Boone: A Biography (66 page)

Boone’s greatest influence on our culture and literature and selfimage is shown in more implicit, subtle, and indirect instances. While Boone is explicitly invoked, named or unnamed, in many novels and poems and in painting after painting, including George Caleb Bingham’s
Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap
(1851–52) and Thomas Cole’s
Daniel Boone at His Cabin at Great Osage Lake
(1826), Boone’s presence is influential in places where he is not named but is immanent as a model so familiar he is already implicit in the very fabric of American culture and mythology. According to Richard Slotkin, “
The figure and the myth-narrative
that emerged from the early Boone literature became archetypal for the American literature which followed: an American hero is the lover of the spirit of the wilderness, and his acts of love and sacred affirmation are acts of violence against that spirit and her avatars.”

As the myth building continued, the crushing failures Boone had suffered were forgotten or ignored. As with Washington, his accumulated failures did not seem to diminish his legend but actually enhanced it. “
Boone’s stature, paradoxically, was largely unaffected
by painful, repeated failure. His fortunes began to decline simultaneously with the end of the Revolutionary War and the publication of Filson’s biography.”

When Emerson began to formulate and define the aspirations of the young nation in
Nature
in 1836 and “Self-Reliance” in 1839, he appealed again and again to the independent, versatile, resourceful man who is undaunted by adversity. The image of Boone had become so embedded in the collective memory and imagination by then that he does not need to be named. He has become an ideal, transformed beyond the mere woodsman and hunter. “
But if a man would be alone
, let him look at the stars . . . Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood.” In his celebration of resourcefulness and independence, Emerson describes the country boy who is not tied down to a profession but who “
teams
it,
farms
it,
peddles
it
, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper,
goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls.” This self-reliant man walks ahead with his days and feels no shame “in not studying a profession, for he does not postpone his life, but lives already.”

And a little later in the same address Emerson catches much of the spirit of Boone’s solitude and reverence. “
Prayer is a contemplation of the facts
of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good.” Emerson can write it down in 1839, but the legendary Boone had lived this perception and passion decades before, along rivers and in forests and among dangers that likely surpassed Emerson’s imagination. Or at least that is the way the culture remembered Boone and the way we like to remember Boone. Essays such as “Circles” and “Fate” resonate with the wisdom and assurance of a Boone, cheerful in the face of defeat and failure, pushing on to the end of the horizon, beyond the next mountain range where another vista opens. The image of Boone helped inspire and inform this quest of the essential and transforming self, and the vibrant future. In “Circles” Emerson says, “
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
. The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment.”

Again and again in his essays and journals we see Emerson defining the often contradictory experiences and aspirations Boone had enacted and illustrated. In
Nature
Emerson says, “
The health of the eye seems to demand a horizon
. We are never tired so long as we can see far enough.” And later he celebrates the world as it is. “
[A] fact is true poetry
, and the most beautiful of fables.” “
In the tranquil landscape
, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature.”

As Richard Slotkin explains it, “
In each case, the image of Boone
was made to serve as the embodiment of local values or cultural assumptions and as the vicarious resolver of the dilemmas that preoccupied that culture. In the development of these variant images of Boone we
can trace the emergence of American national consciousness, the process of cultural differentiation that finally divided the Euro-Americans from the Europeans.”

If the legend inspired by Boone inspired Emerson, it is not surprising that it also influenced Emerson’s handyman and neighbor, Henry David Thoreau. Since Thoreau’s subject is often a celebration of “wildness” and the relish of wildness and solitude, it is likely that the Boone figure was even more important to the resident of the cabin in the Walden woods. Thoreau did most of his traveling in word and spirit near Concord, but his metaphors often imply and draw on the kind of extended voyages Boone and other frontiersmen actually made into the unexplored, unmapped wilderness. Thoreau celebrated the American Indian, and the subtitle of his most famous book is
Life in the Woods
. “
I love to be alone
. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

Thoreau begins his essay “Walking” by saying, “
I wish to speak a word for Nature
, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil.” The spirit of Boone hovers over every page of the essay, published in 1862 after Thoreau’s death. With exuberance, and often with tongue in cheek, Thoreau’s essay is a celebration of freedom and adventure. “
I believe that there is a subtile magnetism
in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright.”

Thoreau finds his walking is directed toward the west. Like his forerunner in the Kentucky woods, the West draws him inexorably. “
The future lies that way to me
, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side . . . I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe.” Referring to Columbus and Michaux and other explorers, Thoreau says, “
I should be ashamed to think
that Adam in paradise was more favorably situated on the whole than the backwoodsman in this country.” Thoreau describes turning away from the antiquities of Europe and even Massachusetts and facing the West. “
The West of which I speak is but
another name for the Wild; and what I have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of the World.”

Implicit in Thoreau’s anthem to wildness is a contradiction similar to that of Boone’s career. Boone’s love of wilderness leads him to bring others to destroy it. Thoreau’s love of wilderness is stated in the context of the high civilization of Concord at the moment of its greatest cultural achievement. “
I believe in the forest, and in the meadow
, and in the night in which the corn grows,” Thoreau says, echoing the Apostle’s Creed, and he celebrates the darker skins of those who live in the woods and is ashamed of his own paleness. Like Boone, he would become an Indian, seeking the wildest part of the wilderness. “
When I would recreate myself
, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable, and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place—a
sanctum sanctorum
. There is the strength, the marrow of Nature.”

And then Thoreau turns to the political consideration of wildness and freedom, and the emotional and psychological dimensions. The wildness is in us more than it is in the forest. He celebrates the Indian custom of naming and renaming individuals after their actions and attributes. He relishes the wonder of a child as opposed to the habits and tameness of grown men. Thoreau salutes instinct and spontaneity over habit and instruction. Darkness and ignorance can inspire more than the merely familiar. Like Boone, and also young Abe Lincoln, Thoreau made his living as a surveyor, translating the surface of the earth into angles and numbers, but it was simple wonder that appealed to him most. “
I found my account in climbing a tree
once. It was a tall white pine, on top of a hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen before,—so much more of the earth and the heavens.”

By Thoreau’s time, Boone’s forward-pressing Pisgah vision had become the type and archetype to which American poets and philosophers and even politicians appealed. Thoreau published
Walden
in 1854, and the next year an equally remarkable book of verse was published in New York,
Leaves of Grass
by Walt Whitman. Just as expansive and wild as Thoreau’s work, Whitman’s poems spilled in
long, flowing lines that seemed at times to imitate bird calls and ocean waves, and at other times the bel canto opera of which Whitman was so fond. A former journalist and editor turned real estate agent and carpenter, Whitman celebrated himself and his body as the measure of all nature and society.

No poet of the Romantic era extolled the wonder of childhood more effectively than Whitman. When we read his “
There Was a Child Went Forth
” we may think of the young Daniel Boone discovering the woods around him north of Oley.

There was a child went forth every day
,

And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became
,

And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day
,

Or for many years or stretching cycles of years
.

The early lilacs became part of this child
,

And grass and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird
,

And the Third-month lambs and the sow’s pink-faint litter, and the mare’s foal and the cow’s calf . . .

Wonder and wildness are the bedrock on which Whitman’s persona and vision are grounded.

Alone far in the wilds and mountains I hunt
,

Wandering amazed at my lightness and glee
,

In the late afternoon choosing a safe spot to pass the night
,

Kindling a fire and broiling the fresh-kill’d game
,

Falling asleep on the gathered leaves with my dog and gun by my side
.

By the time Whitman wrote these lines in the 1850s the image and legend of Boone had pervaded the American consciousness and been repeated so often he did not need to be named to be invoked. Boone had become a figure of America’s ideal self, a touchstone of poetry
and history and national identity. By the 1850s the legend of Boone had been extended and adjusted with the legends of other western frontiersmen: Davy Crockett, Jim Bridger, Jedediah Smith, and Kit Carson, Boone’s distant kinsman. The lore of the mountain men of the Rockies, from Hugh Glass to John Colter and the Bent brothers, was an echo of the original story of Boone, first created by Filson in 1784, but much simplified. Henry Nash Smith tells us, “
The fur trapper, or Mountain Man
, was much more clearly uncivilized than Daniel Boone had been.”

In his visionary zeal Whitman seems completely unaware that the Open Road he invites the reader to follow may lead ultimately to the shopping mall, the choked and smelly expressway, the polluted landscape. As the poet Louis Simpson would write in 1959, “
The Open Road goes to the used-car lot
.” Whitman shares with Boone a romantic innocence about the consequences of their quest and the vexed destiny that in a few decades would be all too manifest.

William Bartram’s
Travels
had been published in 1790, creating a detailed portrait of the untamed wilderness of North America as a paradise, a new Eden. While Boone was hacking Boone’s Trace and building Boonesborough, Bartram was studying the splendor of the Great Smoky Mountains and northern Georgia. Richard Slotkin tells us, “
[Bartram’s] record bears the distinctive markings
of the mind of Filson’s Boone. There are frequent echoes of Filson’s phraseology, but more significant is his sharing of Boone’s expectation of receiving wisdom from the wilderness and his consequent willingness to submit himself to experience in it.”

Recent scholars have argued that Bartram and the figure of Boone created by Filson influenced British romanticism as well as American. Both Wordsworth and Coleridge read Bartram’s
Travels
as young poets, and because of Gilbert Imlay’s connection with Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin they knew of Filson’s “The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon” also. It is ironic that some of the ideals of English Romantic poetry would be imported from the American
wilderness by a scoundrel such as Imlay. As Maurice Manning states it, “
Boone was a living example
of the synthesis of the mental and physical experience, which is both natural and humane, and which became Wordsworth’s primary aesthetic.” The intense emotions and perceptions of an ideal and natural nobility that would be created in English Romantic poetry had already been lived in “
an uncouth place like Kentucky
, by rough-hewn rustics like Boone.”

The legend of Boone complemented but transcended the account of Bartram because of the added dimension of heroism given to Boone, the questing knight, the Moses leading his people to the Promised Land, the lover who consummates his passion for the body of the beautiful untamed land. And other dimensions of the Boone story had entered the popular imagination by the 1850s also, among them the picture of Boone the patriarch in Missouri, surrounded by his extended, affectionate family, honored by all who knew him. In “I Sing the Body Electric” Whitman portrays just such a noble figure.

I knew a man, a common farmer, the father
of five sons
,

And in them the fathers of sons, and in them the fathers of sons
.

This man was of wonderful vigor, calmness, beauty of person
,