WHEN DANIEL BOONE WAS WELL INTO HIS SIXTIES, HE MOVED WITH his family from Kentucky to Missouri. The story goes that he said there were “too many people!” in Kentucky (which at the time had been a state for less than a decade and which had about 200,000 people in it).1 When Boone was in his eighties, after his wife, Rebecca, died in 1813, he lived mostly with his daughter Jemima and her husband, Flanders Callaway, in their house on the Missouri River, perhaps sixty miles upstream from St. Louis.
Because of Boone’s immense reputation, many people came to visit him. Some were old friends, but others wanted to build their own reputations by being able to say they had seen the great Boone. In June 1820 Chester Harding, a young painter out to make a name for himself, traveled up the Missouri River to paint Boone’s portrait. Harding was only twenty-seven; Boone was eighty-five. When Harding walked into the Callaways’ cabin, Boone was “lying in his bunk, near the fire, and had a long strip of venison wound around his ramrod, and was busy turning it before a brisk blaze.”2 By this time Boone could no longer move well and could barely see—he was to die two months later. But residual strength pours out of Harding’s picture of the man.
What did Boone do as an old man in Missouri? For a long time he still hunted. In 1816–17, already in his eighties, he and others went for a long hunt up the Missouri, reaching at least as far as Fort Osage near the western border of Missouri. Some say he made it as far as the mouth of the Yellowstone River, in what is now North Dakota. Boone and his companions came back with boatloads of pelts. That was Boone’s last long trip. The next year uncontrollable shivering made him cut short a hunt with a grandson after three days. It was Boone’s final hunt, though he kept hoping for more.
In his last three or four years, Boone stayed close to home and talked about things that had happened years earlier. He continued to hunt and trap near home, sometimes with Shawnees he had known and fought almost forty years earlier in Kentucky and who, like Boone, had moved to Missouri. His old Shawnee friends liked to reminisce, too. They reminded Boone that they had captured him in Kentucky—that was back in 1778—and their chief Blackfish had adopted him as his son, and Boone had said he would induce the settlers at Boonesborough to surrender the fort to Blackfish, but instead Boone escaped and led the settlers’ successful defense of the fort against the Shawnees’ attack.3
When the pilgrims came to see the great man, Boone generally tried to get out the back door if he saw them coming.4 If he was not able to escape in time, he would talk to them. A lot of what he said was to debunk the exaggerated things that had been written about him. He told one pilgrim: “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.” On why he had crossed the mountains into Kentucky and led others into the wilderness, Boone had a ready answer: he liked to hunt, and he was “naturally romantic.”5 Others asked him about all the Indians he had killed, citing an epic poem that Daniel Bryan had written under the ripe name The Mountain Muse: Comprising the Adventures of Daniel Boone and the Powers of Virtuous and Refined Beauty. What did Boone think of that poem? Boone said of it that Bryan had called him “a wonderful man who had killed a host of Indians”; yet, he said, “I never killed but three that I claimed”—though he added, “but many was the fair fire I have had at them.”6 Boone told another interviewer that he was sorry that he had killed any Indians, “for they have always been kinder to me than the whites.”7
His children and his grandchildren remembered Boone’s sayings, the wisdom of a long and hard life. “Better mend a fault than find a fault,” he had told them. And “If we can’t say good, we should say no harm.”8 In his last years Boone got ready for his long life to end. He had a coffin built, and he lay in it from time to time, to make sure it fit. He scared his grandchildren by saying that he slept in it sometimes. Maybe he did, or maybe he was funning them, the way he did by telling them, as if they were true, stories about the Yahoos, out of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels—next to the Bible, Boone’s favorite book. But he did check out his coffin from time to time. And he read his Bible.