Boone: A Biography (64 page)

“
His [Boone’s] worship was in secret
, and he placed his hopes in the Savior,” his son Nathan told Draper. “In his latter years my father was a great student of the Bible. He was seldom seen reading any other book and fully believed in the great truths of Christianity.”

Boone had never lost the influence of the Quakers in Pennsylvania. His peaceableness and reticence, his tolerance and ease with other races, his love of fairness, seemed derived in part from early contact with the Friends. But some thought he was deeply influenced by Indian beliefs also. Timothy Flint said outright, “
He worshipped, as he often said
, the Great Spirit—for the woods were his books and his temple, and the creed of the red men naturally became his.”

While the Indians had been absorbing many of the teachings of the Moravians and Methodists and other denominations, men like Boone were assimilating an Indian sense of a sacred, animistic wilderness and meshing it all into a single creed of goodwill and respect for others and all life. As mentioned earlier, the ideas and poetry that would be expressed a few decades later by Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman were already at work in the minds and hearts and pulse of men such as Boone and William Bartram, who had also been brought up as a Quaker. Probably Boone would have agreed with Emerson when he said, “
I like the silent church before the service
begins, better than any preaching.” If the genius of American thought and literature was created from the fusion of New England spiritual zeal and the naturalism of the Enlightenment, it was also deeply informed by the American experience of the wilderness, the great forests and vistas of the West, the spirit of the frontier men and women and the Native hunters and holy men they encountered, fought with, imitated, learned from.

If in his old age Boone viewed his relations with Indians through amber-tinted binoculars and renewed affection, the affection and respect were returned by those who had known him as Sheltowee at Chillicothe. The younger daughters of Blackfish were now old women, but they remembered Boone’s kindness to them. Boone visited Indian friends at their homes also.

The attempts by some to debunk the myth of Boone as frontier hero and Indian fighter have actually enhanced the legend of Boone as a man of peace and goodwill. As the historian Arthur K. Moore
phrased it, “
Many a Kentuckian engaged in much more heroic
actions with the Shawnee than Boone . . . There is slight evidence that Boone ever knowingly killed an Indian and no record of a violent hand-to-hand combat . . . Boone seems to have dealt with the Indians by . . . placating them.” Even his would-be detractors concede Boone was a man of humanity and peace.

I
N HIS FINAL
years Boone’s moods could change with the weather. To some visitors he spoke of his disappointment with civilization and especially Kentucky. To others he could appear cheerful and at peace with his life and his lot. At times he was angry about the legends and fictions that had been written and circulated and repeated about him. To the end of his life he was aware of his effect and his fame. Commenting on reports that he still went hunting in his last years, Boone told Peck, “
I would not believe that tale
if I told it myself. I have not watched the deer’s lick for ten years. My eyesight is too far gone to hunt.”

In 1816 Boone and Nathan began to build a stone house near Nathan and Olive’s cabin on Femme Osage Creek. Since Boone himself was eighty-two years old and arthritic, it is assumed that most of the heavy work was done by Nathan, and his father served as a helper and adviser. But local tradition in Missouri has it that Boone did at least some of the carpentry, including the pegged wooden doors. It is quite possible that the idea of the large stone house, and the design of the house, were as much Boone’s as Nathan’s. The house was meant to look like those the Boones had seen years before in Pennsylvania. Squire had begun work on a smaller stone house near Cuivre River before he had to return to Kentucky around 1801. Building something permanent of stone seemed to be on the Boones’ minds, after their many moves from log cabin to cave to half-face camp to log cabin.

Nathan cut the blue limestone from a nearby quarry and dragged the blocks on a sled pulled by oxen to the site. Most of the stones were about three feet wide and weighed several hundred pounds. To
cut such rocks from the hillside required hundreds of holes drilled by hammer and hand-turned bit. After the block was broken loose by an explosion of black powder in the holes, the piece had to be dressed to size with hammer and chisel. To prepare one stone could take hours, sparks flying from the chisel point, stench of burned metal, limestone chips, and dust.

The trick of dressing stone is to cut each piece within acceptable limits of exactness. Since every stone cuts differently, has a different feel to the touch and eye—what masons sometimes refer to as flavor—it is a matter of approximation, chipping and measuring and chipping again, to find an acceptable tolerance of straightness, plumbness. Part of the beauty of stonework is the roughness, within the overall exactness. Since it took Nathan and his father three years to build the house, with time out for farming and hunting, we can guess they extracted each stone from the quarry, dressed it, and dragged it to the building site one day at a time. Boone’s skill as a blacksmith must have been put to use sharpening the tools and replacing broken drills and hammers and chisels.

Once all the stones were cut and hauled to the site on the gentle hillside near a spring, the work had only begun. The plans for the house called for a structure twenty-six by forty-six feet with three-foot-thick walls and two main stories, a full basement where the cooking was done, and a large attic. It was a kind of American castle, with gun ports in the first story. Nathan had lived in log cabins all his life. He had been born at Boone’s Station, had lived on Marble Creek, at Limestone and Point Pleasant. He and Olive began their marriage camping under the stars on the way to Missouri and then settling in a small cabin on Loutre Creek before they obtained the claim on Femme Osage.

The stone house was built as a monument to the Boones’ long struggle and trek from Pennsylvania to North Carolina, to Kentucky and Virginia, and on to Missouri. It was a manor house, a family seat. But the house was also a fortress, against Indian attacks, against the uncertain future, and against the many failures and embarrassments of
Boone’s career, his debts and losses, his constant moves. With the great stone house, Nathan was reaching toward stability as well as prominence. He wanted to build a dwelling that would last for centuries.

It cannot have been easy for Nathan and the other sons to live in the shadow of their famous father. Boone had been away from home much of the time when they were young. He might be famous elsewhere, but at home he was most often in debt, and most of the work of farming and procuring a subsistence was left to Rebecca and the children. The family had been forced to keep moving, under a cloud of lawsuits, accusations, rumors of treason. As the youngest and favored son, with more education than the rest, Nathan must have felt more than his brothers and sisters the necessity of proving himself against the rumors of inherited instability and fecklessness.

Nathan, with the help and advice of his father, cut walnut logs three feet in diameter and hewed beams nearly a foot thick and two to two and a half feet tall. The joists and sills and beams of the house looked like something out of a cathedral in the Old World. The frame of the house was pegged together, mortised and tenoned, from heavy timbers. Father and son sawed and planed thick oak boards for the floors, and pegged them into place. The planks were made one at a time with a whipsaw, as one sawyer stood in a pit beneath the log and the second held the other end of the saw above the log. Anyone who has ever tried to saw or drill oak lumber knows how it resists even the sharpest tools. As the stone walls were made, each stone was swung into place by block and tackle. But first a bed of mortar had to be spread on the stone the next block was to rest on. The mortar itself was made from lime and sand and water, sometimes with a little clay thrown in: one part lime, three parts sand, and enough water to make a paste that could be spread and shaped with a trowel.

After Boone’s death Nathan would say
his father had been entitled to Masonic honors, though he had none at his funeral since there were no Masonic lodges in the district. Though Boone had been initiated into Freemasonry years earlier, in this one period near the end of his
life Boone worked literally as a mason, helping where he could, sometimes wielding the trowel, perhaps mixing the mortar and keeping it wet until used. Often the oldest member of a masonry crew was responsible for keeping the “mud” soft and ready to be spread.

Boone had given Nathan a fine silver watch
for his twenty-seventh birthday on March 2, 1808. The timepiece survived Nathan’s campaigns as an officer in the Missouri militia and the U.S. Army. Nathan would be commissioned a major and then a lieutenant colonel in the army and serve at posts in Kansas, Wisconsin, and Oklahoma. Made by William Hopetown in London in 1783, the watch is still owned by a descendant in Pasadena, California. A fine watch was a traditional gift from a father to a son, a sign of continuity, dignity, maturity. Boone, who had always told time by the sun and stars, when he had cared to tell it at all, wanted Nathan to have this symbol and gadget of the new era that was coming into being.

It is said the attic of Nathan’s palatial house was used for dances in the years after it was built. With furniture cleared away from the thick oak floor, the neighbors and boys and girls of the region, those who did not disapprove of dancing for religious reasons, would gather on Saturday evenings with a fiddler or sometimes even a small band called an orcestry for dance reels and jigs. Every community seemed to have its fiddler, who was often also a good storyteller, with a knack for quips and jokes. Nathan and Olive had fourteen children, and it is pleasing to think of the family gathering in the large attic with their friends and stepping to the fiddle music and banjo picking, listening to ballads and slightly smutty tales, and singing the ballads and love songs of the day. The rolling Missouri countryside must have been sweetened by the music and glow of their frolics as fireflies winked their amorous codes in the meadows and orchards.

As it turned out, Nathan was more like his father than either of them may have realized. Nathan would later serve in the Missouri Constitutional Convention, as well as in the militia and U.S. Army. But like his father he accumulated debts. In spite of his prominence,
his recognized ability as a leader, his skill as an artisan like his father and uncle Squire, Nathan’s finances grew more and more precarious as his debts mounted, until in 1837 he had to sell his stone mansion on Femme Osage Creek and move his family far to the west, to Greene County, Missouri, build a log house on the prairie, and start all over again. Like his father before him, Nathan must have discovered that the only thing permanent was alternating growth and loss, and the legends that seemed to attach themselves to the Boone name wherever they went.

E
VEN IN THE
sad years after the death of Rebecca, and throughout his long decline, Boone kept something of his dry wit and relish of irony. After he fell ill while hunting with his grandson James Boone in November of 1817 and was taken to the home of Isaac Van Bibber, Nathan was summoned. Assuming that his father had already died, Nathan ordered a coffin to be made while he went to get the body of the old pioneer. “
I gave directions before leaving home
for a coffin to be made so the funeral might take place immediately on my return,” Nathan said.

But Boone had not died. In fact he had rallied and was able to return with Nathan. And when he saw the coffin Nathan had ordered, Boone was not at all pleased. Made of plain boards it was “
too rough and uncouth
.” For all his modesty and good manners, Boone had a sense of style and dignity. The plain coffin was used for a relative and Boone ordered a fine coffin made for himself to match the one he had commissioned for Rebecca in 1813.

“
Soon after this event
, he gave directions to a cabinet-maker in the settlement to prepare a coffin of black walnut for himself, which was done accordingly, and it was kept in his dwelling for several years,” Peck would write. But according to Peck, Boone later decided the walnut coffin was not good enough either. He gave that coffin for someone else’s burial and ordered an even better one for himself. “
Another of cherry was prepared
, and placed under his bed, where it continued
until it received his mortal remains.” The cherry coffin was a handsome piece of work, and the old man took pleasure in showing it off. Elizabeth Corbin, sister of Daniel Morgan Boone’s wife, Sara, later told Draper, “
[T]he coffin appeared marvelously beautiful!
The fame of it spread among the simple minded settlers, and it had exceedingly numerous visitors.” Later the coffin was stored at Nathan’s new stone house, but from time to time Boone would take it out to admire and study. His granddaughter Delinda later remembered that he would “
rub and polish it up, and cooly whistle
while doing it.” Others said
he would lie down in the coffin to show
how well it fit him, and sometimes he would take a nap in it, scaring the children.

Even as a feeble old man Boone was still the performer, larger than life. If he had to be an old man in his second childhood, waiting for death to claim him, then he would play the role in a way nobody would ever forget. He continued to improvise and expand the role of Daniel Boone created many years before. He had always been able to make himself memorable. His coffin was the finest that could be had, and he was going to enjoy it and be
seen
enjoying it.

No doubt Boone took comfort in making death so familiar. The box he would later rest in was right here now, and he could dust it and rub it with oil. His hands had never been idle, whether scraping a steer horn to make a powder horn, oiling his traps, or repairing his rifle. The Reverend Nathan Kouns, who visited Boone in 1818, reported, “
[H]e commenced scraping a horn
with a piece of glass, and said he was going to make a powder horn as he intended to go out and hunt in the fall. He soon laid it aside and I learned from Capt. Lamme that he had been five years at work on the same horn in view of a fall hunt still in the future.” Boone had always admired fine workmanship. He carved fine powder horns for his grandchildren and neighbors, and
he repaired rifles friends and neighbors
brought to him. His craftsman brother Squire had died in 1815, but Daniel Boone was a craftsman too. He would make his last days a work of art.