ALREADY MYTHIC DURING HIS LIFE, BOONE AFTER HIS DEATH NOT only survived but evolved in countless stories, biographies, novels, poems, and paintings. That survival and evolution continues to this day, assisted both by the magnitude and drama of what Boone did and by the scarcity of autobiographical material that survived him. Tellers of the Boone story have each been able to fashion a Boone to their own liking because they have been little constrained by the man’s own words. Filson’s account of Boone was no more than a short sketch, ending in 1783. After the loss in the Missouri River during the War of 1812 of the autobiography that Boone had dictated to a grandson, Boone had tried again, dictating his life and adventures to a grandson-in-law named Dr. John Jones. The idea was that Jones would prepare the narrative for press, with the profits to go to Boone. Nathan said the narrative was never completed because of Boone’s Loutre Lick trip and his subsequent sickness and changes of residence among his children. Jones promised to give Nathan the incomplete narrative, but it was never found after Jones died suddenly in the early 1840s.1 So people recounting Boone’s story after his death were left largely unfettered by Boone’s own telling of his story. They took full advantage of their liberty to shape their picture of him to their own purposes.2
Some presented Boone as a child of nature, an exemplar of the earthly Rousseau-like Paradise of life in the wilderness. This was how Lord Byron presented him in his book-length Don Juan, a poem begun in 1818 as a picaresque ramble that was “meant to be a little quietly facetious upon everything.”3 For more than sixteen long cantos Byron follows the Spanish lover Don Juan—whose amorous entanglements bear more than an occasional resemblance to those of Byron—from his childhood in Spain, to Turkey(where he is sold into slavery), to joining the Russians in their siege of the Turkish-held city Ismail at the mouth of the Danube, to Russia (where Catherine the Great takes him as a lover), and to England (sent on an embassy by Catherine). The preceding sentence may give the impression that Don Juan is tightly plotted—but as Virginia Woolf said, it has “an elastic shape which will hold whatever you choose to put into it… [Byron] could say whatever came into his head.”4 Byron wrote to a friend: “You ask me for the plan of Donny Jonny: I have no plan—I had no plan, but I had or have materials…. Why, Man, the Soul of such writing is its licence; at least the liberty of that licence, if you like.”5 In Don Juan itself the poet wrote, without embarrassment, “Note or text / I never know the word which will come next.”6
What came next, in the middle of canto 8, were stanzas describing Boone in idyllic terms. The canto, published in 1823 (three years after Boone died), tells of the Russians’ siege of Ismail. After describing the Turks’ defeat and before recounting the bloody sack of the city, Byron pauses to praise the God-made country over the man-made (and man-destroyed) city, by pointing to Daniel Boone and his progeny:
LXI
Of all men, saving Sylla the man-slayer,
Who passes for in life and death most lucky,
Of the great names which in our faces stare,
The General Boon, back-woodsman of Kentucky,
Was happiest amongst mortals anywhere;
For killing nothing but a bear or buck, he
Enjoy’d the lonely, vigorous, harmless days
Of his old age in wilds of deepest maze.
LXII
Crime came not near him—she is not the child
Of solitude; Health shrank not from him—for
Her home is in the rarely trodden wild,
Where if men seek her not, and death be more
Their choice than life, forgive them, as beguiled
By habit to what their own hearts abhor—
In cities caged. The present case in point I
Cite is, that Boon lived hunting up to ninety;
And what’s still stranger, left behind a name
For which men vainly decimate the throng,
Not only famous, but of that good fame,
Without which glory’s but a tavern song—
Simple, serene, the antipodes of shame,
Which hate nor envy e’er could tinge with wrong;
An active hermit, even in age the child
Of Nature, or the man of Ross run wild.
LXIV
’Tis true he shrank from men even of his nation,
When they built up unto his darling trees,—
He moved some hundred miles off, for a station
Where there were fewer houses and more ease;
The inconvenience of civilisation
Is, that you neither can be pleased nor please;
But where he met the individual man,
He show’d himself as kind as mortal can.
LXV
He was not all alone: around him grew
A sylvan tribe of children of the chase,
Whose young, unwaken’d world was ever new,
Nor sword nor sorrow yet had left a trace
On her unwrinkled brow, nor could you view
A frown on Nature’s or on human face;
The free-born forest found and kept them free,
And fresh as is a torrent or a tree.
LXVI
And tall, and strong, and swift of foot were they,
Beyond the dwarfing city’s pale abortions,
Because their thoughts had never been the prey
Of care or gain: the green woods were their portions;
No sinking spirits told them they grew grey,
No fashion made them apes of her distortions;
Simple they were, not savage; and their rifles,
Though very true, were not yet used for trifles.
LXVII
Motion was in their days, rest in their slumbers,
And cheerfulness the handmaid of their toil;
Nor yet too many nor too few their numbers;
Corruption could not make their hearts her soil;
The lust which stings, the splendour which encumbers,
With the free foresters divide no spoil;
Serene, not sullen, were the solitudes
Of this unsighing people of the woods.
LXVIII
So much for Nature:—by way of variety,
Now back to thy great joys, Civilisation!
And the sweet consequence of large society,
War, pestilence, the despot’s desolation,
The kingly scourge, the lust of notoriety,
The millions slain by soldiers for their ration,
The scenes like Catherine’s boudoir at threescore,
With Ismail’s storm to soften it the more.
Byron’s Boone stanzas stretched facts for effect. Boone becomes a general, not a mere colonel, and lives “hunting up to ninety.” Byron had to force rhymes to meet the demands of the ottava rima form—eight lines in a stanza, with a strict abababcc rhyme scheme. So “buck, he” rhymes with Kentucky—but try yourself to come up with two (printable) rhymes for Kentucky. The reaching for rhymes may well have led to the sharp changes in mood and direction that give the poem its unique impromptu quality. Overall, Byron painted in the Boone verses a sylvan and free heaven on earth—a basic theme for Byron, who admired Rousseau and made a pilgrimage to places associated with him—in contrast to the tyranny and cruelty of the old world, exemplified in the brutality of the siege and sacking of Ismail.7
It is a measure of Boone’s international fame that Byron, writing in Italy, saw Boone as one of “the great names which in our faces stare,” and chose him to be the recognizable emblem of the happy backwoodsman. That mayhave happened because Byron had read a version of Filson’s account of Boone or Henry Marie Brackenridge’s book, published in 1814, of his travels in Louisiana and up the Missouri River. Brackenridge included a description of Boone as patriarch presiding over an extended family that “retired through choice,” burying themselves “in the midst of the wilderness,” to place themselves at “a distance from the deceit and turbulence of the world” and to be “truly free.”8 But Byron’s knowledge of Boone may also have come, indirectly, from Gilbert Imlay, the rogue who cheated Boone out of a large tract of prime Kentucky land and who included a pirated version of Filson’s account in his own book on the American west. Byron’s circle, in his self-imposed exile in continental Europe, included several people with connections to Imlay, including Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley’s lover (and eventual wife) Mary Godwin (the author of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus), and Mary Godwin’s young stepsister, Claire Clairmont. Mary Godwin was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, who had lived for years with Imlay and who had borne his daughter, Fanny Imlay. Claire Clairmont threw herself at Byron when she was only seventeen and within a year bore him a daughter in Italy.9 This complicated and sexually intertwined Imlay-connected network bears no resemblance to the idyllic simplicity of Boone and his family that Byron depicted—but may well have helped Byron learn about Boone.10
Like Byron, James Fenimore Cooper also showed Boone as a child of nature, in Cooper’s depiction of the Boone-like Natty Bumppo in the Leatherstocking novels—The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), and The Deerslayer (1841)—all portraying the hero as a “philosopher of the wilderness.” In The Prairie Bumppo crosses the Mississippi as an old man—“The sound of the ax has driven him from his beloved forests to seek a refuge… on the denuded plains that stretch to the Rockies”—much as Boone did. Cooper expressly noted, at the beginning of The Prairie, that “the adventurous and venerable patriarch” Boone placed the Mississippi between him and the multitude, “seeking for the renewal of enjoyments which were rendered worthless in his eyes, when trammeled by the forms of human institutions.”11 The same view, of Boone as child of nature, was presented by Thomas Cole in Daniel Boone at His Cabin at Great Osage Lake, painted around 1826. Cole shows Boone as a frowning old man, alone in front of a cabin in a wilderness with a lowering sky, dressed in a buckskin hunting shirt, holding a rifle, a dead deer at his feet.
Other writers and artists presented Boone not as a natural philosopher but as a heroic slayer of Indians, often engaged in hand-to-hand combat. Timothy Flint, a clergyman before he became a popular writer, went to Missouri as a missionary and interviewed Boone there, planning to write about him—but Flint’s goal in his book on Boone was “not to bury the memory of our pioneer in that most revolting of all sepulchers, a dull biography.” When a historian chided him for writing a book so lacking in fact, Flint said his book “was made not for use but to sell.”12 Flint succeeded; Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone, the First Settler of Kentucky, published in 1833, went through fourteen editions by 1868. Accuracy was not Flint’s strong suit. In Flint’s telling, for example, Boone’s year of birth is twelve years after the actual date, Boone’s year of death two years too early, and the number of Indians who took the girls captive near Boonesborough balloons to nineteen. Flint was more interested in tales of derring-do, however unlikely, than in dry facts. Flint’s Boone: comes close to shooting Rebecca, mistaking her for a deer at night; kills a wound-maddened she-bear by pointing his knife at the bear’s heart as she hugged him (the bear “fell harmless to the ground”); and kills many panthers, one by lodging a bullet “in the heart of the fearful animal, at the very moment it was in the act to spring upon him.”
Boone’s most amazing feats, in Flint’s book, involve fighting and evading Indians, depicted as fearsome foes (in the attack on Bryant’s Station “the mass of biped wolves raised their murderous yell”; in torturing white captives, Indian women “appear to surpass the men in the fury of their merciless rage, and the industrious ingenuity of their torments”). Pursued by Indians, on two separate occasions, Flint’s Boone swings on a grapevine to make his path hard for his enemies to follow. Hearing that the Indians have captured his daughter, Boone swears, “By the Eternal Power that made me a father, I will either bring her back, or spill my life blood.” Before being taken captive by the Shawnees, Flint’s Boone, attacked by two Indians, kills one with a rifle shot and then fights the other Indian over the slain Indian: “Boone, placing his foot on the dead body, dexterously received the well-aimed tomahawk of his powerful enemy on the barrel of his rifle, thus preventing his skull from being cloven by it. In the very attitude of firing [sic] the Indian had exposed his body to the knife of [Boone] who plunged it in his body to the hilt.”13
Flint’s portrayal of Boone as Indian slayer reflected his own beliefs that there was an innate “repulsion between the Anglo-Americans and them [the Indians]”—an “antipathy between the two races that seems fixed andunalterable” —and that Indians “are a cruel people by nature” in whom “the writhing of their victims inspires a horrible joy.”14 Others also portrayed Boone, who rarely killed Indians, as a mighty Indian killer. The same improbable scene of Boone standing on one slain Indian while sinking a knife into another one was carved in stone in 1826–27 by Enrico Causici in his heroic sculpture The Conflict between Daniel Boone and the Indians, which for years appeared over the south door of the Rotunda in the Capitol in Washington, D.C.
Flint was writing and Causici was sculpting at a time when Indians were being removed by force and threat of force to enable white settlement to continue to expand westward. As the art historian J. Grant Sweeney has observed, portrayal of Indian ferocity was “iconic justification for the aggressive expansion of the nation into Indian territories.”15 A similar theme, coupled with concepts of white racial superiority, underlay many dime novels about Boone as well as Horatio Greenough’s monumental sculpture The Rescue (1836–53), designed for the steps of the Capitol, in which an over-sized Boone-like figure is shown staying the hand of a muscular, breech-clout-wearing Indian about to tomahawk a terrified settler mother and child. Greenough said his purpose was “to convey the idea of the triumph of the whites over the savage tribes.”16 Once again, tellers of the Boone story were presenting a different aspect of Boone, to further their own objectives.17
Flint portrayed Boone not only as an Indian fighter but also as an opener of the wilderness—a man “formed to be a woodsman, and the adventurous precursor in the first settlement of Kentucky,” a man whose name will be recorded “in all future time, and in every portion of the globe… as the patriarch of Backwoods Pioneers.”18 The theme of Boone as the spearhead of America’s westward expansion, already present in Filson’s book, was repeated in Judge Coburn’s 1820 eulogy, describing Boone as “the instrument of opening the road to millions of the human family from the pressure of sterility and want, to a land flowing with milk and honey.”19 That theme became more central in later portrayals of Boone, made as America swept westward across the continent, settling the Louisiana territory, defeating Mexico, pushing on to California—fulfilling what came to be known as the country’s “manifest destiny,” a phrase first used in an 1845 newspaper article by John L. Sullivan, editor of the New York Morning News, stating that America’s claim “is by right of our manifest destiny to overspread and possess the whole ofthe Continent which Providence has given us for the development of… a noble young empire.”20
Peck, in his 1847 biography, had as his main theme Boone as agent of America’s westward drive—as evident from the subtitle, “The Pioneer of Kentucky.” Peck said Boone “spoke feelingly, and with solemnity, of being a creature of Providence, ordained by Heaven as a pioneer in the wilderness, to advance the civilization and the extension of his country,” although Peck also showed Boone as “an enthusiastic admirer of nature in its primeval wildness.”21 The same theme of Boone as pathfinder, as “Columbus of the woods,” underlies paintings of Boone in the 1840s and 1850s—above all, George Caleb Bingham’s Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap (1851–52).22 Bingham shows Boone leading settlers through the mountain pass into the promised land of Kentucky, like Moses leading the children of Israel through Sinai. Boone stands looking at us, in unsoiled buckskins, his clean-shaven face a younger version of the face in Harding’s portrait—not surprisingly, since Bingham as a boy had helped Harding in Missouri make a finished portrait of Boone from Harding’s portrait sketch. Rifle on shoulder, Boone leads a horse on which sits a shawl-wearing woman, presumably Rebecca. In the background sunlight is breaking through dark clouds over the Cumberland Mountains. As Sweeney observed, “No single work of art has contributed more to establishing Daniel Boone as the quintessential symbol of westward expansion in mid-nineteenth century America.”23
After 1860, with the continental United States occupying all of its present limits, there was less need for images of Boone as pathfinder or as slayer of demonic Indians. Rousing popular biographies of Boone continued, but there was also a diligent effort to record the historical Boone. That effort was led by Lyman Copeland Draper, who in 1838, when only twenty-three years old, decided his life’s work would be to research and write the history of the American frontier through a series of lives of the pioneers, beginning with Daniel Boone, who, as Draper put it, “is generally acknowledged to be the pioneer of the West.” The first task, in Draper’s view, was to gather materials before they were lost and to compile the “precious historical incident” still “treasured up in the memory of aged Western Pioneers, which would perish with them if not quickly rescued.” The task was immense. On his own and later as secretary of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Draper—all five foot one and 101 pounds of him—traveled over fifty thousand miles,much of it on foot or on horseback, talking to old-timers, copying or purchasing manuscripts, interviewing and corresponding with Nathan and Olive Boone and countless other Boones and Bryans. His tenacity and prodigious research resulted in the assembly of the world’s largest collection of manuscripts relating to the Ohio Valley and the Northwest Territory.
Writing was much harder for Draper than compiling data. He took copious notes—over three hundred pages on his interviews with Nathan and Olive Boone, for example—and started a massive biography of Boone, which he even advertised prematurely when he heard that a competing one was about to be published.24 Yet he could not finish his Boone book. He could not go down a path without pursuing byways that led to other smaller byways, in fractal profusion. He stopped working on the book in 1856, having completed over eight hundred pages of manuscript and having taken Boone’s life as far as the siege of Boonesborough in 1778. Draper continued to collect materials about Boone and other frontier figures and corresponded with potential sources of Boone information until not long before he died, in 1891. Draper even turned to spiritualism, to ask questions of what he hoped were the astral presences of George Rogers Clark and Simon Kenton. He wrote no more of the Boone book, however, after 1856. Toward the end of his life Draper made a desperate utterance with which many historians will sympathize: “I have wasted my life in puttering. I can write nothing so long as I fear there is a fact, no matter how small, as yet ungarnered.” Draper’s successor as secretary of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Reuben Gold Thwaites, who was to write a fine biography of Boone (and many other excellent books on frontier history, in large part by mining Draper’s collections), said of Draper’s writing: “It was ever the same story. Ever planning, never doing.”25 But if Draper completed only an unfinished discursive start of a Boone biography, he also left behind, as part of the huge mass of frontier history documents that he bequeathed to the Wisconsin historical society, a monumental collection of documents and interview notes that has underlain all subsequent biographies of Boone—though each biographer has brought to the task his own interests and insights.
Thus, the portrayal of Boone, in literature and the visual arts, has evolved and changed in the years since Boone died. Draper’s document trove (although it included many folkloric reminiscences compiled decades after the events) had put some limits on the historians in their depiction of Boone.No such limits have restricted poets or the makers of movies and television shows. Some readers will remember Fess Parker in the 1960s TV series on Boone, wearing a coonskin cap of the sort the real Boone despised (“From the coonskin cap on the top of ol’ Dan / to the heel of his rawhide shoe; / the rippin’est, roarin’est, fightin’est man / the frontier ever knew”).26 Nor have Draper’s documents prevented the manufacture of spurious Boone relics—including trees blazoned with inscriptions to the effect that “D. Boon cilled a Bar on this Tree” (though Boone always spelled his name with an e at the end).27
Daniel Boone is hard to pin down. Even his physical remains may—or may not—have moved after Boone’s death. In 1845, twenty-five years after he died, the founders of a new cemetery in Frankfort, Kentucky’s capital, sought to honor Boone—and to promote their cemetery—by moving (with considerable fanfare) the remains of Boone and Rebecca from the Bryan family graveyard in Missouri to the Frankfort cemetery. One of the organizers of the proposed reinterment was an ancestor of mine, Mason Brown, a judge on the circuit court and a son of Kentucky’s first U.S. senator, John Brown.28 Brown was chairman of the Frankfort Cemetery Company, which pledged to erect over Boone’s remains “a monument… to which every Kentuckian can point with pride, as marking the spot where the ashes of this pure, noble and fearless pioneer have been placed by the descendants of his early friends and comrades.”29
The cemetery organizers wrote to Nathan Boone, promising the Frankfort cemetery would be “the most beautiful cemetery in the West” and sending letters in support of the proposed move from a slew of dignitaries—among them U.S. Senator John J. Crittenden and the governor, two former governors, and the attorney general of Kentucky. The cemetery engaged Boone’s nephew William Linville Boone, a Kentuckian, to negotiate with Boone descendants. William Boone went out to Missouri with Crittenden’s son Thomas and Jacob Swigert (clerk of Kentucky’s Court of Appeals) and told the owner of the farm where Boone and Rebecca were buried that the Boone family had consented to the move. Three local men were hired to dig up the remains. Word spread, and a few dozen people, many of them Boones and Bryans, gathered at the graveyard. The family graves were ill marked, though in the mid-1830s small gravestones with the names of Daniel and Rebecca had been inscribed and erected. According to Swigert, “There were 30 or 40 persons standing around, who identified the grave of Boone, wherethey got his body.”30 A St. Louis newspaper reported that the “coffins were entirely rotten.” Many bones crumbled on touch, but the workers put what they could in pine boxes, which were taken to Frankfort.31
The cemetery organizers and Frankfort’s leaders held an elaborate procession and ceremony for the burial of the Boone remains. The night before the reinterment, in the presence of Mason Brown, William Boone, and other Kentucky dignitaries, Boone’s bones were taken out of a pine box and placed in a fancier coffin. Also present was Mason Brown’s son, my father’s grandfather John Mason Brown, then only a boy. Years later he described the scene to Lyman Draper:
Though I was but eight and a half years old, I have still a most vivid and accurate remembrance of all that occurred—It was my first sight of a skeleton, and I shall never forget how Dr. Snead arranged the bones in order upon a bed of shavings that quite filled the coffin—
The skull of Boone was handled by the persons present and its peculiarities commented upon—My father placed it in my hands that I might say that I had lifted it—A cast of Boone’s skull was then taken by a person named Davis.… He poured wax until a mold was formed and then made two plaster casts therefrom.
Mason Brown sent one of the two casts to the Smithsonian, where it was destroyed in a fire. After John Mason Brown was sent the other cast in 1882, he had three or four copies made, one of which he sent to Draper. A cast (or a copy of a cast) ended up at the Kentucky Historical Society, where it is still on display with other Boone relics.32
The procession and reinterment ceremony took up much of Saturday, September 13, 1845. The Frankfort Commonwealth exuberantly estimated the crowd at between fifteen and twenty thousand—a remarkable number for a town that at the time had a total population of about three thousand. There were twenty-one groups in the order of procession. After military companies and a band came the hearse, drawn by four white horses, and accompanied by old surviving pioneers, serving as pallbearers. Then came the orator (Senator Crittenden), the clergy, the president and members of the Frankfort Cemetery Company, the governor of Kentucky, judges, congressmen and state legislators, the clergy of the Methodist Episcopal Conference (meeting in Frankfort that week), Masons, Odd Fellows, fire companies, schools and teachers, militia, another band, and finally “No. 20. Strangers andCitizens in Carriages” and “No. 21. Strangers and Citizens on Horseback.”
In addition to the old white settlers, in the procession there “also tottered along the first black man who ever trod the soil of Kentucky, and his steps were sustained by another, also of African descent, who was the first child of other than Indian parentage ever born in what now is a Commonwealth of nearly a million souls.” The newspaper account hastened to add: “Of the people who composed the great body of the Procession, it may well be said that the Saxon race, in no clime or country, could have been more nobly represented—whether for the brave appearance of the men or the splendid beauty of the women. They seemed indeed the suitable inheritors of this goodly land.” Following a hymn and a prayer, Senator Crittenden orated and “enchained attention by the spells of his magic eloquence” (the substance of which went unreported). After a closing prayer and a benediction, the coffins were lowered into the graves, the aged pioneer pallbearers threw dirt on the coffins, others helped to fill in the graves, and the crowd dispersed.
The same issue of the Frankfort paper went on to report that the Kentucky Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, presided over by a bishop who had delivered a prayer at the Boone ceremony earlier that week, in a meeting “conducted in the spirit of christian kindness,” had voted ninety-eight to five to join the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, the pro-slavery southern section of the church. The Methodist Church in the United States was being torn apart on the issue of slavery. The issue that had delayed Missouri’s admission to the Union in 1820, the year of Boone’s death, was rending American Christian denominations in the year that Kentucky sought to honor Boone by his reinterment.33
The Frankfort cemetery began selling lots briskly after the reinterment. The Boone ceremony must have been good for business. Despite what the cemetery organizers had said to the Boone family and the owner of the Missouri graveyard, however, the Frankfort cemetery did not fund a monument honoring the Boones. The state of Kentucky in 1860 finally paid for a four-sided stone monument, fifteen feet high, with bas-relief panels on each side illustrating different aspects of Boone—among them the natural philosopher in the woods and the Indian fighter who wielded rifle butt and hunting knife against a bare-chested muscular Indian with raised tomahawk.
At the time of the reinterment the study of phrenology—the analysis of mind and character by studying the relative development of different parts of the brain, as indicated by the shape of the skull—was still in vogue. A fewmonths after the reinterment the Frankfort Commonwealth published a report of a phrenological analysis of the skull, by the man who had taken a cast of the skull. The examiner listed a variety of “admeasurements” (for example, “From Philoprogenitiveness to Individuality—8 inches”) and noted: “Relative sizes of the organs—all the affective faculties—with one exception (Inhabitiveness) very large. Conclusion: very strong; always on the alert; the highest degree of courage; he had no affinity for society—he fled from it.” According to the examiner, the subject “was passionately fond of traveling; had great perception of courses and distances, and could not be lost in the woods. Such is the character which I deduce from his head.”34 It is remarkable what the phrenologist could discern from careful measurement of the skull—with the benefit of knowing whose skull it was and what had been that person’s outstanding strengths.
Or was the skull in fact Boone’s? Missourians over the years have claimed the Kentuckians took the wrong bones out of the ill-marked graveyard in which many Boones, Bryans, and slaves were buried and have argued that Boone is still buried in Missouri (and that tourists therefore should go to the Missouri graveyard, not the Frankfort cemetery). Kentuckians have argued in reply that the Boone relatives in Missouri consented to the removal and that bystanders had pointed out the location of Boone’s grave to those exhuming the bones. In 1983 Kentucky’s forensic anthropologist Dr. David Wolf looked at the plaster cast of the skull now at the Kentucky Historical Society and declared that the skull might well not be Boone’s. According to Dr. Wolf, the forehead did not slope as much as that of the usual Caucasian male skull, the general shape of the brow ridges was more black than white, an indentation of the frontal bone tended “to be more of a black feature than a white,” and the occipital bone at the back of the head was more protruding and bun-shaped, which he said was a black feature. “Boy, this could really be the skull of a Negro,” Dr. Wolf said—though he admitted that the cast was a poor one, giving him little to go on, and that the skull could be of a Caucasian. He told the National Geographic: “The cast was poorly made and was only of the cranium. But the round forehead and long, narrow head are typical of Negroids, and the apparent young age at death certainly casts doubt that it was Boone’s.”35
Dr. Wolf was not infallible, however. In 1988 he concluded that human remains found in Jefferson County, Kentucky, were those of an African-American girl who had been killed in the 1970s. In 2004 Dr. Emily Craig,Dr. Wolf’s successor as Kentucky’s forensic anthropologist, studied the same bones and determined they were at least a hundred years old and that the case “was not a ‘modern’ homicide of a teenager” but “a disturbed grave, most likely from the mid or late 1800s.” Asked how Dr. Wolf had reached his very different conclusion, Dr. Craig said, “Mistakes happen, that’s all I know how to say it.”36 In 1995 Dr. Craig said that the plaster cast in the Kentucky Historical Society, purportedly of Boone’s skull, had “negligible” scientific worth, being only of the top half of the skull: “I can tell it is a male. But I would be very reluctant to make a determination of race. It was altered. It was filed down to make it look nice. As a scientist, I can’t in good conscience make a determination.”37In Dr. Craig’s view an exhumation and an examination of the actual remains would be needed to determine if the bones in Frankfort are Boone’s. No one is pushing for that to happen.38
One suspects that Boone would have been amused by the whole thing—the ceremony in Frankfort, the dispute over the location of his moldering bones, the racial identification of the skull.