filson published The Discovery, Settlement And present State of Kentucke, a book which included a chronicle of Boones adventures. Thanks to Filsons book, in Europe, Boone became a symbol of the natural man who lives a virtuous, uncomplicated existence in the wilderness. This was most famously expressed in Lord Byrons epic poem Don Juan (1822), which devoted a number of stanzas to Boone, including this one: Of the great names which in our faces stare, The General Boon, back-woodsman of Kentucky, Was happiest amongst mortals any where; For killing nothing but a bear or buck, he Enjoyed the lonely vigorous, harmless days Of his old age in wilds of deepest maze. Byrons poem celebrated Boone as someone who found happiness by turning his back on civilization. In a similar vein, many folk tales depicted Boone as a man who migrated to more remote areas whenever civilization crowded in on him. In a typical anecdote, when asked why he was moving to Missouri, Boone supposedly replied, I want more elbow room! By 1787, Boone kept a tavern and worked as a surveyor, horse trader, and land speculator. He was initially prosperous, owning seven slaves, a relatively large number for Kentucky at the time, which was dominated by small farms rather than large plantations. That is the worst I can find about him by Twentieth Century Standards (not sure if there are any standards in the 21st!) But to fit 19th Century standards, Boones image was often reshaped into the stereotype of the belligerent, Indian-hating frontiersman which was then popular. In John A. McClungs Sketches of Western Adventure (1832), for example, Boone was portrayed as longing for the thrilling excitement of savage warfare. Boone was transformed in the popular imagination into someone who regarded Indians with contempt and had killed scores of the savages. The real Boone disliked bloodshed, however. According to historian John Bakeless, there is no record that Boone ever scalped Indians, unlike other frontiersmen of the era. Boone once told his son Nathan that he was certain of having killed only one Indian, during the battle at Blue Licks, although he believed others might have died from his bullets in other battles. Even though Boone had lost two sons in wars with Indians, he respected Indians and was respected by them. In Missouri, Boone often went hunting with the very Shawnees who had captured and adopted him decades earlier. Some 19th-century writers regarded Boones sympathy for Indians as a character flaw and therefore altered his words to conform to contemporary attitudes. According to the later folk image, Boone the trailblazer was too unsophisticated for the civilization which followed him and which eventually defrauded him of his land. However, Boone was not the simple frontiersman of legend. 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 Boones ventures ultimately failed because his investment strategy was faulty and because his decency made him reluctant to profit at someone elses expense. According to Faragher, Boone lacked the ruthless instincts that speculation demanded. According to one story, in 1810 or later, Boone went with a group on a long hunt as far west as the Yellowstone River, a remarkable journey at his age, if true. In 1816, a United States officer at Fort Osage, on the Missouri, wrote, We have been honored by a visit from Colonel Boon, the first settler of Kentucky; he lately spent two weeks with us. . . . . He left this for the river Platt, some distance above. Col Boon is eighty-five years of age, five feet seven inches high, stoutly made, and active for one of his years; is still of vigorous mind, and is pretty well informed. Other stories of Boone around this time have him making one last visit to Kentucky to pay off his creditors, although some or all of these tales may be folklore. American painter John James Audubon claimed to have gone hunting with Boone in the woods of Kentucky around 1810. Years later, Audubon painted a portrait of Boone. His obituary, printed in the Missouri Gazette, October 3, 1820, says, At the age of eighty, in company with one white man and a black man, whom he laid under strict injunction to return him to his family dead or alive, he made a hunting trip to the headwaters of the Great Osage, where he was successful in trapping of beaver, and in taking other game. Daniel Boone died of natural causes on September 26, 1820, at Nathan Boones home on Femme Osage Creek, 2-1/2 months short of his 86th birthday. His last words were, Im going now. My time has come. In 1845, the Boones remains were supposedly disinterred and reburied in a new cemetery Frankfort Cemetery in Frankfort, Kentucky. Resentment in Missouri about the disinterment grew over the years, and a legend arose that Boones remains never left Missouri. According to this story, Boones tombstone in Missouri had been inadvertently placed over the wrong grave, but no one had ever corrected the error. Boones relatives in Missouri, displeased with the Kentuckians who came to exhume Boone, kept quiet about the mistake, and they allowed the Kentuckians to dig up the wrong remains. There is no contemporary evidence that this actually happened, but in 1983, a forensic anthropologist examined a crude plaster cast of Boones skull made before the Kentucky reburial and announced it might be the skull of an African American. Black slaves had also been buried at Tuque Creek, so it is possible the wrong remains were mistakenly removed from the crowded graveyard. Both the Frankfort Cemetery in Kentucky and the Old Bryan Farm graveyard in Missouri claim to have Boones remains. youtube/watch?v=zPyBMY08x1U
Posted on: Wed, 22 Oct 2014 16:47:32 +0000
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