Boone: A Biography (3 page)

Boone was most fortunate of all in attracting the scholar and writer Lyman Copeland Draper, who never finished or published his
Life of
Daniel Boone
. A native of upstate New York, Draper (1815–91) worked as a clerk, editor, and journalist but devoted his life to collecting information and documents for the study of the western frontier and the Revolutionary War era. He borrowed, bought, begged, copied—some said stole—thousands of documents and interviewed hundreds of survivors and descendants. He corresponded with hundreds more and seemingly came in contact with everyone who ever lived in the frontier Ohio Valley or was descended from the pioneers there.

Draper interviewed Daniel Boone’s youngest son, Nathan, and Nathan’s wife, Olive Van Bibber Boone, at length in 1851, at their home in Greene County, Missouri. As secretary of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin in Madison, Draper collected and hoarded documents and transcripts, rather than completing his projected biographies of Boone and George Rogers Clark and other pioneers. At his death he left an ocean of interviews and papers scholars have been struggling through and sifting ever since. Draper was small in stature but a giant of American historical scholarship. “
I am a small bit of a fellow
,” he wrote to one correspondent. “Yet small as I am, and as ‘good for nothing’ as I often think myself, I yet feel that I have something to do.”

One of the assistants Draper trained at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin was Reuben Gold Thwaites (1853–1913). When Draper retired, Thwaites succeeded him as director of the society and became one of the most important editors and writers on frontier history of his time. In 1902 Thwaites published his own biography of Boone, called simply
Daniel Boone
. It was the first published life of Boone to make use of the hoard of documents Draper had collected.

In 1920 a professor of mathematics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Archibald Henderson, published
The Conquest of the Old Southwest
to much acclaim. Henderson was a descendant of Judge Richard Henderson, founder of the Transylvania Company and Boone’s employer, and he stressed the significance of the Transylvania venture in the founding of Kentucky and Tennessee. Henderson planned to follow that history with a life of Daniel Boone, but a peculiar
chemistry began to work on the professor as he proceeded with his project. He decided that his ancestor Richard Henderson was the real hero of the story of Kentucky and that Daniel Boone was little more than a hired hand. He became a debunker of Boone, and at Fourth of July celebrations and memorial ceremonies he made a spectacle of himself attempting to build up the reputation of his ancestor and belittle the scout and hunter who had hacked Boone’s Trace and given his name to Boonesborough. In the end Archibald Henderson was unable to write the biography, and his research material was left to the University of North Carolina as the Henderson Papers, a valuable resource in the North Carolina Collection.

Probably the most successful biography of Boone ever published was John Bakeless’s 1939 volume,
Master of the Wilderness: Daniel Boone
. Bakeless, a historian and professor of journalism at New York University, drew heavily on modern research of the frontier period and made extensive use of the Draper Collection at Madison. The book went through several editions and is still in print. Many Boone enthusiasts still consider it the best Boone biography ever written. However, Bakeless had little interest in Indians and Indian culture, except to portray them usually as savages, or in the slaves who were present in so much of the activity of the frontier. Implicit in much of Bakeless’s narrative is the assumption of the superiority of white culture destined to subdue and transform the wilderness into the ideal of American civilization.

In 1992 John Mack Faragher published
Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer
and brought to his study of Boone a formidable knowledge and insight about Indian culture and the impact of Indian culture on white culture. Faragher took Boone studies up to a new level with his sensitivity and erudition concerning Native American history. He also included in his portrait of Boone the rumor that Boone was not the father of one of his children, begotten while Boone was away hunting or in the militia in January 1762. Faragher makes
the story exciting and plausible, a significant element in drawing the characters of Boone and his wife, Rebecca. Yet most Boone scholars have considered the story as little more than a composite of contradictory rumors, passed on by elderly informants with vague memories, improbable if not impossible.

A major service to Boone scholarship has been performed in recent years by the scholar Ted Franklin Belue. In 1998 he published a transcribed and annotated edition of Draper’s unfinished
Life of Daniel Boone
. Only those who have tried to read Draper’s notes and documents on microfilm can appreciate the value and difficulty of Belue’s achievement. With this volume Belue put at our fingertips the heart of Draper’s work on Boone and, through his notes and chronology, provided an invaluable resource for further study.

In 1999 the Kentucky architect and Boone scholar Neal O. Hammon published
My Father, Daniel Boone
, a compilation of the interviews Draper conducted with Boone’s youngest son, Nathan, and Nathan’s wife, Olive, in 1851. Gathering the material from several locations in the Draper Collection, Hammon arranged the pieces into a coherent narrative, making easily accessible the words of our most reliable informant about Daniel Boone.

Michael A. Lofaro published
Daniel Boone: An American Life
, a short biography for popular audiences, in 2003. Lofaro’s book presents the Boone narrative in thrilling, condensed form, yet also provides one of the most useful bibliographic and scholarly resources we have to date.

Among the younger historians, I have learned the most from Stephen Aron, author of
How the West Was Lost
and
American Confluence
. Aron is especially adept at showing the complexity and flux of events on the American frontier and placing those events in the context of continental and even world history.

It requires a certain bravado to enter a field as crowded as Boone biography. Of major figures in early American history, only Washington and Franklin and Jefferson have had their stories told more often and
in greater detail. What recklessness or delusion could tempt a writer to take on a subject so often studied, attacked, dramatized?

My fascination with Boone goes back to boyhood. My father, who was a wonderful storyteller, had a lifelong interest in Daniel Boone and loved to quote the hunter and explorer. Since Daniel’s mother was Sarah Morgan, my father thought we were related by blood. Though I have not found more than a distant family connection, I always felt a kinship with the hunter and trapper and scout.

The classic author I struggled with and learned most from as a young writer was Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau’s observation, knowledge, wisdom, integrity, artistry, and stubbornness remain unsurpassed in American literature and culture. And more than any other single author Thoreau expresses much that was likely the experience and aspiration and genius of Boone. Thoreau put into sentences the poetry and thought Boone had lived.

Many boys, both old and young, feel a connection with Boone, but growing up in the mountains of western North Carolina in the 1940s and 1950s, hunting and trapping, fishing and wandering the mountain trails, I may have felt the kinship more literally than most. Living on a small farm, without a truck or tractor or car, plowing our fields with a horse, keeping milk and butter in the springhouse, listening to stories about the old days by the fireplace or on the porch in summer, I always felt an intimate contact with the past, with the Indians, with the frontier. Working in the creek bottoms day after day, I turned up arrowheads and pieces of pottery. The Indians seemed to haunt the ground beneath my feet, and the laurel thickets, and the mutter of creek and waterfall. Once after a flood scoured away several feet of alluvial soil in the field by the river, I found the charred remains of a campfire perhaps a thousand years old.

It was writing the novel
Brave Enemies
, set in the American Revolution and culminating at the Battle of Cowpens in South Carolina in 1781, that led me back to Boone. As I did my research on the Revolutionary period in the Carolinas, I grew more and more preoccupied
with life on the frontier, where white settlers mingled and fought with and learned from the Native populations. I came to see what an extraordinary story that was, the collision of different worlds right in my own backyard, as British confronted French, Indians fought Indians, white Regulators confronted the colonial government, and finally Americans fought the Crown. And through it all the thread of slavery stretched like a poison filament from earliest colonial times to the nineteenth century and Civil War.

I found Boone a much more complex person than I had noticed before. Why was he remembered, romanticized, revered, and written about when many other figures on the Kentucky frontier were pretty much forgotten? I wanted to find out what it was about Daniel Boone that made him lodge in the memory of all who knew him and made so many want to tell his story. How was a scout and hunter turned into such an icon of American culture?

In the course of my research I discovered that Boone had been a Freemason and that his membership in that society connected him in unexpected ways with leading figures of the American Revolution, such as Benjamin Franklin and Washington, and with the new spirit of brotherhood, liberty, and reason spreading through Europe and North America. No other Boone scholar seemed to have noticed Boone’s association with Masonry. I also found that Boone was a great dreamer, and a significant part of his dream was a vision of hunting and living at peace with the Indians, in the wilderness over the mountains. It was a vision and a longing that set him apart from many other hunters of the time.

Boone many times referred to himself as a woodsman. It was the description he seemed to prefer, the identity he chose to claim. When he wrote to Gov. Isaac Shelby in 1796 asking for the contract to rebuild the Wilderness Road, Boone said, “
I am no Statesman
I am a Woodsman and think My Self . . . Capable of Marking and Cutting that Rode.” When young I studied engineering and wanted to build roads also. Many of the narratives I have written concern path blazing and
road building. That was another aspect of Boone I felt a deep connection with: Boone the artisan and artificer, Boone the road maker.

Some have said the name Boone comes from the Norman Bohun, from the nobleman Henry de Bohun (1176–1220). The Boones had lived in Devonshire for centuries, working as weavers and blacksmiths, before they immigrated to Pennsylvania. Boone’s mother was Sarah Morgan, descended from Welsh Quakers from Merionethshire in the mountains of North Wales.

In one of the happiest accidents of punning etymologies known, Americans acquired the word
boondocks
from Tagalog in the Philippines, and from that wonderful word, meaning “mountains,” derived the term
boonies
, referring to the hinterlands, the backcountry. Many wrongly assume
boonies
comes to us from the name Boone, explorer of hinterlands and backcountry. And we also have the Old French word
boon
as in “boon companion” from the Latin
bonus
, meaning “good.” And from Old Norse we have
boon
, meaning a “blessing or benefit,” coming from a word that meant “prayer.”
Boon
is also an Old English word for the rough fiber taken out of flax as it is prepared for spinning into thread. The Boones had been weavers for generations in Devonshire. Boone was fortunate in his name, if not in his business enterprises.

“
They may say what they please
of Daniel Boone, he acted with wisdom in that matter,” Simon Kenton remarked about rumors of Boone’s dishonesty and treachery once when he surrendered some salt boilers in 1778. Kenton meant that the truth of the man’s deeds and character would rise above all the clouds of rumor spread by detractors. And for more than two centuries it has.

Boone

1734–1750

The Quakers of Devonshire lived as farmers and weavers in hamlets and mountain valleys. They had broken away from the official church and been punished by fines and ostracism, sometimes by prison and whippings. As Quakers they could not hold office or vote. As pacifists it was against their faith to serve in the army or navy. They could not attend school or train for the learned professions. As followers of George Fox, they called themselves Friends, and they did not have a hierarchy of clergy or ritualized service. They met in silence and spoke only as the spirit stirred them. The ties of neighbors and among the Friends were very close. Though often persecuted and exploited, they attempted to live lives of calm goodwill and honest work, farming and weaving linen and wool, blacksmithing and helping one another.