Boone: A Biography (63 page)

But nature is a stranger yet
;

The ones that cite her most

Have never passed her haunted house
,

Nor simplified her ghost
.

To pity those that know her not

Is helped by the regret

That those who know her, know her less

The nearer her they get
.

However elusive his character might be, Boone’s relish of the wild and freedom, his sense of being at home for long expanses of time with only animals and hills and clouds for companions, put him at the head of a class of woodsmen of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including William Bartram—who explored the wilds of Florida and Georgia, as well as the Carolinas, delighting in both the wildlife and the Natives—and Audubon, Thoreau, John Muir. These men, and hundreds like them less famous, were at home in the pristine wilderness that lay at their feet and just beyond the next hill. They were sometimes men of ambition, but their ambitions were directed toward wonder and curiosity. They were willing to take enormous risks to see new places, and find new places within themselves, to feel like Adam stepping into an endless garden of canebrakes and meadows, mountains and rivers sparkling in the distance, waiting to be explored and named. They learned from the Indians, and some associated closely with Indians. Later poets, such as Bryant, Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson, would return again and again to the essential solitary glimpse of paradise, putting into words and into sounds a strain of experience already deeply rooted in American culture, an ideal and a longing.

In the fall of 1817 Boone went hunting again, this time with his grandson James. He had hunted every fall since he was big enough to throw a spear or swing a club. He and James wandered up the Missouri, and the old man was exhilarated to be in the woods again. A duck landed by their campfire, as though offering itself for their breakfast. But the cold began to tell on the old man’s joints, and they turned back after a few days. Yet his urge to hunt was as great as it had ever been. Nathan told Draper, “
My father said he was as naturally inclined
each fall to go hunting and trapping as the farmer is in spring to set about putting in his crops.”

In the years after Rebecca’s death, Boone never kept house himself but moved from Nathan’s house to Jemima’s to Daniel Morgan’s and then Jesse’s. Jesse had arrived from Kentucky in 1816. But primarily Boone lived with Jemima and Flanders Callaway, near Rebecca’s grave.
Many visitors searched him out, to hear stories of the old days in Kentucky, of the Indians and the Revolution. The Reverend John Mason Peck, who would later publish his biography in 1847, interviewed Boone in December 1818, not long after newspapers had mistakenly reported his death. Expecting to meet a rough, intimidating frontiersman, Peck found instead a “
countenance . . . ruddy and fair
, and [he] exhibited the simplicity of a child. His voice was soft and melodious. A smile frequently played over his features in conversation.”

Peck noticed how solicitous Boone’s family was of the old man’s comfort, showing great affection for the patriarch. “
Every member of his family appeared to delight
in administering to his comforts,” Peck later wrote. As he recounted his life, Boone stressed that though he had experienced hardships and dangers, others had also. “
He was sociable, communicative
in replying to questions, but not in introducing incidents of his own history. He was intelligent, for he had treasured up the experience and observation of more than fourscore years.”

The portrait that emerges from Peck’s account is of a wise and resigned old man. He recounted the loss of his lands in Kentucky and Missouri and said that tracts of land had always “
proved an injury rather than a benefit
.” The lessons he had been taught had made him “indifferent to the affairs of the world.” It appears that in his last years Boone recognized the difference between his life in the woods as a trapper and hunter, his life with his family on the frontier, and his ventures in the world of business and politics. Most who met Boone in these last years gave pretty much the same account of the old scout. Boone liked to stress that over the years his best and most reliable friends had been Indians. In his final years he seemed to wax more romantic and affectionate than ever toward Native Americans, remembering them as a people of honor and compassion. He had always identified with Indian culture, since his youth in Pennsylvania, and in his old age, safe in Jemima’s home, he recalled mostly the good things from his many encounters, transactions, and captivities with Native Americans.

Once Boone said that “
while I could never with safety repose
confidence
in a Yankee, [I] have never been deceived by an Indian.” Much has been made of the comment over the years, and though the sentiment was probably real, he was forgetting or ignoring the many times his furs had been taken by Indians, many of his family and friends who had been killed by Indians, the torture and death of his son James by Big Jim, the killing of his brother Ned and his son Israel, the kidnapping of Jemima and the Callaway girls, the attempt by Blackfish to take him and eight other treaty signers hostage at Boonesborough. But Boone’s affection for Indians, especially the Shawnee family that had adopted him, many of whom now came to visit him in Missouri, revealed the part of himself that truly was more in sympathy with the Indian ways than with the white culture. It showed the doubleness in his nature, which had been part of his special character, his
difference
, from the beginning.

Many believe that Boone in his final years saw clearly the contradictions of his life, how his “love of Nature” had led not to a future of peaceful hunting with Indians but to the destruction of the hunting grounds the Indians had preserved so long. Boone blamed the lawyers and speculators and politicians, calling them “Yankees,” meaning Americans; most of the Yankees Boone knew came from Virginia and North Carolina. And yet he saw that some of the blame must rest with him also. If he had been an instrument ordained to settle the wilderness, as Filson said he was, for the Indians he was an “
instrument
by which they lost their hunting grounds
.” The contradictions of his life were all too obvious at times to the elderly explorer.

The story of Boone is the story of America. From the Blue Ridge to the Bluegrass, from the Yadkin to the Yellowstone, no man sought and loved the wilderness with more passion and dedication. Yet none did more to lead settlers and developers to destroy that wilderness in a few short decades. Richard Slotkin says, “
He destroys the wilderness and the game
by the very acts which reveal his love for them.” Few white men of his time came close to understanding and appreciating the Native Americans as well as Boone did, yet few did as much, ultimately,
to displace the Indians and destroy their habitat and culture. A man of peacefulness and goodwill, Boone spent much of his life involved with or witness to border wars, with the French, the Cherokees, the British, Shawnees, Loyalists, Wyandottes, Osages, Kansas.

T
HERE ARE
several mysteries and paradoxes about Boone’s last years. A few who talked with him then reported he was bitter, sardonic, that he shunned society and civilization. Though he had always preferred the isolation of the woods, apparently he was even more repelled in his final decade by the corruptions and indignities of the world. His family noted that seeing a visitor approaching the house, the old man would sometimes
take his cane and hobble out
the back door to avoid questions and gawking strangers. “
Many heroic actions and chivalrous adventures
are related of me which exist only in the region of fancy. With me the world has taken liberties,” Boone said. “And yet I have been but a common man.”

One of the abiding mysteries about Boone’s last years is the question of whether he ever returned to Kentucky after leaving in 1799. There are many stories of his return to the Bluegrass to pay his debts. He seems to have been sighted almost as often as Elvis. Once his land grant came through in 1814 he had enough funds to settle his accounts in Kentucky. Rev. John Mason Peck wrote that Boone had kept no record books or documents “
and knew not how much he owed
, nor to whom he was indebted, but in the honest simplicity of his nature, he went to all with whom he had had dealings and paid whatever was demanded.” Since Peck is not always the most accurate of biographers, his story might be discounted. But Peck had interviewed Boone at length, unlike all the other biographers except Flint and Filson.

And yet the members of Boone’s immediate family claimed that he never returned to Kentucky after 1799. The daughter of Jacob Boone later said that Daniel never visited her family in Limestone. Just a few weeks before his death, Boone told a neighbor he had kept his promise never to return to Kentucky. Nathan Boone, one of the most reliable
sources about Boone’s last years, told Draper that his father never set foot in Kentucky again. The weight of evidence seems to be on the side of the family denials, yet the stories of Boone’s return to Kentucky are convincing also. It is a question no one seems able to resolve, another example of apparent but conflicting truths that refuse to be reconciled.

Since Boone moved between his children’s homes in his later years, it is possible he visited Kentucky while each thought he was staying with one of the others, or was off on an extended hunting trip. He may have wanted to return and pay his debts quietly, without any fuss. The old sometimes relish such acts of covert independence.

Over the past 175 years biographers have discussed Boone’s religious beliefs in a number of ways. Early biographers sometimes portrayed the frontiersman as a devout Christian, almost a missionary bringing the gospel and Protestant culture to the savage wilderness. Some, for instance, asserted Boone never touched liquor, imposing Victorian abstinence on a man not only of the frontier but of the eighteenth century. The many accounts of him passing the bottle to companions, as well as the records of his frequent purchases of spirits, give the lie to that pious claim.

According to a letter by James Robertson
, Boone and all his family were converted by an Episcopalian missionary while living with the Robertsons on the Watauga River around 1772. That claim is almost certainly not true. For one thing, there were no Episcopalians until after the American Revolution, when American Anglicans formed their own organization. Still others would claim that Boone was essentially a Baptist. James Bradley would tell Draper, “
Col. Daniel Boone was a Baptist in sentiment
, was not a church member, but was religiously inclined.”

In fact, we have no record of Boone ever joining a church. It is possible that the disputes and contentions between the Quakers and his father, Squire, made him reluctant to join any congregation. Boone was a cheerful, peaceable man who avoided quarrels and arguments. He possibly associated church membership with feuds and petty
self-righteousness. It was how one lived, not the outward displays of piety, that proved one’s character and spirituality. “
Colo. Boone was a firm believer
in a divine overrule of providence and related many instances in his eventful life where he thought it had been particularly exercised towards him,” Stephen Hempstead told Draper.

Boone’s granddaughter Delinda married a Baptist preacher named James Craig, and a number of other Boone relations and friends answered the call to the pulpit.
There were sometimes Bible readings
and devotions on Sundays at Boonesborough. And of course, we know Boone took the Bible as well as other books to read by the campfire on his hunting trips. In 1816 he wrote a remarkable letter to his widowed sister-in-law:

october the 19th 1816

Deer Sister

With pleasure I Red a Later from your sun Samuel Boone who infrms me that you are yett Liveing and in good health Considing your age I wright to you to Latt you know I have Not forgot you and to inform you of my own Situation Sence the Death of you Sister Rabacah I leve with flanders Calaway But am at present at my sun Nathans and in tolarabel halth you can gass at my feilings by your own as we are So Near one age I Need Not write you of our satuation as Samuel Bradley or James grimes Can inform you of Every Surcomstance Relating to our famaly and how we Leve in this World and what Chance we Shall have in the next we know Not for my part I am as ignerant as a Child all the Relegan I have to Love and fear god beleve in Jeses Christ Don all the good to my Nighbour and my self that I Can and Do as Little harm as I Can helpe and trust on gods marcy for the Rest and I beleve god neve made a man of my prisepel to be Lost and I flater my Self Deer sister that you are well on your way in Cristianaty gave my Love to all your Childran and all my frends fearwell my Deer sister.

Daniel Boone

Mrs. Sarah Boone

NB I Red a Later yesterday from sister Hanah peninton by hir grand sun Dal Ringe She and all hir Childran are Well at present

This letter is of particular interest for several reasons. Though its spelling is wild and inconsistent, the voice of the man comes through vividly. One has the sense of an old man who spoke much better than he wrote. What is evident is Boone’s humility and simplicity, his affection for his family and his goodwill toward his fellow man. He admits his ignorance, but his claims for himself, though modest, are significant. He concedes he is childlike but has tried to do good, or at least little harm. He believes in a God of mercy, who honors integrity. It is the letter of a man at peace with himself. There is no hint of bitterness. The many failures and disappointments have left him humble, accepting.

Boone often attended services held by Baptists when he was visiting Jemima. He was present at a service preached by Rev. John Mason Peck. It was a time when revivals were sweeping the Missouri region, following the period that historians call the Second Great Awakening. But there is an independence and wit in Boone, of the kind we associate with Thoreau. As Thoreau was dying the abolitionist Parker Pillsbury asked him “how the opposite shore might appear to him.” “
One world at a time
,” the author of
Civil Disobedience
snapped. When the sage of Walden was asked on his deathbed by his aunt Louisa if he had made peace with God, Thoreau replied, “I did not know we had ever quarreled.” When a Baptist preacher named James E. Welch asked Boone if he had “experienced a change in your feelings toward the Saviour” Boone fired back, “
No sir, I always loved God ever since
I could recollect.”