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CODA

A CLOUD OF MYTH AND LEGEND SURROUNDS BOONE. THERE ARE contemporary accounts and letters (including several from Boone himself), but many of the stories about Boone were gathered decades after he died, from very old pioneers and from the children or grandchildren of pioneers. Many of the biographies contain more folktales than facts. There are physical Boone relics, but many are no more convincing than pieces of the True Cross. The myths, the legends, the dubious relics, are not Boone’s legacy. His legacy consists of the reality of his achievements, the strength of his character and principles, and the transformation of America that he helped to bring about.

Consider Boone’s actual achievements. On foot, on horse, or by boat Boone traveled from eastern Pennsylvania down to Florida, across much of Virginia, Maryland, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Kentucky, into what is now Ohio and Michigan, across the Mississippi and well up the Missouri River. He blazed what became the Wilderness Road, from the Cumberland Gap up to the Kentucky River—the route on which hundreds of thousands of settlers were to travel on their way to Kentucky. He led settlers into Kentucky in 1775 to build Boonesborough, even after Indians killed several in the group he led. He was a leader in Boonesborough’s successful defense in 1778, which did much to prevent American settlers from abandoning Kentucky during the bloody years of the Revolution. He brought many settlers into Kentucky, and later into Missouri, both in person and by his example and the strength of his reputation.

Boone’s achievements were based on the strengths of his character and principles. He had stamina and remarkable courage, sometimes to the point of excess. His formal education was minimal, but he had suppleness andquickness of mind in dealing with changing circumstances—for example, his captivity by the Shawnees. His humor and self-deprecation were engaging. So was his nondoctrinaire religious outlook “to Love and fear god, beleve in Jesus Christ, Dow all the good to my Nighbour and my Self that I can, and Do as Little harm as I Can help, and trust on gods marcy for the rest.”¹ He dealt fairly with others, Indians as well as whites.

Boone had weaknesses and deficiencies. He was not a good businessman. His scant formal education showed up in his phonetic spelling. He had little taste for large organizations or for regular attendance on legislative committees. His family connections were not grand. But in tight spots people looked to Boone. It was no accident that the frontiersmen on the Clinch River in 1774 wanted him as their captain, or that the station built in the wilderness for Col. Richard Henderson’s Transylvania Company was called Boonesborough, not Hendersonville. In addition to his skills as a woodsman and scout, Boone was a decent man, not the coonskin cap–wearing near-brute of the dime novels. Someone who knew him in Boonesborough described him as “a remarkably pleasant good natured mannerly man.”² Judge David Todd, a member of a leading family of Kentucky settlers, who like Boone had moved to Missouri from Kentucky, said Boone “was a plain, gentlemanly man, good memory, mild, and equable. No ruffian, nor did he partake near as far as I have seen of the slovenly backwoods character.”³

Boone’s achievements, character, and principles helped to bring about the enormous transformations in America that happened during Boone’s long life: the westward expansion, the explosive growth in population of Kentucky and Missouri, the decline of game, the Indians’ dwindling power, the changes in the American economy, the nascent threat that slavery posed to the American Union, and the development of a sense of American national identity.

In 1750, the year of Boone’s first long hunt, the total non-Indian population in the British colonies in what became the United States was 1.1 million.⁴ That population was located primarily within a hundred miles of the Atlantic coast. The U.S. Census Bureau keeps track of the population center of the United States. By the bureau’s definition the population center of the United States is the point at which an “imaginary, flat, weightless and rigid map of the U.S. would balance perfectly” if every person—counted where they lived on the day of the census—weighed the same. The earliest year for which the Census Bureau has calculated the country’s population center is1790, fifteen years after Boone led the blazing of what became the Wilderness Road and helped to found Boonesborough. By 1790 hundreds of thousands had settled in Kentucky and elsewhere in the Ohio Valley, but the center of the American population—which had jumped to 3.9 million—was still in an Atlantic Coast state, near Chestertown, Maryland, on the eastern side of the Chesapeake Bay. By 1820, the year of Boone’s death, the total U.S. population had grown to 9.6 million (not a great deal less than the approximately 13.9 million who then lived in Great Britain), and the center of population had shifted well to the west, in the Shenandoah Mountains in what is now West Virginia, where Boone had hunted often.⁵ As Frederick Jackson Turner, the great historian of the American frontier, noted, “By the census of 1820 the settled area included Ohio, southern Indiana and Illinois, southeastern Missouri, and about one-half of Louisiana.”⁶ Thanks to the Louisiana Purchase, U.S. territory in 1820 extended west to the Rocky Mountains. That, too, was in some part attributable to Boone and others like him: Napoleon and Talleyrand were more willing to sell the Louisiana territory to the United States because they recognized that the territory would be increasingly hard to hold in light of the immigration into Upper Louisiana of thousands of Americans—and many of those Americans went to Missouri following the example of Daniel Boone.

If the population of America as a whole grew impressively during Boone’s lifetime, the population of Kentucky and Missouri exploded. In Kentucky there were only about 200 American settlers in the beginning of 1776. The numbers grew to 74,000 in 1790 and to 564,000 in 1820, the year Boone died. The growth in Missouri was similar—from fewer than 5,000 non-Indians in 1800, to 20,000 in 1810 and over 60,000 in 1820. A significant part of the growth of the non-Indian population in Missouri was in the Boone’s Lick country (opened up in large part by Boone’s sons Nathan and Daniel Morgan), where 20,000 people lived by 1820.⁷ Boone and his children were remarkably fecund, but Boone was not, of course, the progenitor of all of the new Kentuckians and Missourians. Many hundreds of settlers followed Boone directly into Kentucky and Missouri. Many tens of thousands more came into Kentucky and Missouri at least in part because of Boone’s reputation and example and, in the case of Kentucky, because of the defense of Boonesborough against the Indians and the success Boone, Benjamin Logan, George Rogers Clark, and others had in raiding the Shawnees in Ohio and pushing them westward.

The huge population growth in Kentucky and Missouri during Boone’s lifetime contributed to other vast changes in Kentucky, Missouri, and throughout what had been the frontier. Game was killed or driven westward, away from the settlements. Farms replaced forests. Clapboard houses and plowed fields replaced seasonal hunting camps in the wilderness. Roads capable of bearing laden wagons replaced the narrow horse paths Boone and others had blazed. The entire economy and way of life in Kentucky and Missouri were radically different in 1820 than in 1750, and Boone had contributed to that change. Turner summarized the change in his essay on the passing of the frontier: “Stand at Cumberland Gap and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file—the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur-trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the farmer—and the frontier has passed by.”⁸ Boone would not have liked those economic changes—in particular the diminishing of the game, the replacement of forests by farmland, the far denser population, or lack of “elbow-room”—but he helped to bring each of them about. Boone and his followers killed game with great efficiency. As a trader, Boone helped to equip white and Indian hunters and trappers with guns, powder, shot, and traps and purchased the pelts they brought in trade. He and his family and companions cut down forests to make cabins and stockades and firewood, including the enormous amounts of wood needed to boil salt from weakly saline springwater. Boone surveyed thousands of acres of land for settlers in Kentucky and helped to popularize to prospective settlers the advantages of settling in Kentucky and in Missouri.

The power of the Indians, relative to the white settlers, had dwindled to near-insignificance in Kentucky and Missouri by the time Boone died. In the early 1770s the Shawnees to the north and the Cherokees to the south far outnumbered the whites in what was to become Kentucky, and Boone was able to hunt there only on sufferance and by concealing himself from the Indians. By the mid-1790s few Indians remained in Kentucky, the risk of significant Indian attack was minimal, and many Shawnees and Cherokees had left Kentucky for the west—many of them going, as Boone would go, across the Mississippi into Missouri. The pattern recurred in Missouri. The Osages, in number and military strength, were far greater than the small Spanish garrison in Upper Louisiana when Boone and his family arrived in 1799. By 1808, under pressure from a flood into Missouri not only of white settlers but also of Shawnees, Cherokees, Choctaws, and other Indians who had beendriven west across the Mississippi, the Osages had given up much of their claims to land in eastern Missouri—through a treaty orchestrated in part by Boone’s son Nathan. By the time Boone died in 1820, Osage power was broken, the Osages were moving west out of Missouri, and whites greatly outnumbered Indians in Missouri.

The dwindling of Indian power was largely a result of the enormous growth in white settlement as well as the debilitating effect of smallpox, measles, and other white-introduced diseases, and, after 1803, the U.S. government’s ability to relocate eastern Indians to western lands it had acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. But Boone—though not an Indian hater—played a significant part in the relative decline of Indian power in Kentucky and Missouri. In Kentucky he led the blazing of a main route for immigrants, was himself among the first American settlers, guided subsequent parties of settlers, and encouraged others to come by his example. He also led the defense of Boonesborough that kept settlers in Kentucky and played an important role in the American raids on the Shawnee towns north of the Ohio River that broke the Shawnees’ power and contributed to their migration across the Mississippi. In Missouri Boone led a sizable party of Americans to settle up the Missouri in the Femme Osage District, and his example encouraged a flood of Americans coming into Missouri. In both places Boone’s hunting and trapping—and that of other Americans—helped to decimate the game. In these ways Boone, although he had Indian friends, helped to destroy the traditional Indian way of life and to force the Shawnees across the Mississippi and eventually to push them and the Osages out of Missouri. A vignette illustrates the extent of the Shawnee removal to the west: in 1809 Hugh McGary, the Indian hater who had fed the body of one Shawnee to his dogs and who had murdered Shawnee chief Moluntha, died peacefully in a town in southeastern Illinois called Shawneetown. The town, the site of what had been a Shawnee village, had no Shawnees in it by the time of McGary’s death.⁹

In short, by the time Boone died, Kentucky and Missouri—and the old frontier in general—had been transformed to such an extent as to be barely recognizable by pioneers of Boone’s generation. Around 1820 Boone’s old friend the illiterate giant Simon Kenton, who had moved to Ohio in 1798, came back to Washington, Kentucky, where he had lived for many years before he left the state. One day Kenton saw a boy riding to take a bag of corn to be ground at a new mill. Curious to see the new mill, Kenton rode his horse alongside the boy. They stopped at a ridge not far from Limestone,overlooking the countryside. Kenton said, as if talking to himself: “What a change! What a change!” He told the boy that in the old days what had since become the main road between Lexington and Limestone was only a buffalo trace, with impenetrable cane-brake on either side of it. Now there were clapboard houses, barns, and fenced fields. There was a big spring on the boy’s father’s farm. Kenton told the boy that years earlier, in the 1770s, Kenton and Boone had come upon that spring after they had hidden from a large party of Indians hunting buffalo and elk nearby. The Indians left so much dung at the site that Kenton and Boone named it the “Shitting Spring.” Kenton said that for some years afterward “many a claim was entered such a course and distance from ‘the Shting Spring.’” The spring now was on well-kept farmland.¹⁰

It simply was not the same world. Boonesborough, which Boone had helped to found and to build in 1775, had been one of Kentucky’s larger towns when Kentucky became a state in 1792. By 1810 it was an obscure hamlet. Soon it was only the site of a ferry crossing on the Kentucky River. In 1838 Boonesborough’s most notable landmark, the giant elm Judge Henderson had called “the most beautiful tree that imagination can suggest”—the tree under which the Transylvania legislative convention met in May 1775—was cut down.¹¹

Instead of log cabins huddled together in stockades, by 1820 Kentucki-ans and Missourians were building houses of stone and brick. Timothy Flint, who had found on the Ohio Valley in 1815 “log-houses, and wooden benches,” ten years later saw there “brick houses, ornamented court-yards, trellis-wrought summer-houses, fruit-gardens, and within, carpets, sideboards, and sofas.”¹² At least until the credit crunch and financial panic of 1819, there was money enough in Kentucky’s bluegrass towns—and, for that matter, in the Boone’s Lick region in Missouri—for conspicuous consumption. Lexington, in the heart of the bluegrass country, did not exist when Boone first came to the area. By 1810 Lexington had a population of 4,300 (a jump from 1,800 ten years earlier), of whom 1,509 (35%) were slaves, a burgeoning economy built on hemp (surrounding hemp plantations as well as factories turning the hemp into rope and bagging material) and buzzing commerce, and many substantial brick townhouses.¹³ Four years later an article in the Niles’ Weekly Register noted about Lexington: “They have a theatre; and their balls and assemblies are conducted with as much grace and ease as they are anywhere, and the dresses of the parties tasty and elegant.Strange things these in the ‘backwoods!’—The houses are mostly of brick, and some of them splendid edifices—one or two of the inns yield to none in America for extensiveness, convenience and good living.”¹⁴

Frankfort, the state capital, which had only a cabin or two in 1780, soon boasted its own array of showy brick houses, including one that Senator John Brown built in the 1790s. By 1802 formal balls were being held in Frankfort houses.¹⁵ Two years later Brown’s wife, Margaretta, wrote to a friend that Frankfort “commands a very considerable trade” and “contains about eight hundred inhabitants, one-third of whom are black; and more neat and convenient dwelling-houses than could have been expected” given how recently Frankfort was settled (less than twenty years). She described her own house as “commodious, and even elegant.”¹⁶ Margaretta, writing her husband in 1811 while visiting her native New York City, described “a very brilliant party” she had enjoyed there, saying that she would “be proud to introduce the most distinguished amongst them to our Frankfort Assemblies, or private parties, confident that we should lose nothing by the comparison, either in point of tasteful dresses, genteel arrangements, or choice of refreshments.”¹⁷ In 1819 Margaretta Brown wrote to their son Orlando, then a student at Princeton, that Kentuckians are “so far… from being free of ostentation, that the profusion and display at our entertainments, has ever been a matter of astonishment to strangers,” but no one has the courage to set a better example “for fear of being thought mean…. We could not invite a friend to dinner, but ‘the table must groan with costly piles of food.’” Only changed circumstances (presumably Margaretta had in mind the 1819 panic and the closing of many western banks) caused Kentuckians to be pursuing a more moderate course “from necessity, which we never would have adopted by choice.”¹⁸

Thomas Hart, a relative by marriage of Senator Brown, expressed what his group liked to do: “What a pleasure we have in raking up money and spending it with our friends!”¹⁹ A visitor from New England, Rev. Timothy Flint, who was to interview Boone in Missouri and pen a Boone biography, noted of Frankfort at about this time that “the inhabitants, male and female, were remarkable for their display in dress” and wrote that Lexington “has taken on the tone of a literary place, and may be fitly called the Athens of the West.”²⁰ None of this sounds like the wilderness of Kentucky in which Boone hunted alone in 1770, or the Missouri frontier to which Boone led his family in 1799—but whether or not Boone would have liked the changes, he hadhelped to bring them about by what he had done to open up Kentucky and Missouri to farming and commerce.

Another transforming change was the development of American national identity and a reduction of the conflicting loyalties that had existed when what became America was claimed by Britain, British colonies, France, Spain, and different Indian tribes. When Boone was born in 1734, there was little sense of unity among the disparate British colonies along the Atlantic coast, from Georgia to the Maine district of Massachusetts. Different colonies—notably Virginia and Pennsylvania—asserted their separate claims to the Ohio Valley and competed bitterly for the Indian fur trade. During the Revolution Indians, Americans, and British vied for control of the Ohio Valley, and Spain struggled to keep the Louisiana Territory. The Revolution gave birth to a new nation, the United States of America, with a national government that became stronger with the adoption of the Constitution—but there were still conflicting loyalties. The British sought to keep control of as much as possible of the Indian fur trade, supplying Indian forces until the British garrisons in Detroit and elsewhere in the Northwest Territory were finally removed in 1796, and even thereafter stirring up Indian resistance to America in the War of 1812. Prior to the Louisiana Purchase, the Spanish sought to use their control of New Orleans as a lever to detach from the new United States the westerners seeking to trade down the Mississippi. By the time of Boone’s death, however, there was a far greater sense of American unity and identity. The Louisiana Territory had become part of the United States, the Indians were no longer effective fighting forces in Missouri or in the Ohio Valley, and the Americans had fought the British to a standstill in the War of 1812.

Boone both exemplified the conflicting loyalties that existed on the frontier and worked to build the new American nation. He had become an adopted son of a Shawnee chief and had told the British commandant in Detroit that he would seek to have the settlers at Boonesborough pledge allegiance to the British Crown. Boone had gone to Missouri when it was still Spanish territory and had held office under the Spanish administrators of Upper Louisiana. But he also fought the British-supported Indians in Kentucky and played a key role in keeping American settlers in Kentucky during the Revolution, as well as in breaking Indian power in the Ohio Valley. The migration of Boone and his family across the Mississippi led many other Americans to settle in what became Missouri and made more likely the eventual cession of the Louisiana Territory to the United States.

This is not to suggest that the United States in 1820 was monolithic. The bitter issue of slavery was already festering, as shown by the fight over Missouri’s admission to the Union. In a way Boone contributed to this issue, too—not knowingly and not as a zealot on either side of the issue. Boone owned a few slaves from time to time, in his moments of prosperity, but no surviving writing by or story about Boone indicates that he was wedded either to slavery or to its abolition. Just as Boone had friends among the Shawnees, Boone appears to have respected and valued individual African-Americans—among them Derry Coburn, Boone’s preferred companion on many of his hunting trips in Missouri. Like much of what Boone did, his closeness to Derry seems to have been based on pragmatism rather than ideology: Derry was skilled at hunting and woodcraft, and the two men got along together well in the wilderness. But Boone’s career inadvertently furthered the spread of slavery, and so contributed to the issue that nearly destroyed the Union forty years after Boone’s death.

Boone helped to open up the bluegrass country of Kentucky. While he himself was conspicuously uninterested in farming, the land he opened up in Kentucky lent itself to growing hemp, which was a labor-intensive crop. Hemp cultivation in Kentucky was a principal reason for the growth of the state’s slave population and for the pro-slavery views of many of Kentucky’s leaders. In 1792, when Kentucky was drafting a constitution as part of becoming a state, the delegates (many of whom owned hemp plantations) voted twenty-six to sixteen to defeat an antislavery plank. More than 90 percent of the delegates owned slaves, although only 23 percent of the electorate were slaveholders.²¹

Again inadvertently, Boone helped the spread of slavery into Missouri. His family’s move to Missouri encouraged many from states in the Upper South in which Boone had lived—Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia—to follow suit. Many of these emigrants had been slave owners before moving to Missouri, and they brought slaves with them, in part because many moved to the Boone’s Lick region, which was well suited for labor-intensive hemp and tobacco cultivation. To a large extent the emigrants had chosen to acquire land in Missouri, where slavery was permitted, rather than in the Northwest Territory, in which slavery was forbidden by the Northwest Ordinance. By 1820 there were nearly two thousand slaves in the Boone’s Lick country, many owned by immigrants from Kentucky and Tennessee. InMissouri as a whole in 1820 there were some ten thousand slaves, about 15 percent of the territory’s population.²²

Daniel Boone contributed to the transforming changes in America during his long career—the birth of the nation, the westward growth of American territory and of the American settlers, the shrinking of Indian power, the shift from hunting to farming and commerce, the increasing sense of national identity—not because of any ideological conviction but because of what he liked to do and did well. His interviewer and biographer Peck viewed Boone as God’s instrument in building America, but Peck, despite his theological bent as a Baptist minister, was obliged to report that Boone “appeared to have entered into the wilderness with no comprehensive views or extensive plans of future improvements” and that Boone’s aim was “not to lay the foundations of a state or nation.”²³

Boone liked to explore new lands, to scout, to hunt, to trap. He was outstandingly good at these things, so people trusted him and followed him. The more that Boone succeeded in hunting and trapping and leading settlers to new lands and the more that people followed him, the harder it was for him to remain a successful hunter and trapper and scout while staying in the same place, and the more he was driven to new lands, with ever more people following in his wake. By doing what he did best, Boone helped to bring about the birth and transformation of America.