Boone: A Biography (51 page)

After he finds himself alone on the desert island, Crusoe says, “
[A]s my reason began to master my despondency
, I began to comfort myself as well as I could, and to set the good against the evil, that I might have something to distinguish my case from worse.” Describing the period when he was alone in Kentucky after the departure of his brother Squire for North Carolina in May 1770, Boone tells us, “
[I was] by myself, without bread
, salt, or sugar, without company of my fellow creatures or even a horse or dog. I never before was under greater necessity of exercising philosophy and fortitude.”

Much of Crusoe’s story is taken up with details of his survival, how he built a shelter, enlarged his cave, planted grain, hunted. But alternating with the descriptions and narrative are passages of philosophical comment. “
And let this stand as a direction
from the experience of the most miserable of all conditions in this world, that we always find in it something to comfort ourselves from, and to set in the description of good and evil, on the credit side of the account.” Boone also describes in some detail the way he and his brother Squire struggled in the wilderness, threatened by Indians, loneliness, the unknown. And then, like Crusoe, he will turn from narrative to philosophical observation. “
Thus situated, many hundred miles from
our families in the howling wilderness, I believe few would have equally enjoyed the happiness we experienced. I often observed to my brother, You see now how little nature requires to be satisfied.”

Filson and Boone understood, as did Defoe, that even an adventure story had to make a moral point. Besides many parallels in technical details about survival, landscape, solitude, there are similarities in the passages of meditation. But there are also many echoes of Crusoe’s story in the accounts of his life Boone gave to others besides Filson. One example is the motif of the father figure who comes in dreams to warn the son of imminent danger. Crusoe again and again reminds the reader of warnings his father gave him before he left to go to sea. Sick with ague, he writes in his journal June 27 of a vision or dream in which he saw a man descend from the sky amid flames and say in a
terrible voice, “
[S]eeing all these things have not brought thee
to repentance, now thou shalt die.” Boone later said that after he and Stewart were released by the Indians in December 1769, he dreamed he was attacked by hornets and yellow jackets, as the chief Will Emery had warned he would be if he ever returned to Kentucky. The creek they were camped on, a tributary of Otter Creek, just east of Richmond, Kentucky,
was named Dreaming Creek
, and is still called that to this day. The inference in Crusoe’s story of the dream is that the man with the terrible voice who comes to warn him is his father or is like his father. Throughout his later life Boone claimed that his father, Squire, appeared to him in dreams, often to warn him of approaching danger. John Bakeless says, “
Each time when captured, robbed
or defeated he . . . dreamed unfavorably about his father.” Crusoe mentions again and again his daily Bible reading. Near the end of his life Boone would write to his sister-in-law that he read the scriptures daily. And Nathan would tell Draper that the Bible was Boone’s favorite reading.

In no place does the Filson account echo Crusoe more closely than in the summing up and rounding off at the end. “
Many dark and sleepless nights have I been
a companion for owls, separated from the chearful society of men, scorched by the Summer’s sun, and pinched by Winter’s cold, an instrument ordained to settle the wilderness. But now the scene is changed: peace crowns the sylvan shade . . . I now live in peace and safety, enjoying the sweets of liberty, and the bounties of Providence.” This conclusion was no doubt added by Filson after he had interviewed Boone and returned east. But the similarities in tone and gesture to Defoe are unmistakable. “
How strange a chequer-work of Providence
is the life of man; and by what secret differing springs are the affections hurried about as different circumstances present.”

One of the most memorable passages in the Boone-Filson narrative is the description of the Cumberland Mountains as Boone approaches the Cumberland Gap for the first time in 1769. Filson had never seen those mountains in 1784, so the images and associations and details have to be Boone’s own. “
The aspect of these cliffs is so wild
and horrid,
that it is impossible to behold them without terror. The spectator is apt to imagine that nature had formerly suffered some violent convulsion; and that these are the dismembered remains of the dreadful shock; the ruins, not of Persepolis or Palmyra, but of the world!”

Anyone who has seen the cliff-rimmed mountains near Cumberland Gap knows how forbidding they appear, how they would inspire dread in one on foot or horseback searching for a pass through the awesome barrier. The description foreshadows the other strain of romanticism, not of Wordsworth or Emerson, but of Poe, who would later write, “
The scenery which presented itself on all sides
, although scarcely entitled to be called grand, had about it an indescribable, and to me, a delicious aspect of dreary desolation.”

One of the best-known passages in Filson’s “The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon” tells of Boone’s time alone in the woods after Squire has returned to the settlements for supplies. He describes climbing a mountain to look over the land ahead, and his epiphany of Pisgah vision. “
I surveyed the famous river Ohio
that rolled in silent dignity, marking the western boundary of Kentucke with inconceivable grandeur. At a distance I beheld the mountains lift their venerable brows and penetrate the clouds.”

T
HE TIMING OF
Filson’s visit to Kentucky and the timing of the publication of his book with its detailed map of “Kentucke” could not have been better. With the Revolution over, settlers were streaming over the mountains, floating and rowing down the Ohio, riding and walking over Boone’s Trace.
The Discovery
,
Settlement and Present State of Kentucke
, which contains “The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon,” was printed in Wilmington, Delaware, in 1784 and sold out its first printing. It was carried to England and to Europe and translated into French and German. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had died in 1778, but his vision of the “natural man” had taken hold in advanced circles in Europe and helped prepare the way for the romantic legend of Daniel Boone and the image of the wilderness of America as the new Eden.
Thomas Jefferson in Paris read the narrative, as did the naturalist and author Buffon. In 1790 William Bartram’s
Travels
would be published in England and further stimulate the romantic image of the American wilderness, inspiring both Wordsworth and Coleridge. Bartram was inspired in part by Filson’s little book. Byron would later celebrate the hero “General Boone” in a famous passage of
Don Juan
. Very quickly Boone became a celebrity and symbol of the American West, the natural man, the frontier hero. And Filson’s book became a landmark in American culture. Walton tells us, “
Interest in his subject was high
, and he contemplated a second edition; but when General Washington failed to send on an endorsement, the idea was abandoned.” Washington hesitated to endorse Filson’s effort because the map he had made, while a very good sketch, was not geometrically exact.

The Boone legend began with Filson’s little narrative in 1784 and continues to this day, despite a number of attempts to debunk it. Boone’s story and character stand up remarkably well under critical scrutiny. Boone’s character has some of the resilience shown in history by his contemporaries Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Adams, and Hamilton. They seem to be figures that we need in our history and in our image of ourselves, and no amount of quibbling and skepticism diminishes their stature very much. In the words of the scholar Arthur K. Moore, “
Boone the frontiersman, as an acknowledged
agent of progress, sanctioned the civilizing process, whatever the cost to the Indians and to his own kind, and thereby put a happy face on a matter which somewhat troubled the American conscience.”

One argument for the high fictive content of Filson’s narrative has always been the literary and historical allusions scattered throughout the text. No slightly educated backwoodsman such as Boone could possibly have made reference to “the ruins, not of Persepolis or Palmyra, but of the world!” when describing the rugged cliffs leading to the Cumberland Gap. Very likely that comparison was added by Filson. But, on the other hand, supposedly uneducated people will sometimes surprise you with odd bits of information accumulated by
hearsay or random reading. Boone’s son Nathan said his father loved to read history books and likely took them with him on his hunting trips. George Rogers Clark, for example, was a man of considerable scholarship, though he lived on the frontier. There is no reason Boone could not have heard of the ancient ruins from friends such as Richard Henderson. The allusion to Persepolis and Palmyra would not have come out in conversation with fellow hunters, but when talking to an educated easterner writing down his story, Boone just might have drawn on his capacious memory and made the comparison. Anyone who has served in the army, or worked on a construction crew, or sailed on a ship, knows that unlikely people can demonstrate surprising bits of erudition.

When
The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke
appeared it included an endorsement signed by “Daniel Boon, Levi Todd, James Harrod.” They were willing to say they had examined the text and map and could “recommend them to the public, as exceeding good performances, containing as accurate a description of our country as we think can possibly be given; much preferable to any in our knowledge extant, and think it will be of great utility to the publick.” In effect, Boone was providing a blurb for his own autobiography.

Filson’s book was published on Boone’s fiftieth birthday, and throughout the remaining thirty-six years of his life he never offered anything but praise for the volume. Visitors read passages from “The Adventures” to him and he reiterated his faith in their truthfulness. “
All true: Every word truth!
” the old hunter was heard to say more than once. Filson’s narrative is our best window into the way Boone viewed himself and wanted others to view him, in 1783 and later.

Filson elevated Boone to a celebrity from which, in J. Winston Coleman’s words, “
neither the love of friends nor the hatred of enemies
has . . . been able to remove him.” Filson portrayed a Boone who, according to Richard Slotkin, was “
a model of the republican citizen
. . . when the newly independent nation was looking for some self-image appropriate to its stature and ideology.”

Four years after publishing his book and map, Filson was killed by Indians on land he was inspecting near future Cincinnati. In a eulogy to Filson, written a century later, Col. Reuben Durrett, founder of the Filson History Club of Louisville, observed, “
No little mound attracts to his last resting-place
, and no inscription tells of his deeds; but he will live, in his map of Kentucky and in his narrative of Boone, when others, laid beneath marble columns surmounted by brazen epitaphs, are remembered no more.” However unlikely a figure he cut among his contemporaries, Filson’s writing has had a sustained influence on American history, folklore, and literature. “
A man does not have to be great
to be important,” Filson’s biographer says. “As an entrepreneur Filson was a failure. As a person he was uncongenial. As an intellectual he was undistinguished. But because he undertook some tedious and petty tasks, he made a substantial contribution to American history and letters: book and map sped the settlement of the West; in his tale of the adventures of Daniel Boone he created the prototype of our national hero.”

However much pleasure Boone took in Filson’s account and his new fame, neither seemed to do him much good in the years that followed. With his exceptional gifts and achievements Boone won renown, and the new recognition seemed to undermine the gifts, the faculties that had made him known. Leaving the woods to become a trader and public official, surveyor and land agent, Boone turned in directions where his talents were weakest. His new fame brought him ever more business, surveying jobs for which he may not have been fully qualified, speculation he was unwilling to pursue to a satisfactory or profitable conclusion, transactions with con men and even government contracts to supply militias and prisoners. He would have gotten in trouble in any case. He spread himself too thin, and his enhanced reputation accelerated the process. Reviewing the years 1785–95 one cannot help but feel that Boone lost his focus, that he was out of his element and out of his depth in some significant ways. It is possible that he never quite recovered from the grief and guilt over the defeat at the Blue Licks and
the loss of Israel. Boone kept going, and to outward appearances prospered, doing even better than before. He had position and apparent wealth, and he made a substantial amount of money as a surveyor. But in fact he was getting deeper in debt because of his carelessness with business and legal details and documents.

At Limestone Boone built a large house for his family, which served also as a tavern, Boone’s Tavern. The lumber for the building came from dismantled flat boats brought down the Ohio from Pittsburgh. He built a store and warehouse also and set himself up to sell goods to travelers arriving on the Ohio, to trade in furs and deerskins, ginseng, herbs, all the commodities of the frontier economy. In the tavern he sold meals and spirits and lodging. He traded in guns and gun repair. He lent money on little more security than a man’s word. He bought and sold horses and no doubt served as a kind of pawnbroker for the region. And of course he got more and more deeply into the land business, continuing to survey land for himself and for dozens of clients.

He was now a licensed surveyor, an official surveyor, first in Fayette County, then in Lincoln County. “
Thomas Allin and Samuel Grant the persons appointed
to examine Daniel Boone having reported that he is able and qualified to execute the Office of a Deputy Surveyor of this county the said Boone had the Oath of Office administered to him.” Once Boone was certified as a surveyor in one county, it was a mere formality to be certified in others.
In 1783 Boone made around forty surveys
, in spite of persistent attacks by Indians in the area.