MANY OF US THINK WE KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT DANIEL BOONE. We grew up hearing about him or seeing someone in a movie or on TV acting the part of Boone—a cheerful, illiterate American patriot wearing a coonskin cap, who discovered Kentucky, built the first settlement there, and killed innumerable Indians. But little of what we think we know about Boone is true. Boone despised coonskin caps and did not wear them. He did not kill many Indians. He killed a few, but only when he had to. He was an adopted son of a Shawnee chief and had many friends among the Shawnees—even though Indians killed Boone’s brother and two of Boone’s sons. Boone was not illiterate; indeed, he wrote better than most on the frontier. His spelling was often phonetic and idiosyncratic, but so was that of Lewis and Clark and many of Boone’s contemporaries. Boone was neither the first white to cross the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky nor the builder of the first settlement in Kentucky. While often thought of as an American patriot, during and after the Revolution Boone was not uniquely American in his ties: his first commission as a militia officer was signed by Virginia’s last British colonial governor; he was Shawnee by adoption; and he became a civil servant in Spain’s administration in Missouri, before the Louisiana Territory was acquired by the United States.
If the untruths about Boone are remarkable, the truths about Boone’s life and achievements are much more so. During Boone’s long lifetime—he lived from 1734 to 1820—America was born as a country and completely transformed. What had been disparate settlements of fewer than a million British colonists huddled near the Atlantic Coast became an independent nation reaching well beyond the Mississippi and numbering close to ten million.1 Daniel Boone helped to bring about the making and transformation of America.
Boone was unexcelled as a woodsman and explorer of the American frontier. Born in Pennsylvania, he traveled through Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, and Michigan, out to Missouri, and at least as far west as Kansas. This was at a time when one traveled by foot, on horseback, or by boat. Although he was not the first white to cross the Cumberland Gap, Boone and a party of axemen under him blazed what became the Wilderness Road from the Cumberland Gap to the Kentucky River. Hundreds of thousands of settlers entered Kentucky on that road. Boone was a founder of Boonesborough, led many immigrants into Kentucky, and by his example induced many others to follow. Between 1775 and 1800 the number of settlers in Kentucky grew from fewer than 200 to 221,000, and in 1792 Kentucky became a state. By 1820, when Boone died, Kentucky’s population had reached 564,000.2 Boone’s leadership of the successful 1778 defense of Boonesborough against a sustained Indian attack was instrumental in keeping white settlers in Kentucky during the bloody years of the Revolution.
In 1799 Boone and his family moved to Missouri, then a Spanish territory with a non-Indian population of perhaps four thousand. Boone explored and hunted up the Missouri River at least as far as Kansas. His example helped to encourage an influx of settlers into Missouri. By 1820, when Boone died, sixty-seven thousand people lived in Missouri, which was then on the verge of statehood.3
Boone’s achievements made it harder for him to do what he most loved to do. Boone excelled in hunting, opening up the wilderness, and guiding settlers into frontier territory. But by doing these things, Boone and other frontiersmen changed the land forever, so that he could not stay where he was and keep on hunting, trapping, and scouting. He was forced to move, with the advancing frontier, farther and farther west. That process of change and movement was key to the transformations in America in Boone’s lifetime.
I have sought to give a full picture of Boone, stripping away the layers of myth that have encrusted Boone since the first book about him appeared in 1784.4 There have been many biographies of Boone written since then, several of which are described in the bibliographical note at the end of this book—but none has focused to the same extent as this book on Boone as an example of and contributor to America’s transformation, or on how Boone illustrates the conflicts in loyalties and the fluidity on the frontier until the new nation was formed, the Louisiana Territory was purchased, Indian power declined,and the British finally withdrew from their garrisons on American land. Boone fought Indians, but he was the adopted son of a Shawnee chief, and he remained friends with Shawnees for over forty years. During the Revolution he defended the frail young American settlements in Kentucky, yet like many on the frontier, his loyalties were not limited to the new nation that had yet to take shape. Boone fought the British not because he was a dyed-in-the-wool American—a national identity that was still being created—but because he was defending settlements against Indians armed and sometimes supported by the British. When Boonesborough was besieged, Boone was willing to discuss dispassionately the pros and cons of surrendering the fort and pledging allegiance to the British Crown. In 1799 Boone and his family moved to Missouri when it was still Spanish territory, and Boone became a civil servant in the Spanish administration of Missouri, although he probably expected at the time that Missouri would become part of the United States.
Quite apart from the conflicting loyalties Boone confronted, his own character was complex. He was a loner who loved being by himself in the wilderness, but at the same time a leader whom others trusted with their lives in the face of deadly dangers. He was a wanderer who was away from his family sometimes for years at a time, but he was also devoted to his family. He was a nurturer who cared for the young, the lost, the wounded, but also was a risk-taker who brought two of his sons and one of his brothers into perils that led to their violent deaths. Boone was not a regular churchgoer, but his faith was strong and simple, as was his belief in the importance of treating others fairly.
Daniel Boone, though long dead, has been a part of my life since I was a child. My father was born and grew up in Kentucky. His family had lived there since Boone’s time, and ancestors of mine knew Boone well. One of my relatives, Col. John Floyd, a founder of Louisville, helped Boone rescue his teenage daughter Jemima when she was captured by Indians in 1776. John Floyd married a relative, and his son married a daughter, of my ancestor William Preston, who in 1774, as colonel of the militia in western Virginia, made Boone a captain by inserting his name in a blank commission that had been signed by the British governor of the colony. Another ancestor, John Brown, congressman and senator from Kentucky, was one of Boone’s lawyers in the litigation that soured Boone on Kentucky.
America is not an old country. You do not have to go back many generations to meet Daniel Boone. In 1845, twenty-five years after his death,Kentuckians brought Boone’s remains back from Missouri to Kentucky. My father’s great-grandfather, Mason Brown, a judge in Kentucky, led the effort to reinter Boone in Frankfort, Kentucky’s capital. When local dignitaries looked at the bones before the reinterment, Mason Brown put Boone’s skull in the hands of his young son, John Mason Brown, so he could say that he had held it. Col. William Preston had lived only three generations before the boy who held Daniel Boone’s skull.
My father, also named John Mason Brown (our family is not imaginative in naming children; my grandson is another John Mason Brown), had on the walls of his study, inherited from his uncle, the long and heavy rifle that Col. John Floyd was carrying in 1783 when Indians killed him not far from Louisville. That rifle now hangs on my brother’s living room wall. I grew up steeped in stories my father told me about Daniel Boone and the settling of Kentucky. My father used to say that Daniel Boone had paid for part of my education. That was because in 1952 my father wrote a book on Boone for young readers, which kept on selling vigorously throughout my adolescence. That book, reprinted in 2007, continues to reward new young readers today, as it excited me when my father read it to me paragraph by paragraph while writing it years ago. I owe to my father the kindling of my abiding interest in Daniel Boone and in the opening of trans-Appalachian America. The acknowledgments and the bibliographical note show my indebtedness to others for their studies of Boone and his period.
I invite you to meet Daniel Boone, for the large role he played in America’s birth and transformation, for the complexity of his character, and for the strength of the principles that underlay his achievements.