Daniel Boone (November 2 [O.S. October 22], 1734 – September 26, 1820) was an American pioneer and frontiersman whose exploits made him one of the first folk heroes of the United States. He became famous for his exploration and settlement of Kentucky, which was then beyond the western borders of the Thirteen Colonies. In 1775, Boone blazed the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap and into Kentucky, in the face of resistance from Native Americans. He founded Boonesborough, one of the first English-speaking settlements west of the Appalachian Mountains. By the end of the 18th century, more than 200,000 people had entered Kentucky by following the route marked by Boone.[3]
Boone served as a militia officer during the Revolutionary War (1775–1783), which was fought in Kentucky primarily between American settlers and British-allied Indians. Boone was taken in by Shawnees in 1778 and adopted into the tribe, but he resigned and continued to help protect the Kentucky settlements. He also left due to the Shawnee Indians torturing and killing one of his sons. He was elected to the first of his three terms in the Virginia General Assembly during the war and fought in the Battle of Blue Licks in 1782, one of the last battles of the American Revolution. He worked as a surveyor and merchant after the war, but went deep into debt as a Kentucky land speculator. He resettled in Missouri in 1799, where he spent most of the last two decades of his life, frustrated with legal problems resulting from his land claims.
Boone remains an iconic, if imperfectly remembered, figure in American history. He was a legend in his own lifetime, especially after an account of his adventures was published in 1784, making him famous in America and Europe. After his death, he became the subject of many heroic tall tales and works of fiction. His adventures—real and legendary—helped create the archetypal frontier hero of American folklore. In American popular culture, Boone is remembered as one of the foremost early frontiersmen, even though mythology often overshadows the historical details of his life.[4]
Boone was born on October 22, 1734 ("New Style" November 2), the sixth of eleven children in a family of Quakers.[5][note 1] His father, Squire Boone (1696–1765), immigrated to colonial Pennsylvania from the small town of Bradninch, England, sometime around 1712.[7] Squire, a weaver and blacksmith, married Sarah Morgan (1700–1777), whose family were Quakers from Wales. In 1731, the Boones built a one-room log cabin in the Oley Valley in what is now Berks County, Pennsylvania, near present Reading, where Daniel was born.[8]
Boone spent his early years on the Pennsylvania frontier, often interacting with Lenape Indians.[9] Boone learned to hunt from local settlers and Lenape Indians; by the age of fifteen, he had a reputation as one of the region's best hunters.[10] Many stories about Boone emphasize his hunting skills. In one tale, the young Boone was hunting in the woods with some other boys when the howl of a panther scattered all but Boone. He calmly cocked his rifle and shot the panther through the heart just as it leaped at him. The story may be a folktale, one of many that became part of Boone's popular image.[10]
In Boone's youth, his family became a source of controversy in the local Quaker community. In 1742, Boone's parents were compelled to publicly apologize after their eldest child Sarah married a "worldling", or non-Quaker, while she was visibly pregnant. When Boone's oldest brother Israel also married a "worldling" in 1747, Squire Boone stood by his son and was therefore expelled from the Quakers, although his wife continued to attend monthly meetings with her children. Perhaps as a result of this controversy, in 1750 Squire sold his land and moved the family to North Carolina. Daniel Boone did not attend church again, although he always considered himself a Christian and had all of his children baptized.[11] The Boones eventually settled on the Yadkin River, in what is now Davie County, North Carolina, about two miles (3 km) west of Mocksville.[12][13]
Boone received little formal education, since he preferred to spend his time hunting, apparently with his parents' blessing. According to a family tradition, when a schoolteacher expressed concern over Boone's education, Boone's father said, "Let the girls do the spelling and Dan will do the shooting."[14] Boone was tutored by family members, though his spelling remained unorthodox. Historian John Mack Faragher cautions that the folk image of Boone as semiliterate is misleading, arguing that Boone "acquired a level of literacy that was the equal of most men of his times."[14] Boone regularly took reading material with him on his hunting expeditions—the Bible and Gulliver's Travels were favorites.[15] He was often the only literate person in groups of frontiersmen, and would sometimes entertain his hunting companions by reading to them around the campfire.[16][17]
I can't say as ever I was lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.
—Daniel Boone[18]
The French and Indian War (1754–1763) broke out between the French and the British, along with their respective Indian allies, and Boone joined a North Carolina militia company as a teamster and blacksmith.[19] In 1755, his unit accompanied General Edward Braddock's attempt to drive the French out of the Ohio Country, which ended in disaster at the Battle of the Monongahela. Boone, in the rear with the wagons, took no part in the battle, and fled with the retreating soldiers.[20] He returned home after the defeat, and married Rebecca Bryan, a neighbor in the Yadkin Valley, on August 14, 1756.[21] The couple initially lived in a cabin on his father's farm, and eventually had ten children, in addition to raising eight children of deceased relatives.[22]
In 1758, conflict erupted between British colonists and the Cherokees, their former allies in the French and Indian War. After the Yadkin Valley was raided by Cherokees, the Boones and many other families fled north to Culpeper County, Virginia.[23] Boone saw action as a member of the North Carolina militia during this "Cherokee Uprising," periodically serving under Captain Hugh Waddell on the North Carolina frontier until 1760.[24]
Boone supported his growing family in these years as a market hunter and trapper, collecting pelts for the fur trade. Almost every autumn, despite the unrest on the frontier, he would go on "long hunts", extended expeditions into the wilderness lasting weeks or months. Boone went alone or with a small group of men, accumulating hundreds of deer skins in the autumn, and trapping beaver and otter over the winter. When the long hunters returned in the spring, they sold their take to commercial fur traders.[25] On their journeys, frontiersmen often carved messages on trees or wrote their names on cave walls, and Boone's name or initials have been found in many places. A tree in Washington County, Tennessee reads "D. Boon Cilled a. Bar on tree in the year 1760". A similar carving is preserved in the museum of the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Kentucky which reads "D. Boon Kilt a Bar, 1803." The inscriptions may be genuine, or part of a long tradition of phony Boone relics.[26][27][28]
According to a popular story, Boone returned home after a long absence to find that Rebecca had given birth to a daughter. Rebecca confessed that she had thought that Daniel was dead, and that his brother had fathered the child. Boone did not blame Rebecca, and raised the girl as his own child. Boone's early biographers knew the story but did not publish it.[29] Modern biographers regard the tale as possibly folklore, since the identity of the brother and the daughter vary in different versions of the tale.[30][31][32]
In the mid-1760s, Boone began to look for a new place to settle. The population was growing in the Yadkin Valley, which reduced the amount of game available for hunting. He had difficulty making ends meet, and was often taken to court for nonpayment of debts. He sold what land he owned to pay off creditors. After his father's death in 1765, Boone traveled with a group of men to Florida, which had become British territory after the end of the war, to look into the possibility of settling there. According to a family story, he purchased land in Pensacola, but Rebecca refused to move so far away from friends and family. The Boones instead moved to a more remote area of the Yadkin Valley, and he began to hunt westward into the Blue Ridge Mountains.[33]
It was the first of May, in the year 1769, that I resigned my domestic happiness for a time, and left my family ... to wander through the wilderness of America, in quest of the country of Kentucky.
— Daniel Boone[34]
Years before entering Kentucky, Boone had heard about the region's fertile land and abundant game. In 1767, Boone and his brother Squire first crossed into what would become the state of Kentucky, but they failed to reach the rich hunting grounds.[35][36] In May 1769, Boone set out again with a party of five others—including John Findley, who first told Boone of the Cumberland Gap—on a two-year hunting and trapping expedition.[37] His first sighting of the Bluegrass region from atop Pilot Knob became "an icon of American history," and was the frequent subject of paintings.[38]
On December 22, 1769, Boone and fellow hunter John Stuart were captured by a party of Shawnee, who confiscated all of their skins and told them to leave and never return.[39] The Shawnee had not signed the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, in which the Iroquois had ceded their claim to Kentucky to the British. The Shawnee regarded Kentucky as their hunting ground; they considered American hunters there to be poachers.[40][41] Boone, undeterred, continued hunting and exploring in Kentucky. On one occasion, he shot a man to avoid capture, which historian John Mack Faragher says "was one of the few Indians that Boone acknowledged killing."[42] Boone returned to North Carolina in 1771, but came back to hunt in Kentucky in the autumn of 1772.[43]
In 1773, Boone packed up his family and, with his brother Squire and a group of about 50 others, began the first attempt by British colonists to establish a settlement. Boone was still an obscure figure at the time; the most prominent member of the expedition was William Russell, a well-known Virginian and future brother-in-law of Patrick Henry.[44] Another member of this expedition was Boone's friend and fellow long-hunter, Michael Stoner.[45]
Included in this group were an unknown number of enslaved Blacks, including Charles and Adam. On October 9, Boone's oldest son, James, several Whites and Charles and Adam left the main party to seek provisions in a nearby settlement. They were attacked by a band of Delawares, Shawnee, and Cherokees. Following the Fort Stanwix treaty, American Indians in the region had been debating what do to about the influx of settlers. This group had decided, in the words of Faragher, "to send a message of their opposition to settlement".[46] James Boone and William Russell's son, Henry, were tortured and killed. Charles was captured. Adam witnessed the horror concealed in riverbank driftwood. After wandering in the woods for 11 days, Adam located the group and informed Boone of the circumstances of their deaths. Charles's body was found by the pioneers 40 miles from the abduction site, dead from a blow to the head.[47][48] The brutality of the killings sent shockwaves along the frontier, and Boone's party abandoned their expedition.[49]
The attack was one of the first events in what became known as Dunmore's War, a struggle between Virginia and American Indians for control of what is now West Virginia and Kentucky. In the summer of 1774, Boone traveled with a companion to Kentucky to notify surveyors there of the outbreak of war. They journeyed more than 800 miles (1,300 km) in two months to warn those who had not already fled the region. Upon his return to Virginia, Boone helped defend colonial settlements along the Clinch River, earning a promotion to captain in the militia, as well as acclaim from fellow citizens. After the brief war, which ended soon after Virginia's victory in the Battle of Point Pleasant in October 1774, the Shawnee relinquished their claims to Kentucky.[50][51]
Following Dunmore's War, Richard Henderson, a prominent judge from North Carolina, hired Boone to help establish a colony to be called Transylvania.[note 2] Boone traveled to several Cherokee towns and invited them to a meeting, held at Sycamore Shoals in March 1775, where Henderson purchased the Cherokee claim to Kentucky.[53]
Boone then blazed "Boone's Trace," later known as the Wilderness Road, through the Cumberland Gap and into central Kentucky. Sam, an enslaved Black "body servant," and other enslaved laborers were among this group of settlers. When this group camped near the location of present-day Richmond, Kentucky, Indians attacked, killing Sam and his owner. After driving off the attackers, the party buried the two men side by side.[48]
He founded Boonesborough along the Kentucky River; other settlements, notably Harrodsburg, were also established at this time. Despite occasional Indian attacks, Boone brought his family and other settlers to Boonesborough on September 8, 1775.[54]
American Indians who were unhappy about the loss of Kentucky by treaties, saw the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) as a chance to drive out the colonists. Isolated settlers and hunters became the frequent target of attacks, convincing many to abandon Kentucky. By late spring of 1776, Boone and his family were among the fewer than 200 colonists who remained, primarily at the fortified settlements of Boonesborough, Harrodsburg, and Logan's Station.[55]
On July 14, 1776, Boone's daughter Jemima and two other girls were captured outside Boonesborough by an Indian war party, who carried the girls north toward the Shawnee towns in the Ohio country. Boone and a group of men from Boonesborough set out in pursuit, finally catching up with them two days later. Boone and his men ambushed the Indians, rescuing the girls and driving off their captors. The incident became the most celebrated event of Boone's life. James Fenimore Cooper created a version of this episode in his classic novel The Last of the Mohicans (1826).[56][57]
In 1777, Henry Hamilton, British Lieutenant Governor of Quebec, began to recruit American Indian war parties to raid the Kentucky settlements. That same year in March, the newly formed militia of Kentucky County, Virginia, mustered in Boonesborough, whose population incl