ONCE IN MISSOURI, BOONE, AS SYNDIC, DID SOME JUDGING. MUCH more of his time was spent hunting and trapping and in the quest to perfect title to the land he thought he had been granted by the Spanish. Boone was growing older and frailer, but his reputation continued to grow across America and Europe.
The fragments that survive of Boone’s work as syndic convey the roughness of the frontier and of the justice Boone dispensed. As his son Nathan put it, he “governed more by equity than by law.”1 Boone held court out in the open, under the shade of an elm that came to be known as the Judgment Tree. For petty offenses, according to one of Boone’s nephews, Boone often gave the defendant a choice of being whipped on the spot and set free or being sent to the more settled and larger (though still small) community of St. Charles for trial in court. Many chose to be “whipped and cleared,” as one story has it.2
Months after the Americans had assumed control over Lower and Upper Louisiana, in a case that presumably was sent on for trial at St. Charles, Boone signed a deposition that gives a flavor of frontier life in Missouri:
June 30th, 1804
This Day came before me Justice of the Peace for the District of the Femme Osage, Francis Woods Peter Smith & John Manley and made oath that on the 29th of June of said Month at the house of David Bryan a Certain James Meek and the Bearer hereof Bery Vinzant had some difference Which Came to blows and in the scuffle the said James Meek bit of a piece of Bery Vinzants Left Ear, further theDeponent saith not Given under my hand and seal the day and Date above written
One case too serious to be heard by a syndic in Femme Osage involved the December 1804 killing of Will Hays, husband of Boone’s daughter Susannah. Susannah had died in 1800 soon after the Boone party came to Missouri, felled by a “bilious fever” at the age of thirty-nine. One of her daughters married James Davis, and it was Davis who killed Will Hays, at Hays’s place on the Femme Osage Creek, not far from where Boone and Rebecca lived. For decades Boone had worked closely with Hays, who had helped to teach Boone writing and arithmetic and how to survey. Hays had become, however, in Nathan’s words, “a bad tempered, drinking man.” After Susannah’s death Hays drank even more heavily and had wild rages, including ones directed at Davis. When Davis came on Hays’s place to borrow a horse in December 1804, Hays came out with a loaded rifle, and Davis went behind a tree. “All the trees in the world shan’t save you,” Hays said, aiming toward Davis and daring him to shoot. Davis jumped out from behind the tree and fired. Hays, shot in the chest, died several hours later. One of the Hays children, Daniel Boone Hays, the only witness to the killing, reported it to Boone, who took Davis into St. Charles, posted bond for his release, and testified at the trial about Hays and his character. Davis was acquitted.4
Even after Boone ceased to be an official at Femme Osage, he continued to be a significant local figure—chosen as executor of estates and as a resolver of disputes. He also played an ongoing role in defending the settlements. After the Louisiana Purchase, the territory of Louisiana in 1804 organized local militia. In 1806 James Wilkinson, the governor of the territory, appointed Boone as the captain of the Sixth Company of the militia, in the District of St. Charles. Nathan Boone was appointed an ensign, the third-ranking officer in the company.5
Much of Boone’s time in Missouri before 1813, when he was not out hunting, was spent on land on the Femme Osage Creek that had been granted to his son Nathan, though Boone and Rebecca also lived for a time at their son Daniel Morgan’s house in the Femme Osage District. Nathan started with a cabin in 1800, followed later that year by a “good substantial log house,” and several years later by a “commodious stone building,” still standing in whatis now Defiance, Missouri—a house that was “built of hewn lime stone and offers the comforts of a city residence.”6 Boone and Rebecca moved in with Nathan and his family, before building, around 1805, a small house in Nathan’s yard that was Boone’s home until early 1813. Boone traded lead, powder, and dry goods for trappers’ peltry, which he then sold in St. Louis.7 He also helped Nathan on his building projects. Boone built himself a shop and did “all the needed smith work for the family” as well as making and repairing traps and guns, before he tired of it, disposed of his tools, and concentrated on hunting.8
Boone never stopped hunting and trapping, though his ailments and age restricted him more and more as the years went by. When he was at the Femme Osage, he hunted around home. In the late summer of 1801 or 1802 he joined his sons Nathan and Daniel Morgan on a deer hunt, getting skins for sale at St. Louis. He then went beaver trapping on the Bourbeuse River, perhaps twenty miles south of Nathan’s house, with Derry Coburn, a Negro slave in his early twenties who belonged to Daniel Morgan. Boone enjoyed being with Derry. According to a Boone relative who knew them both, Derry “was a man of the same peculiar disposition which character-ized Daniel Boone, non-communicative on the subject of his exploits.”9 That only partly describes Boone’s loquacity. Boone liked to talk, to Derry and to friends and to sympathetic strangers, and he liked to reminisce. One visitor to Boone in Missouri said that “though at first reserved and barely answering questions respectfully, he soon became communicative, warmed up, and became animated in narrating his early adventures in the west.”10 But Boone talked when he felt like it, and unnecessary talking in the woods was not good for hunting or trapping. On a hunt or setting or checking traps, Boone and Derry could understand what each other was thinking without saying much. Boone did most of the trapping. Derry stretched the skins and was the cook and camp tender.11 The trapping was good. In September 1802, for example, Nathan and another man, trapping perhaps 150 miles west of Nathan’s house, caught nine hundred beaver.12
In October 1802 Boone, Derry, and Will Hays, Jr., went trapping on the Niangua River, over a hundred miles southwest of the Boone settlement on the Femme Osage. The farther west they went, the better the hunting and the trapping—and the more they intruded into Osage hunting grounds and threatened Osage profits as middlemen in the fur trade with tribes farther west. As the Shawnees had fought to keep intruders out of their huntinggrounds, so did the Osages, who were a mightier nation in Missouri than the Shawnees had been in Kentucky when Boone first hunted there. Thomas Jefferson, who had authorized the Louisiana Purchase and commissioned Lewis and Clark to explore the new American territory, said of the Osages: “The truth is they are the great nation South of the Missouri, their possession extending from thence to the Red River.”13 The Osages in 1804 numbered about sixty-three hundred, including some fifteen hundred warriors and were in firm control of the southern prairie–Plains—most of Missouri, except its eastern quarter; all of northwestern Arkansas; and most of Oklahoma, apart from the panhandle.14 Their men were proud, well proportioned, and tall—six feet or more. Washington Irving described the Osages as “the finest-looking Indians in the West.”15 Until the early nineteenth century whites came to Osage country to trade but did not control Osage territory.16
Boone Country in Missouri
Map by Mary Lee Eggart
The Osages were well armed from trading furs for guns, powder, and shot with French traders in St. Louis. Warfare was central to their way of life. Osages believed that “after death they will go to another village. If they die on the battlefield they will go to a village where they will find plenty of horses and game. If they die of illness they are relegated to a miserablevillage.”17 These were the people on whose hunting lands Boone and his companions were intruding in 1802. The result was foreseeable, particularly since the Osages at the time were facing incursions into their hunting grounds not only from whites like Boone but also from other tribes, including Shawnees, Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Delaware, and Illinois, driven out of the east by the ever-expanding American settlements, as well as from northern tribes such as the Sauks, backed by Canadian fur traders.
One day when Derry was cooking a venison stew, Hays was out trapping, and Boone had just left the camp to look at his traps, eight or ten Osages ran into camp, yelling and shooting off their guns. Derry ran. Boone, seeing the Indians firing into the air, figured they were not seeking to kill him and his companions but to scare them away and take the goods from the camp. So Boone, by this time sixty-seven years old, rode back into camp. The Indians pulled him from his horse and took his coat. Boone called Derry back to the camp. The Indians took their furs and the powder in Boone’s horn, tasted the venison Derry was cooking but found it way too peppery for their liking, and rode off. Boone had concealed some powder, and Derry had secreted a chunk of lead. They had enough ammunition to continue trapping until spring (though they had to hide in a snowed-in cave for days to avoid a large party of Indians, and at one point a steel trap sprang shut on one of Boone’s hands and mangled it; the hand nearly froze before Boone got back to his hunting camp and, with Derry’s help, was able to get the trap off). When Boone and Derry finally returned home, they brought with them about two hundred beaver skins.18 The incident with the Osages must have reminded Boone of the time in 1769 when Captain Will and his Shawnees took the pelts from Boone’s hunters and told them to go home and never come back to Shawnee hunting grounds.
For a time Boone, old and subject to crippling rheumatism, did not hunt or trap much in Osage territory. In 1808, however, he went on a fall and winter beaver hunt with Will Hays, Jr., and Derry, going almost two hundred miles upriver on the Missouri, not far from what was to become Kansas City. A solitary Indian invited them to his camp, rode ahead of them, and came back with twenty or thirty whooping Indians—presumably Osages, it being Osage country. Boone and his companions wheeled their horses and rode off in a hurry but had to cut loose their traps and the skins and furs they had taken.19
Nathan Boone, who hunted often in central and western Missouri, also had unpleasant encounters with Indians. In 1803 Indians took from him and his fellow hunters most of their furs as well as four horses. In November 1804 Osages took from Nathan and his brother-in-law Matthias “Tice” Van Bibber their horses, blankets, coats, and all of their furs (Nathan alone had caught fifty-six beavers and twelve otters), and within minutes another group of Indians—Osages, Nathan believed—forced them to turn over most of their powder, balls, and flints. Nathan and Tice traveled back east on foot for seventeen days in bitter cold, often knee-deep in snow, with no meat, before they came upon the salt spring that was to become known as Boone’s Lick. Nathan managed to kill and roast a huge panther and make vests for himself and Tice out of the skin. They finally found a camp of white hunters, including Nathan’s nephew James Callaway. Nathan and Tice thawed themselves out and ate up, before walking the rest of their hundred-mile trip home. They arrived on Christmas Eve. Olive Boone told Draper, with an evident edge, “It was the first Christmas [Nathan] had spent at home since our marriage, and I had to thank the Indians for that.” Nathan suffered from the effect of the exposure on that trip for the rest of his life. He and Tice had been obliged to cut up their deerskin leggings to patch the ice-worn holes in their moccasins, until their leggings were nearly gone and their legs were exposed to the snow and the cold. Tice Van Bibber never recovered from the ordeal and died within two or three years.20
Nathan Boone realized there was a significant commercial opportunity at the salt licks he had encountered on that cold trek. Starting in 1805, he and his brother Daniel Morgan Boone began large-scale salt-boiling operations at Boone’s Lick, ultimately producing a hundred bushels of salt a day—with frequent interruptions from Indians stealing and killing the beef cattle that were being driven to the works to feed the salt-boilers. The saltworks, which the Boone brothers sold around 1811, helped to encourage a flood of white settlement around Boone’s Lick, more than a hundred miles west of Femme Osage. The trail worked into the ground between Boone’s Lick and St. Charles ultimately grew into the Boone’s Lick Road, a main route for settlers moving into central Missouri after the War of 1812.21 Timothy Flint, in St. Charles at the time, reported that from 1816 through 1819 “the whole current of immigration set towards… Boon’s Lick.… Boon’s Lick was the common centre of hopes, and the common point of union of the people. Askone of them whither he was moving, and the answer was, ‘To Boon’s Lick, to be sure.’”22 The Boone name and reputation contributed to what Peck, an early Boone biographer who interviewed Boone in 1818, described as an “an avalanche”: “It seemed as though Kentucky and Tennessee were breaking up and moving” into the lower Missouri Valley, with the Boone’s Lick country as the new promised land—with many of the newcomers, according to Peck, “drawn by [Boone’s] example and influence.”23 Once again, the Boones were spearheading the westward drive of American settlement.
The Osages’ fight against incursions into their territory was as destined to failure as had been the Shawnees’ efforts in Kentucky and Ohio. The flood of intruders—white settlers and Indians driven out of the east—was overwhelming, and the Osages were weakened by disunity, fostered in part by whites. The main trading houses in St. Louis, led by the Chouteau family, backed the northern branch of the Osages; white traders on the Arkansas River backed a southern, or Arkansas, branch. The fragmented Osages ended up agreeing to give up their claims to lands in Missouri, in successive treaties in 1808, 1818, and 1825, and moved west into Oklahoma.24 Nathan Boone, though only twenty-seven, played a key role in the 1808 treaty. As a captain in the St. Charles militia, he guided the American troops under Gen. William Clark (the Clark of Lewis and Clark) to a site almost 250 miles west of St. Charles, where the Americans built a fort and trading post that came to be called Fort Osage. There Nathan met with the Osage chief White Hair and encouraged the Osages to come to the fort to agree to the treaty and to receive trade goods.25
The Shawnees were one of the many Indian groups intruding into Osage territory in the 1790s and early 1800s. Louis Lorimier, who had been part of the Shawnee raid that had taken Boone and the salt-boilers captive in 1778, in the early 1790s led a group of Shawnees and Delawares to Cape Girardeau, a hundred miles or so south of St. Louis on the Mississippi, where the Spanish gave them a large land grant. By the late 1790s there were some twelve hundred Shawnees and six hundred Delawares on the grant. Like Boone, Lorimier became an official in the Spanish administration in Louisiana.26 Other Shawnees moved into Missouri, until soon after the War of 1812 there were an estimated fourteen hundred Shawnees in Missouri—far more than the roughly eight hundred still in Ohio.27
It is possible that Lorimier and Boone, the old adversaries, crossed paths in Missouri. It is certain that Boone saw other Shawnees who had been atOld Chillicothe during Boone’s captivity there and who had since moved to a village across the Missouri River from St. Charles. Boone also met with the salt-boiler captive Joseph Jackson, who had rejoined these Shawnees under his Shawnee name Fish after his unhappy attempt to reenter the white world in Kentucky. Boone visited the Shawnees and Fish at their hunting camp and at their village near St. Charles.28 The Shawnees visited Boone at Femme Osage from time to time. A Boone granddaughter remembered seeing unfamiliar horses tied up in front of the house. “Your grandfather has got some visitors, old friends,” Rebecca told her, “some of the identical old Shawanoes with whom he was a prisoner.”29 The granddaughter remembered that the Indians gave Boone a pony that became a great favorite with the granddaughters.30 Boone and the Shawnees went on local hunts together and reminisced about old times. “Dan,” one of them said, “you remember when we had you prisoner, and our chief adopted you as his son, and you and he made an agreement that we would all go to Boonsburrow, and you would make them all surrender, and, all bury the Tomahack & all live like Brothers & Sisters.” Boone did not deny any of it.31
Boone got on well with the Indians. Like many Indian men, he liked hunting and roaming the woods more than farming. Boone would have agreed with much of what the Osage chief Big Chief said in 1820, declining to adopt the whites’ farming life:
I see and admire your manner of living, your good warm houses, your extensive fields of corn, your gardens, your cows, oxen, workhouses, wagons, and a thousand machines, that I know not the use of. I see that you are able to clothe yourself, even from weeds and grass. In short, you can do almost what you chose. You whites possess the power of subduing almost every animal to your use. You are surrounded by slaves. Everything about you is in chains. I hear I should exchange my presents for yours. I too should become a slave. Talk to my sons, perhaps they may be persuaded to adopt your fashions, or at least to recommend them to their sons; but for myself, I was born free, was raised free, and wish to die free. I am perfectly content with my condition. The forests and rivers supply all the calls of nature in plenty.32
In 1809 Boone heard from John Coburn, whom he had known back in Kentucky in the 1780s and who now was a judge and influential political figure in the territory of Louisiana, that the board would not grant an exception to the requirement that the granted tract had to have been occupied and improved. In December 1809 the board formally rejected Boone’s claim.33 Several of his relatives fared better. Daniel Morgan Boone was confirmed in his ownership of six hundred arpents, Squire Boone of seven hundred arpents, and Flanders Callaway of eight hundred arpents.34 Once again, the prospect of substantial land ownership was slipping from Boone’s grasp. Judge Coburn and others worked on a petition to Congress for a bill to grant him land in Missouri (despite the board’s conclusion), based on all Boone had done to open up the west for American settlement, and on a similar memorial seeking the Kentucky legislature’s support of the petition to Congress. To assist this effort, Boone dictated the story of his life to his grandson John Boone Callaway, a son of Flanders and Jemima Callaway.
Boone kept on hunting and trapping—more trapping than hunting, because his eyesight was not as good as it had been. He was frequently stricken with bouts of rheumatism, at times so badly that, as he wrote Judge Coburn,he was “Deep in Markury”—presumably meaning that he was dosing himself with mercurous chloride, or calomel, in an attempt to lessen the pain of his rheumatism.35 His relatives sought to dissuade him from the woods. His nephew Daniel Boone Bryan told him he was “too old to be going any more a trapping, and ought now to be staying with his family.” Boone replied: “Dan’l, you know I have never been a farmer, and I cannot make anything by cultivating the soil. My wife is getting old and needs some little coffee and other refreshments, and I have no other way of paying for them but by trapping.”36
So Boone went out again with Derry. This may well have been the winter hunt in 1808–9 when the Indians took his traps and furs. Boone became so sick that he thought his time had come. With Derry’s help he walked to the crest of a hill and “marked out the ground in the shape and size of a grave.”37 He gave Derry detailed instructions on how to bury him if he died. His body was to be washed and laid straight and “wrapped up in one of the cleanest blankets.” He told Derry how to dig the grave and mark it and asked him to cover it with wood poles laid sidewise, to keep the animals from getting him.38 Perhaps Boone was thinking of how the wolves in 1773 had gotten at the body of his dead son James. According to Derry, Boone gave these instructions “with entire calmness, and as if he was giving instructions about ordinary business.”39 But Boone got better and made it home and lived to hunt again.
Reminders of mortality were pressing on him. More and more of Boone’s close kin were dying. His daughter Susannah—the frisky untamable Susannah, mother of ten children—had died in 1800. In 1802 his daughter Levina, Joseph Scholl’s wife, died in Kentucky at thirty-six, leaving eight children, who came out with Scholl to Missouri. Boone’s youngest daughter, Rebecca, who had been weak and consumptive, died in 1805 in Kentucky, at thirty-seven, the mother of seven children. Her husband, Philip Goe, drank himself to death soon thereafter.40 It was hard to be cheerful, but Boone kept going. His spirits were lifted by a visit from his old Kentucky friend, the giant woodsman Simon Kenton, who came out to Missouri to see him. Boone was chopping wood when Kenton came by. Boone burst into tears when he saw him. Kenton had lost all of his land after protracted litigation in Kentucky and had even spent time in debtor’s prison. But the two spent a happy week or two together—as Nathan Boone put it, “The old pioneers seemed to enjoy themselves finely in recounting their old Kentucky troubles and hardships.”41
In 1810 two other old companions from Kentucky, Michael Stoner and James Bridges, stopped by Boone’s place on their way to hunt farther upthe Missouri—and Boone could not resist joining them. They set out in the fall, accompanied by Flanders Callaway and his slave Mose, Will Hays, Jr., and Derry, and came back down the river in early 1811 with a load of beaver pelts. Derry was rowing one of the boats, with Boone at the tiller, bound for St. Louis to seek a decent price for their furs. It is not clear how far up the Missouri the party had gone. Stoner’s son said they went “high up the Missouri.” Hays’s son said his father and Boone went as far as the Yellowstone—which would have meant all the way to what is now the eastern part of Montana, a trip of improbable length and hardship for a man of Boone’s age. But even if the boats made it no farther than Kansas, that was a long haul for a man in his mid-seventies.42
An officer stationed at Fort Osage, near Missouri’s western border, in 1816 wrote to the newspapers: “We have been honored by a visit from Col. Boone, the first settler of Kentucky; he lately spent two weeks with us.… The colonel cannot live without being in the woods. He goes a hunting twice a year to the remotest wilderness he can reach; and hires a man to go with him, whom he binds in written articles to take care of him and bring him home, dead or alive.” According to the officer, Boone left Fort Osage bound upstream to the Platte River. The account jibes with Peck’s report that Boone in April 1816 went to Fort Osage and on to the Little Platte, as well as with Nathan Boone’s account that in April 1816 Boone hired a woodsman known as Indian Philips to go on a hunt up the Missouri. Looking for beaver, they got as far as twenty miles above Fort Leavenworth before Boone fell ill and had to return home. At about the same time Boone reportedly said he planned to take “two or three whites and a party of Osage Indians, and visit the salt mountains. lakes and ponds, and see the natural curiosities of the country along the mountains. The salt-mountain is but 5 or 600 miles west of this place.”43 At eighty-one or eighty-two Boone was apparently still thinking of new lands to the west—and perhaps of getting back into the salt business.
Yet age and frailty were finally catching up with Boone. When the British during the War of 1812 stirred up the Indians in Missouri and several settlers were killed by Indian raids, Boone played only a spectator’s part in the fighting. His sons Nathan and Daniel Morgan both served as captains—Nathan leading a company of mounted rangers in the U.S. Army, Daniel Morgan a militia company that built fortified posts to protect the settlers—but Boone himself was too old. There are stories that he volunteered for service at the beginning of the war and was turned down (being seventy-eight years old atthe time).44 In 1815, however, when a nearby cabin was attacked, with three children mortally tomahawked and the father badly wounded with a ball in the groin, Boone, aged eighty, came over, probed for the bullet, extracted it, dressed the wound, and went outside to scout if the Indians were still in the area.45 And Boone did have to “fort up” several times during the War of 1812, on rumors of imminent Indian attack. On one of those hurried trips downriver to Daniel Morgan’s fortified station, a boat holding the autobiography that Boone had dictated to his grandson overturned, and the book and most of Boone’s other records were lost in the waters of the Missouri River.46
But if the actual Daniel Boone was growing frailer, his reputation and his legend were continuing to grow. Pirated versions of Filson’s book were still selling in Europe. In America Daniel Bryan, who may have been a cousin of Boone’s wife, Rebecca, in 1813 published a 250-page epic poem, The Mountain Muse: Comprising the Adventures of Daniel Boone and the Power of Virtue and Refined Beauty. In 1816 Boone’s great-niece Harriet Boone read Boone the poem, which depicts him as having been selected by an angel of God to settle the American frontier:
With meteor-swiftness, from the council-dome,
High through the azure heights of Atmosphere,
His lofty way the mission’d Seraph winged;
Till poised above the Carolinian hills,
He sought with searching view, th’adventurous Boone.47
Bryan’s endless iambic pentameter rolls on with an extravagance that makes even Filson’s prose seem restrained. He depicts, among other scenes, the one in which Boone and his traveling companions for the first time look out on the rolling plains of Kentucky’s bluegrass country:
Lo! Now the farthest mountain-ledge they scale,
And from its breezy summit raptured see,
Kentucky’s rolling Hills and broad Campaigns!
Prophetic transports thrill’d their kindling hearts,
Unwonted ebullitions warm’d their blood,
And God’s Omnipotence and Wisdom waked
Profoundest adoration of their souls;
As in continued prospect they beheld
Green-mantled Groves and blossom-tinted Knolls,
Of their wide-ranging Vision, and survey’d
Through prescient Fancy’s telescopic tube,
Republic-institutions rising round
The rich Expanse, beneath the angelic aid,
Of Conquest-crown’d Columbian Liberty.48
Having heard Bryan’s poem, Boone said he regretted that he “could not sue him for slander.” He added that all such works “ought to be left until the person was put in the ground.”49 But the growing Boone legend—however distasteful its excesses may have been to Boone—did not hurt the ongoing efforts of his allies in Washington and elsewhere to further his petition to Congress for a land grant in Missouri. The petition, presumably written primarily by Boone’s friend Judge Coburn, was far from understated:
Your petitioner has spent a long life in exploring the wilds of North America, and has, by his own personal exertions, been greatly instrumental in opening the road to civilization in the immense territories attached to the United States.…
But, while your petitioner has thus opened the way to thousands, to countries possessed of every natural advantage, and although he may have gratified to excess his thirst for discovery, he has to lament that he has not derived those personal advantages which his exertions would seem to have merited.…
He approaches the august assemblage of his fellow-citizens with a confidence inspired by that spirit which has led him so often to the deep recesses of the wilds of America, and he flatters himself that he, with his family, will be induced to acknowledge that the United States knows how to appreciate and will encourage the efforts of her citizens, in enterprises of magnitude, from which proportionate public good may be derived.
The petition, coupled with Boone’s extraordinary achievements in opening up the American west, did the trick. The bill granting Boone land in Missouri was reported out of the Senate committee favorably in January 1810. The House Committee on Public Lands in December 1813 recommended that the House confirm Boone’s ownership of 1,000 arpents of land in the Femme Osage District, noting that Boone had “rendered to his country arduous and useful services.” It may be that the petition was originally for 10,000 acresof the finest land in Missouri, but the delegate from Missouri told Congress that all Boone wanted was for Congress to confirm the original grant of 1,000 arpents. That was what Congress did. On February 10, 1814, President James Madison signed the bill into law. For a brief time Boone owned about 850 acres of Missouri land. By May 1815, however, he had sold the land off, with most of the proceeds going to Kentuckians who had read about the grant to Boone and came to Missouri to assert claims relating to Boone’s title warranties on Kentucky land conveyed by him.50 Boone was punctilious about paying his debts, no matter how old and stale—if the debts were real ones and if he had funds. The last claimant from Kentucky alleged that Boone had given his wife, when she was an orphan child, some land that she eventually had to relinquish because of an earlier or more precise entry by someone else. Boone said he had no land or funds and told the claimant: “[You have] come a great distance to suck a bull and I reckon you will have to go home dry.”51