Boone: A Biography (62 page)

A
S WITH
other periods of Boone’s life, there are many rumors and legends about his later years in Missouri. According to Nathan, Daniel and Rebecca took a room in St. Charles around 1809 to be near Nathan’s son James, who was in school there and homesick. “
When
my father heard of it, he and Mother went down, took a room in St. Charles, and kept house there for some time and made a home for little son James.” Living in town may have been more convenient for Boone, as he was treated by a doctor there. It was during this stay in St. Charles that he talked with Stephen Hempstead every night for a month. “
He rented a house nearly opposite
to mine for a while.” When sugar-making time came in February, they likely returned to Jemima and Flanders Callaway’s maple grove for the annual ritual of sap boiling.

Some have claimed that Boone returned to Kentucky around 1810 to visit his brother Squire, who lived on the Indiana side of the Ohio. It would have been on this supposed visit to Kentucky that Boone encountered the bird painter and naturalist John James Audubon, who was co-owner of a store at Henderson, Kentucky. According to Audubon, who later painted a portrait of Boone from memory, the two went hunting together and the frontiersman demonstrated how to “bark” a squirrel, killing the animal with the force of a bullet hitting bark but not touching the animal. “
I perceived that the ball had hit the piece of bark
immediately beneath the squirrel, and shivered it into splinters, the concussion produced by which had killed the animal and sent it whirling.”

In Audubon’s account, Boone also related a tale about escaping from Indians by getting them drunk, and one about marking a spot by blazing a tree and then locating the exact tree years later after the blaze had grown over, thereby proving a boundary claim. Like Filson, Audubon makes Boone sound eloquent and educated, formal in his speech. Audubon never let mere facts stand in the way of good storytelling, and no doubt he enhanced the account with some of his own phrasing, but it is quite possible Boone spoke more formally to some listeners, as he had apparently with Filson. It is possible that Audubon’s story includes many actual phrases from Boone’s speech, along with a good deal of fiction and fine phrasing, smoothed out for a genteel public. “
There were then thousands of buffaloes
on the hills in Kentucky; the land looked as if it never would become poor; and to hunt in those days
was a pleasure indeed. But when I was left to myself on the banks of the Green River, I dare say for the last time in my life, a few
signs
only of deer were to be seen.”

Audubon’s story has so much detail, it is likely he did meet Boone and talk with him. But the encounter probably occurred in Missouri instead of Kentucky. Boone had left Kentucky before Audubon ever arrived in North America in 1803. Audubon traveled widely to find and paint birds. But writing up his account years later in England for his
Ornithological Biography
, the painter may have decided it would sound more convincing if he placed the meeting in Kentucky. After all, Boone was famous for exploring and settling Kentucky, not Missouri. Whether the meeting occurred or not, the image of an encounter between the two giants of the American wilderness caught the attention of readers in the 1830s when Audubon published his
Ornithological Biography
and has lodged in the memory and imagination ever since. It is a meeting that should have occurred: Boone the explorer, the scout and ultimate man of the wilderness, meeting the greatest of the naturalist-artists in modern history. Audubon would do as much as anyone else except Filson to bring the legend of Boone to the future. His portraits in words and oils are indelible in our history. His account amplifies the transition of Boone from actual, historical human being with all his faults and failures, into the realm of heroic art and myth. In that sense the meeting between the two occurred, whether on the banks of the Ohio or the Missouri or on the shores of Audubon’s vision. In any case it was a significant encounter.

Many years later, in 1890, Abner Bryan, son of Jonathan Bryan, wrote to Draper, “
It is quite certain Dl. Boone did return to Ky
after he settled in Missouri. He sold his land, took the proceeds & went to Kentucky, & paid up his old debts—& returned home with four bits in his pocket & said now he had paid his debts—and could die happy—no one would say he was dishonest.” But Bryan’s account sounds so much like that in Peck’s biography of 1847 it may be discounted as testimony. He may have been simply repeating what he had read.

We know that Boone was in Missouri in 1811 when John Jacob Astor’s party of fur traders ascended the river on their way to the Pacific, for they recorded that they visited him. In
Astoria
, which Washington Irving published in 1835, Boone is described as just back from a hunt where he had taken sixty beavers. “
The old man was still erect in form
, strong in limb and unflinching in spirit.” He watched the expedition depart, wishing he could join them.

During the War of 1812 the British encouraged Indian attacks on settlers in Missouri. It was a kind of replay of the attacks in the Revolutionary period on Kentucky. Osages attacked outlying farms and towns again and again. Boone attempted to join the militia, but he was refused. At seventy-eight, he was allowed to serve as a nurse and to assist at the forts. No doubt he advised the younger men on tactics and encouraged them at moments of danger and low morale. Several times Boone and Rebecca had to seek shelter at a nearby fort.

While Boone and Rebecca were living near Jemima and Flanders Callaway during the sugar-making season of 1813, Rebecca suddenly became sick. Nathan told Draper, “
She remained there about a month
. When she was not feeling well, she rode to Callaway’s house, and after a few weeks of sickness, she died there, on March 18, 1813.” After a marriage of fifty-six years, Boone was devastated by the loss. Though he had spent much of their married life away from Rebecca, hunting and trapping, serving in militias and legislatures, held captive by Indians, Boone had depended completely on her. For him, she had moved to Virginia, back to the Yadkin, to the Clinch and to Kentucky, back to the Yadkin again, then to Boone’s Station, to Marble Creek, to Limestone, to Point Pleasant, up the Kanawha, to Brushy Creek, to the Little Sandy, and then to Missouri. Boone’s life cannot be imagined without Rebecca. It is unlikely he could imagine a future without her. Rebecca had spent most of her life in crowded, smoke-filled cabins, surrounded by her children and grandchildren, nephews and nieces. She had given birth to ten, and she had eighteen grandchildren.
It
is quite possible she saw nothing remarkable about her life; after all, many others had lived in much the same way.

She was buried on a hill near the Callaway house, overlooking the Tuque Creek valley. Boone’s granddaughter Susannah Callaway later said Rebecca’s death was “
the Saddest affliction of his life
.” But there was hardly time for mourning. The threat of Indian attacks caused the Callaways to move to Daniel Morgan’s fort, several miles away. Included in the baggage they carried to the Femme Osage was the manuscript of the autobiography Boone had dictated to his grandson John Callaway. The canoe that carried the manuscript along with household goods hit a log and capsized. The account of Boone’s life in his own “voice” was lost to posterity. Boone was probably too old and grieved by Rebecca’s death to attempt the autobiography again. The bad luck that had found Boone so many times, and in so many places, had not forgotten him.

Certainly the jinx that had followed Boone so faithfully did not desert him early the following year. Judge Coburn had assembled another petition to put before Congress, arguing that Boone, who had led so many to settle and develop the West, owned not a foot of land. As the painstakingly assembled petition moved toward a successful decision, the lawyer Edward Hempstead told the committee that Boone did not want the ten-thousand-acre tract stated in the petition, only the original thousand arpents he had been given by Lieutenant Governor Delassus in 1799. Boone was awarded the smaller parcel of land.

Boone was furious that Congress and President Madison had given him such a minimal tract for all his services. He threatened to refuse the grant. In any case he had to sell most of the land the following year to pay off creditors in Kentucky still suing him for debts and land deals made decades before. As soon as they heard Boone had been awarded land, creditors descended on him. “
For this reason my father, Colonel Daniel Boone
, disposed of every acre of his old Spanish grant, which had been confirmed by Congress, to liquidate these demands,” Nathan said.

In this unhappy period, a man whose late wife had been given a parcel of land by Boone years before when she was an orphan rescued from Indians, traveled all the way to Missouri to confront Boone. The property had been lost to another claimant, and the husband badgered Boone to pay for the lost gift. The normally courteous and soft-spoken Boone was so annoyed by the man’s persistence he told him “
he had come a great distance to suck a bull
, and he reckoned he would have to go home dry.”

As the War of 1812 wound down, more settlers poured into Missouri. Thousands were attracted to the region by the name Boone’s Lick. Though Boone had nothing to do with the salt works there, the name caught the popular imagination and seemed to promise a rich and abundant life in the new territory. The trace Nathan and Daniel Morgan made to reach the salt works became known as Boone’s Lick Road, and thousands of settlers followed it west in the years to come, connecting with the Santa Fe Trail or the Oregon Trail. The wilderness of Missouri began to disappear under the arriving axes and plows.

The Reverend John Mason Peck, who interviewed Boone and wrote one of the early biographies, described the flood of immigrants to the Boone’s Lick region after the War of 1812 ended. “
The ‘new-comers’ like a mountain torrent
, poured into the country faster than it was possible to provide corn for breadstuff. Some families came in the spring of 1815; but in the winter, spring, summer, and autumn of 1816, they came like an avalanche. It seemed as though Kentucky and Tennessee were breaking up and moving to the ‘Far West.’ Caravan after caravan passed over the prairies of Illinois, crossing the ‘great river’ at St. Louis, all bound to the Boone’s Lick.”

Another minister and author who interviewed Boone in his last years, Rev. Timothy Flint, wrote the first book-length biography, published in 1833. Though he cannot always be relied on for facts, Flint provides some colorful details about Boone’s last years. “
After the peace, he occupied himself in hunting
, trapping, and exploring the country—being absent sometimes for two or three months at a time—solacing his aged ear with the music of his young days—the howl of
the nocturnal wolf—and the war song of the prowling savages . . . When the writer lived in St. Charles, in 1816, Colonel Boone, with the return of peace, had resumed his Kentucky habits.”

Even in his old age, as Missouri began to be cleared and settled, thanks in part to the lure of his name, Boone was thinking of the farther west. With Derry Coburn and others he explored Kansas and perhaps reached as far north as the Dakotas. His descendant Wade Hays later said that Boone and Will Hays Jr. made a second trip to the Yellowstone, though most historians think this unlikely. And though he knew he would never see it, the Pacific Coast was much on Boone’s mind. Several who spoke with him in his final decade remembered his enthusiasm for the West Coast, called Alta California by the Spanish. Wade Hays wrote, “
Daniel Boone had a vary great idea of the Pacific
Co[a]st[.] [H]e described it vary accurate for some reason, I supose from talking with Indians.” Even as an old man Boone did not lose his fascination with exploration. His failing eyes followed the sunset over the wide bottomlands and hurrying waters of the Missouri.

After he was besieged by creditors trying to collect for old debts in Kentucky, when his grant came through in 1814, Boone was still planning hunting expeditions. Officers at Fort Osage, near future Kansas City, reported that Boone spent two weeks with them in 1816 on his way to the Platt River. According to Nathan, his father traveled as far as Iowa in April 1816 with a hunter named Indian Phillips but had to stay at Fort Leavenworth for several days because of sickness. “
While at the fort he became acquainted
with Captain Bennett Riley of the army, who was then in command. He recovered sufficiently to return home, and Phillips returned with him.” In Missouri Boone associated with Indians often. They were all part of the same larger community.

In 1816 Boone began dictating yet another narrative of his life to the husband of one of his granddaughters, Dr. John Jones. While Boone stayed with the Joneses and was treated for his various ailments, the old hunter told Jones the story of his eighty-two years, and the young doctor wrote it down. “
He went there for the double purpose of
placing himself under the doctor’s medical care and advice for the scrofulous
affection that sometimes bothered him and also to dictate to the doctor a narrative of his life and adventures,” Nathan told Draper. But Boone soon tired of the project and the manuscript was later lost.

The loss of all the certain accounts of his life from Boone’s own lips and in his own words has added to the mystery of his life and character. It is as though there is something about Boone just beyond reach, something unknown and unknowable. He cannot be known “in his own words” because he belongs as much to myth and the collective imagination as to history. We have hundreds of documents in his handwriting, yet we feel he is best “known” in the words of others such as Filson, Audubon, and Peck. There are a number of figures in history who seem to recede the more we study them, always larger than life, hovering between biography and legend. George Washington is one. No matter how much we study his life we never feel we “know” the Father of his Country. Perhaps Robert E. Lee, the so-called marble man, is another. There can be no biography of Shakespeare because the Bard is the voice of his characters, the very voice of nature and history. How could one write a true portrait of Leonardo da Vinci, the ideal model of originality and genius? Such figures become their deeds and the public imagination of those deeds. And something of the same is true for Boone. No matter how many details and documents we have about Boone, he somehow slides back into the amber twilight of legend, projected in the folk imagination and the words of others. As Emily Dickinson said of nature: