Boone: A Biography (5 page)

Squire and Sarah’s sixth child, Daniel, was born November 2, 1734 (October 22, Old Style). From the very beginning the family sensed that Daniel was different from the other children. Lively, apparently tireless, curious, when very young he helped out in the family trades of blacksmithing, milling, and farming. But family lore has it that from the very first Daniel liked to roam in the woods. Oley was mostly forest then, a green world of rolling hills and small streams, and from his childhood Daniel preferred to rove and study the ways of the wild. He seemed born to be an outdoorsman and hunter, the way John Keats was born to be a poet.
One early biographer described the infant
Daniel playing with his father’s powder horn and rifle where they had been laid down after a hunt.

Daniel’s closest relationship was with his mother, tall Welsh Sarah, with her black eyes and cheerful disposition. From his birth she seemed to favor Daniel of all her children, tolerating his pranks, his tendency to slip away into the woods for hours, for whole days. The bond between mother and son was intense, affectionate, inspiring. It seems she put her fondest hopes in this independent, sometimes wayward boy driven by enthusiasms for the wild and curiosity about the world beyond the farm, beyond the river. Daniel’s uncle John Webb took a particular interest in the boy also, “
keeping him and petting him
for weeks together” at his house with his own four children.

In October of 1744 Squire Boone bought twenty-five acres of land five miles north of his home in Oley. That was where he pastured his livestock, and from the age of ten Daniel accompanied Sarah there in summer to look after the cattle and sheep. From spring until fall he lived with her in a cabin in the woods. For the rest of his life Daniel would look back on those summers as an idyllic time. He was assigned to keep an eye on the herds and help with the cows, while his mother milked and made butter and cheese. Once a week they carried the milk and milk products on foot back to the homestead. For Daniel the forest was his mother world, a place of shadows and mystery, infinite diversions and pleasure; the settlement and town were the masculine world of trade and business, meetinghouse, authority and strictness. He would always be closer to the mother world than to the father world. His deepest affinity was with the forest and the streams.

Daniel spent much of those summers exploring the nearby and not-so-nearby woods. Though he had little formal schooling, he studied the ways of animals, of deer and bear, foxes and panthers. He learned to read signs, tracks and droppings, broken twigs, bent-down grass, torn moss. As an early biographer, W. H. Bogart, phrased it, “
He learned lessons of the snow
and the leaves and moss, and to detect, with a quick eye, the tread of foot.” From Sarah he seemed to have inherited a Quaker calm and patience, a sense of intimacy with place and weather, with all life, including Indian life and Indian ways. He delighted in solitude. It is likely that most of the milking and work with the dairy was done by his mother, since
milking and butter making were considered
women’s work.

From the beginning, the complexities and contradictions of Daniel’s character seemed evident. He loved most to spend time alone in the woods, observing and learning, tracking and trapping and killing game.
Indians still lived in the neighborhood
when Boone was a boy. One Indian, a close friend of George Boone, built a cabin on Boone’s
land, lived to an old age, and was buried close by. The local Shawnee Indians liked him because he respected their ways and admired their knowledge of the land and forest. There was almost a Franciscan humility and reverence for life in the young Boone, yet he was a hunter, a killer of the wild animals.

And though he was a Quaker, Daniel was a fighting Quaker. The stories of his youthful pranks and fights, told by Boone’s son Nathan to Lyman Draper in 1851, make it clear the young Daniel was no pacifist. Once two sisters, carrying a bucket of fish guts to empty during the shad run, saw Daniel sleeping under a tree. Unable to resist the temptation, they dumped the contents of the bucket on his face. Brushing the slimy entrails out of his hair and eyes, the young Daniel jumped up and bloodied the girls’ noses and sent them home howling. Within minutes the girls’ mother stormed into Sarah Boone’s kitchen and accused Daniel of attacking her daughters. But the peaceable Quakeress would not tolerate the tirade against her son. “
If thee has not brought up
thy daughters to better behavior,” she said, “it is high time they were taught good manners. And if Daniel has given them a lesson, I hope for my part that it will in the end do them no harm. And I have only to add that I bid thee good day.”

The young Daniel often demonstrated a tendency to wander off without much concern for the worry his absence might cause others. However much he loved his mother, and however much he later loved his wife, Rebecca, his urge to hunt and wander and explore always came first.

From the time he was a boy Boone had a flair for the dramatic. He seemed to know instinctively how to make himself noticed, remembered. As a young man he began to create for himself the role of Daniel Boone, and he spent much of his life perfecting that role. Despite his later protestation that he was “
but a common man
,” he seemed aware from early in his youth that he was not just playing himself but a type, what Emerson would later call a Representative Man. Boone would
embody in his actions and attitude the aspirations and character of a whole era.

At least once, Daniel became so distracted by his own explorations that he forgot the hours of the day, his home, the fact that he was supposed to help his mother. Before it got dark, Sarah had to round up the cattle herself and do the milking, strain the milk, and put it in the springhouse to stay cool. Calm and prayerful, she worked at churning butter from clabbered milk. But when Daniel did not come home by the next morning and still had not returned by noon, she had no choice but to walk the five miles back to town to get help.

A search party was formed and they combed over the Oley Hills all the way to the
Neversink mountain range northwest
of the Monocacy Valley. They found no sign of Daniel that afternoon. But starting out early the next morning they traveled farther and spotted a column of smoke. Late in the afternoon they reached the source of the smoke and found Daniel sitting on a bearskin and roasting fresh bear meat on the fire.
When asked if he was lost
, he said no, he had known where he was all along, on the south shoulder of the hill nine miles from the pasture. The search party accused him of scaring his mother and forcing them all to waste time looking for him. But he calmly answered he had started tracking the bear and didn’t want to lose it. And besides, here was fresh meat for everybody.

Whether this story is true, or just one of the legends that grew around Boone in later life, it reveals as much about the way he was perceived and remembered as it does about his character. People later recalled that even from his boyhood there was a sense that Daniel had been singled out. The story of the search party echoes the story in Luke 2:49 of the twelve-year-old Jesus lost from Mary and Joseph. The boy is finally found in the temple conversing with the elders. When he is questioned and scolded, he explains that he has been “about his Father’s business.” The sense of the story is that Boone had already found his calling and his destiny. It is clear he also knew how to make a memorable impression.

For Boone there was something erotic about the woods, a playground, a place of sometimes dangerous pleasure. And some would later suggest that with his lifelong passion for hunting,
there was a part of Boone that never
quite grew up.

Boone’s cunning and love of pranks are also recorded in many of the childhood anecdotes Lyman Copeland Draper and others collected later. One tale Boone himself liked to repeat in old age concerned his confinement to the house during an outbreak of smallpox. His mother would not let him or his sister Elizabeth outdoors to play. Sick of the imprisonment, young Daniel and Elizabeth decided to catch the smallpox themselves and get it over with so they could go out to play as usual. That night they slipped away to a neighbor’s house and crawled into bed with friends who were infected with smallpox, then returned home before daybreak.

When a few days later the red marks began to appear on him, Sarah grew suspicious. “Now, Daniel,” she said to her son, “
I want thee to tell thy mother the whole truth
.” Daniel readily confessed the initiative he had taken. “Thee naughty little gorrel,” she cried, “why did thee not tell me before, so I could have had thee better prepared.” Sarah called him an Old English word for knave but was too affectionate to punish him. It was the kind of story Boone as an old man liked to recall of his beloved mother.

Squire Boone, however, was not so indulgent with his sons. When he punished them he would swing the strap until they begged for forgiveness. Then he would quit whipping and talk with them calmly. But Daniel was more stubborn than his brothers and endured the punishment in silence. “
Canst thou not beg?
” the frustrated father would ask. But Daniel would never answer, leaving Squire to make up his own mind when the punishment was sufficient. Even as a boy Boone showed the stoicism and self-control he was later renowned for.

While he roved the woods and tended his father’s cattle, Daniel cut
and carved a stick which he used to kill animals—rabbits and squirrels, possums and wild turkeys. Before he owned a gun Boone was already a hunter, with the patience, sharp eye, and deadly aim of the successful hunter who learned something new every day as he went into the woods again. He was proud of his skill at cleaning and dressing a turkey. Often he cooked outdoors for himself and Sarah, hanging the bird on a stick over the flames, turning it to bake on all sides. With a piece of curved bark he caught the drippings, which he used to baste the turkey. When his mother asked how he had learned to do that, he said merely that an Indian had told him how it was done.

When Daniel was almost thirteen he was given his first firearm, a “short rifle gun” with which he roamed the nearby Flying Hills, the Oley Hills, and the Neversink Mountains. The Flying Hills were named for the flocks of turkeys that lived there. The rifle was probably made by Squire Boone, who, besides keeping six looms busy with hired hands, farming, and running his blacksmith shop and mill, was also a gunsmith. His skill at making and repairing guns was passed down to his fourth son. It would be an essential, lifesaving skill in later years, in the wilderness beyond the mountains.

As a blacksmith Squire Boone had taken an apprentice named Henry Miller, two or three years older than Daniel. Henry and Daniel soon got into a fistfight, and then, as often happens with those who begin by fighting, they became lifelong friends. Henry taught Daniel blacksmithing and gunsmithing, as he learned the skills himself. Together they hunted and fished and played pranks on neighbors and on other members of the Boone family. Once they overloaded a rifle that was to be lent to a neighbor named Wilcoxen. Wilcoxen, who knew little about guns, was to pick up the already loaded rifle in the morning for a deer hunt. During the night the boys took out the lead ball, added six times the usual amount of powder, and replaced the bullet.

As soon as the neighbor took the rifle away, the boys realized what
they had done. A seriously overloaded rifle might well explode, injuring Wilcoxen, perhaps even killing him. Sick with guilt and dread, they listened as he stalked off into the woods. Later they heard a report like the blast of a cannon and, running toward the sound of the blast, were relieved to see Wilcoxen stumbling out of the woods, his face bruised and bloody from a cut on his forehead. He said the recoil of the gun had thrown him to the ground.

When he heard the story, Squire Boone answered that the load had been so light he could have rested the gun on his nose without hurting it. Daniel and Henry asked Wilcoxen if he had killed the deer, but the poor man was so surprised by the force of the blast he hadn’t noticed his target. But Wilcoxen recovered his dry wit and commented that he thought “
it was a pretty
dear
shot.” The boys ran into the woods and found the deer and brought it to the neighbor, who likely after that learned to load his gun for himself.

B
ECAUSE OF
the family’s strict Quaker principles, the Boone children were not allowed to attend parties or dances. But Daniel and Henry heard of a frolic to be held in a distant town, and giving each other courage, or daring themselves, they decided to borrow Squire Boone’s horse in the night and ride away to the dance. After an evening of celebration, perhaps after sampling some of the local hard cider, they decided to jump the horse carrying both of them over one of Squire’s cows sleeping in the pasture. The cow awakened and started to rise, rear first, just as the horse began its leap. Daniel and Henry slammed to the ground shaken but unhurt, but the horse broke its neck and died. The boys returned the bridle and saddle to the barn and crept back into the house as if nothing had happened.
Squire never solved the mystery
of how a healthy horse could let itself out of the barn and break its neck in an open pasture.

One of the pranks credited to Boone
and Henry Miller was taking apart piece by piece the wagons of neighbors who had scolded
them and placing the wagonwheels on the ridgepoles of the owners’ barns. But these may have been Halloween tricks more than acts of revenge.

Daniel began to acquire a reputation for prowess, cunning, and willpower. From an early age he could walk miles without getting tired and swim any river or pond. He could outrun other boys and he always seemed to win fights and wrestling matches. With bow and arrow he always seemed to win shooting matches, and with a rifle he was without peer. If he and his friends played “
Hunt the Indian
,” he always found the Indian. If it was his turn to be the Indian, he disappeared and could not be found. Once he and Henry and other boys were carrying their rifles in the woods and surprised a panther sunning on the riverbank. It screamed and started to charge. The other boys ran, but Daniel stood his ground, leveling his sights at the bounding cat.
Just as the creature was about to leap
at him, he fired and the cat fell dead at his feet.