Daniel Boone

An American Life

Michael A. Lofaro

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780813134628, 9780813122786
• eBook ISBN: 9780813138336
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

The embodiment of the American hero, the man of action, the pathfinder, Daniel Boone represents the great adventure of his age—the westward movement of the American people. Daniel Boone: An American Life brings together over thirty years of research in an extraordinary biography of the quintessential pioneer. Based on primary sources, the book depicts Boone through the eyes of those who knew him and within the historical contexts of his eighty-six years. The story of Daniel Boone offers new insights into the turbulent birth and growth of the nation and demonstrates why the frontier forms such a significant part of the American experience.

1

“LET THE GIRLS DO THE SPELLING”

The Boyhood of Daniel Boone

In 1717 Daniel Boone’s grandfather, George Boone, took the courageous step of uprooting his large family from the sleepy village of Bradninch in England and sailing to America. A weaver by trade, fifty-one-year-old George Boone was well past the age when one would normally determine to start a new life. But he was driven by the same two desires that would later encourage the zest for adventure and historic actions of his famous grandson: freedom and land.

As a religious dissenter, a Quaker, George Boone had heard remarkable tales of a sanctuary for Quakers in the New World, a colony founded by William Penn, where no one was persecuted for religious beliefs, with particular interest. Sects such as the Quakers, Mennonites, and Dunkers, the German Baptist Brethren, peacefully coexisted with the native tribes. And cheap land was available in the 28-million-acre land grant that came to be known as Pennsylvania. All this news must have seemed an answer to George Boone’s prayers. Yet he was not an impetuous man. He refused to base a journey across the Atlantic upon rumor and supposition; he demanded direct knowledge and facts. Sometime before 1713, probably in 1712, he sent three of his children—George, Sarah, and Squire—to investigate the land of promise. Squire, the future father of the famous woodsman, shipped out as a cabin boy.

The prospects they anticipated and the land they explored impressed the threesome quite favorably. Sarah and Squire remained in America, and George returned to Devonshire with a glowing report. His father, however, delayed four years more before committing himself, his wife, Mary, and their children to the rigors of the voyage and resettlement. The younger George returned immediately and was wed by May 1713. Eventually the Boones embarked on their journey, traveling eighty miles by land to Bristol, where they took passage for America on or about August 17, 1717. By October 10, and perhaps as early as September 29, they landed in Philadelphia, a small but growing city.

The town of Abington (now Montgomery County), approximately thirteen miles north of Philadelphia, was a community composed nearly exclusively of Friends and was where the Boones first settled. But they soon moved on. As John Bakeless, Boone’s first definitive biographer, aptly put it: “They did not stay. There was always a branch of the Boone family that never stayed. The Boones were wanderers born. They had the itching foot. Something called. Something beyond the mountains always whispered. They heard of distant lands and knew that they must go there.”

Their first remove was only a few miles away to Gwynedd Township, and they made their home in the village of North Wales. George Boone was accepted into the Gwynedd Meeting after producing “a Certificate of his Good Life from the Monthly att Callumpton In Great Britain.” His daughter Sarah married Jacob Stover and settled in Oley Township (now Berks County), a setting so pleasing to George Boone that on one of his visits in 1718 he obtained a warrant for four hundred acres of land on September 4. He likely moved the family to Oley within two years. Although a large community of Quakers had settled in this region, Huguenot and Moravian families were also present, a mix that testified to the widespread drawing power of William Penn’s dream of a colony where all were free to practice their religions as they chose.

Squire Boone married Sarah Morgan, a descendant of the early Welsh inhabitants of Gwynedd, on July 23, 1720. He was a small man of fair complexion with red hair and gray eyes, she a large woman of dark complexion with black hair and eyes. Squire followed both his father’s trade as a weaver and his propensity for acquiring land. He was also a good hand as a blacksmith and gunsmith, abilities he later passed on to Daniel. Squire’s industry and frugality allowed him to purchase 147 acres in New Britain Township in Bucks County on December 3, 1728, and he soon erected his first home. At the close of 1730 he obtained 250 more acres from one Ralph Asheton. He, Sarah, and their growing family of four children moved to this site in Oley, which adjoined his father’s land, sometime in early 1731. Squire soon rose in the esteem of his neighbors and his church. Records indicate that he was a member in good standing of the Oley Meeting and was named a trustee in 1736 and an overseer in 1739.

A sixth child was born to Squire and Sarah Boone on this Berks County farm on November 2, 1734. He was called Daniel. His parents may have named him for Sarah’s brother, the Reverend Daniel Morgan, or for a notable Dutch painter, Daniel Boone, who had died in England in 1698 and was perhaps a distant relative. If Daniel was indeed named for this artist, the boy, although truly appreciative of nature’s beauties, exhibited little inclination toward static endeavors such as painting.

Although it survives for the most part in legend and anecdote, the story of Boone’s early youth is nevertheless a keenly attuned preview of his future exploits. He loved his freedom and was irked by anything that restrained it. He easily forgot his duties as the family’s herdsman and wandered delightedly in a wilderness yet unchanged by civilization. He was a hunter, a fighter, a stout comrade. And he was a boy. He possessed a boy’s sense of humor and commanded respect as an adept prankster. Young Daniel was all this and much more. He and his family sensed that he was different, somehow unsuited to the more domestic aspects of their lifestyle. He naturally helped with the farm, learned rudimentary blacksmithing, and perhaps helped his father in the family trade of weaving. Still, it was only when hunting or trapping that he seemed to feel truly and fully alive.

Perhaps the earliest information about Daniel concerns a smallpox epidemic that broke out in Oley when he was a small boy. To prevent her children from exposure to the dread disease, Mrs. Boone kept them at home. Daniel and Elizabeth, his next older sister, soon decided, with the direct and irrefutable logic of children, that the way to eliminate the restrictions they regarded as punishment was simply to contract the disease, for once over it they could resume their normal activities. The plan formed, they sneaked out of bed one evening, stole away to a neighbor’s farm, and lay down beside a victim of the disease, probably one of their stricken playmates. Then they jubilantly made their way home and slipped back undiscovered into their beds, gleefully awaiting the red blotches that would eventually set them free. Mother Boone all too soon recognized the symptoms that she had vigorously tried to prevent, and riveting her eyes upon Daniel, she quietly asked him to tell her “the whole truth.” He made a full confession of his solution to his problem. Too concerned to scold him overmuch, she told him how badly he had behaved and fretfully added: “Why did thee not tell me before so that I could have had thee better prepared?” Daniel, as did Elizabeth and the other Boone children, recovered with no complications. His confinement was at an end and, as far as he was concerned, the pox had been a great success.

Squire Boone purchased twenty-five acres of grazing land in Oley about five miles north of his present home in October 1744. From the age of ten until he was sixteen Daniel regularly accompanied his mother, who always took charge of the dairy, on the annual migration to the site. During the grazing season, from spring to late fall, they lived in a small rustic cabin built under some shady trees by a swift-flowing brook. Daniel’s job as herdsman tantalized him with many opportunities to neglect the cattle. Often he would slip away into the woods for days at a time. One of his relatives remarked that Daniel was “ever unpracticed in the business of farming, but grew up a woodsman & a hunter.” His only weapon was what he called his “herdsman’s club,” a staff so shaved from a small sapling as to create a lethal point from the knob at the end of its root. During his wanderings through the woods and fields, Daniel became expert in killing small game with a single toss of the spearlike club. When Daniel was twelve or thirteen his father yielded to his pleas and presented him with a short-barreled rifle. Overjoyed, he took it upon himself to keep the family larder filled with fresh game. He became a crack shot for his age and began to take extended winter journeys to the Flying Hills and the Oley Hills, and to the Neversink Mountains “to the north and west of the Monockasy Valley.” Daniel was never to stop his explorations; he would continue to range farther and farther in his hunts to the south and west.

The education of Daniel Boone is a much disputed matter. He insisted to his children that he never had a day of formal education. His older brother Samuel’s wife, Sarah Day, is said to have taught him the basics of the three Rs, but a glance at any of his letters reveals that he never completely mastered spelling and grammar. One legend has it that his uncle John Boone, a schoolteacher, gave up trying to improve Daniel’s composition as a lost cause. Squire Boone was said to have responded to John’s despair with the now famous remark, “it’s all right, John, let the girls do the spelling and Dan will do the shooting, and between you and me that is what we most need.” No worse a grammarian than many a frontier hero such as Simon Kenton and George Rogers Clark, Daniel was, however, the only “creative” speller of George Boone’s forty-five surviving grandchildren.

A whimsical tale surviving about the young boy’s education concerns the tiny country school that Daniel supposedly attended. The teacher was a hard-drinking Irishman whose mood fluctuated violently. He would grow despondent with his charges, excuse himself from the room, and return minutes later with a wide grin on his face to deliver an enlivened, animated lecture. One day when chasing a squirrel in the woods nearby, Daniel stumbled upon the source of his teacher’s inspiration—a bottle of whiskey hidden in the underbrush. After a quick conference, Daniel and the older boys hit upon what they thought would be a just compensation for the Irishman’s all-too-generous use of the hickory switch; they mixed a potent tartar emetic with the whiskey. Needless to say, the next journey out to the thicket resulted in the return of a less-than-cheerful instructor, whose usually reddened face was blanched and strained. He called upon Daniel to solve a mathematical problem. Young Boone blurted out the wrong answer and was whipped with heavy strokes for his error. The blows kept coming. The other children screamed and shouted. The somewhat bewildered Daniel knocked the teacher down and ran for the woods. The Irishman, not Daniel, was dismissed, but Boone was said never again to have ventured into any formal institution of learning. In many ways, nature became his sole teacher, experience and observation his guides.

A typical boy, Daniel Boone had a best friend. Henry Miller, a cousin a few years older than Daniel, worked in Squire Boone’s smithy repairing guns and farm implements. Daniel, as his pupil, became competent at metal work, at least as it related to the rifle. Boone and Miller were a congenial, lively pair who were truly fond of mischief. Any farmer they thought offensive might well find his wagon disassembled and its wheels handsomely displayed on top of his barn or perched in a tree.

One time, the prankish duo learned that George Wilcoxen, a neighbor of Squire Boone who had no training in the use of firearms, wished to borrow a long musket to try his hand at deer hunting. He asked Squire to load the gun for him so it would be ready “for early morning use.” Unnoticed, the boys took the gun, withdrew the ball, and added six additional charges of powder. They then reloaded the ball and secretly returned the musket. Wilcoxen set out at sunrise, no doubt reciting to himself the various instructions given him by his friends. Boone and Miller had begun to doubt the wisdom of their deed; they knew the overloaded musket might explode and seriously harm the unsuspecting hunter. Their thoughts were interrupted by a noise that sounded like the report of a cannon. They ran toward the sound and, much to their relief, met Wilcoxen returning. His bruised face was bloodied from a gash in his forehead. The kick of that “darned gun,” he said, had knocked him to the ground. Squire Boone saw Wilcoxen and earnestly inquired how all this mayhem came about. When Wilcoxen related the story and laid the blame for his wounds on the musket, Squire Boone vigorously told him that the load was so light he could have rested the breech of the gun on his nose and fired it without the least danger. The boys interrupted to ask Wilcoxen if he had killed a deer. He replied that he had a fair shot, but was so dazed by the force of the blast that he did not notice if he had hit the animal. His humor still intact, he wryly added that he thought “it was a pretty dear shot.” Daniel and Henry found the dead deer and brought it in for the novice woodsman, who ever after loaded his musket himself.

Sometimes their escapades did not end nearly as well. They had learned of a dance in a distant settlement and decided to attend without asking Squire Boone’s permission, for they knew that he would categorically refuse because of his Quaker beliefs. Hoping to make a grand entrance, they appropriated Squire Boone’s finest horse and set off double-mounted for an evening’s entertainment. On their return they tried to jump the horse over one of Squire’s cows lying quietly in the path to the stable. The cow bolted up just as the horse was in the midst of its leap. The horse fell with a sickening crunch, breaking its neck. Daniel and Henry, bruised but uninjured, resolved to keep the incident secret. They put the saddle and bridle back in their proper places in the barn and stole stealthily into bed. Poor Squire never was able to figure out how a horse could break its neck in an open field.

Young Daniel was also involved in a boy’s normal share of disputes, and his notions of frontier gallantry, at least at this age, depended upon actions rather than gender. Once, two needy neighbor girls, who were going to Mrs. Boone’s to bring home the remainder of a plentiful catch of shad for their mother, emptied a pail of fish entrails upon the sleeping Daniel’s face as a joke. They went home with the shad, bloodied noses, and swollen faces. Their mother soon presented herself to Mrs. Boone to demand that the young ruffian be punished. Sarah Boone, the most devout Quaker of the family, gave a reply that bristled with the Boone family spirit: “If thee has not brought up thy daughters to better behavior, it is high time they were taught good manners. And if Daniel has given them a lesson, I hope, for my part, that it will, in the end, do them no harm; and I have only to add, that I bid thee good day.”

Clearly, the Boones were not typical Quakers. They were peaceful people, but people ready to defend their possessions and rights with their lives. When there was great fear of an Indian uprising, Daniel’s grandfather George wrote to the governor on March 12, 1728, that though the general populace had fled there remained “about 20 men with me to guard my mill, . . . and we are resolved to defend ourselves to ye last Extremity.”

Similarly, the records of the Exeter Quaker Meeting, the new name given to the Oley Meeting, further testify to the Boones’ independence and reveal that they were not always in accord with the doctrines of the Friends. In 1742 Sarah, Daniel’s oldest sister, married a “worldling,” someone outside the order, and subsequently was disowned by the Society when they discovered that she was with child before the wedding. Called to account for both these matters, Squire Boone confessed “himself in a Fault in keeping them in his House after he knew of their keeping company, but that he was in a great streight in not knowing what to do, seeing he was somewhat sensible that they had been too conversant before.” Five years later, Squire’s son Israel married a non-Quaker, and although no scandal was involved, he too was disowned. On this occasion Squire expressed no contrition and in fact insisted on Israel’s right to marry whomever he pleased. Still not recanting his position after a few months, Squire Boone was judged unfit for membership in the meeting and was expelled.

This accumulation of censure left Squire Boone in a quandary. He had fallen from grace with the Society of Friends and forfeited his leading position in the meeting. His businesses were doing well, but social pressures mounted to such a degree that he resolved to leave Berks County. The desire to see each of his children with good land, now too costly to obtain in Pennsylvania, and the rapidly decreasing fertility of his own fields due to contemporary agricultural methods undoubtedly contributed to the decision as well. On May 1, 1750, a little more than two years after his expulsion, having disposed of all nonessentials and having sold his home and farm for three hundred pounds to his cousin William Maugridge (or Mogridge), Squire Boone led his family out of Pennsylvania. Their destination was uncertain. His wife, Sarah, still a Friend in good standing, requested and received letters attesting to her good character addressed to meetings in Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina.

Daniel may well have served as the guide for the family band that was comprised of Squire’s three married children and their families, his eight as yet unmarried offspring, Henry Miller, and possibly some other relatives. The little caravan wended its way west to Carlisle and then down the Cumberland Valley and into the Shenandoah Valley. The Boones perhaps remained for two years on Linville Creek, a half dozen miles north of Harrisonburg, Virginia. Here, Henry Miller decided to leave the pioneers and make his home south of Harrisonburg, near the residence of Squire’s good friend from Berks County, John Lincoln, whose great-grandson would one day be the sixteenth president. Daniel did not see his friend again for thirty years. When they did meet, one was a well-to-do businessman and the other a living legend of the American frontier.

Between the fall of 1751 and the spring of 1752 the Boones eventually reached the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina. In the present Davie County, Squire built his new home on Dutchman’s Creek, a tributary of the Yadkin River, at a place called the Buffalo Lick. William Byrd II, who had explored the region in 1728 as he headed the Virginia Commission to determine the boundary line between Virginia and North Carolina, described the area in terms that left no doubt as to why Squire Boone settled there: “The Soil is exceedingly rich on both sides [of] the Yadkin, abounding in rank Grass and prodigiously large Trees; and for plenty of Fish, Fowel, and Venison, is inferior to No Part of the Northern Continent. There the Traders commonly lie Still for some days, to recruit their Horses’ Flesh as well as to recover their own Spirits.”

On December 29, 1753, Squire purchased 640 acres of choice land in Davie County on Bear Creek from the Earl of Granville and was issued a license to operate a “Publick House [a tavern or inn] at his own Plantation” in the following year according to the minutes of the county court. The rates for this bit of civilization were set at six shillings for a gallon of spirits, one shilling for a meal of boiled or roasted meat, and two pence per night for a good bed.

Surrounded by a wilderness abundant in deer, turkey, otter, beaver, muskrat, and some buffalo, Daniel, nearly twenty years old, evinced even less interest in farming than he had as a boy in Pennsylvania. The Yadkin region was the extreme western frontier and had very little of civilization about it. A mediocre hunter could bring down four or five deer in a day; Daniel Boone could kill thirty. He helped the family by transporting pelts, furs, and produce to Salisbury during the summer, but took advantage of every opportunity to indulge the hunter’s roving life.

As his extraordinar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. “Let the Girls Do the Spelling”: The Boyhood of Daniel Boone
• 2. Soldier, Suitor, Hunter, Explorer
• 3. “In Quest of the Country of Kentucke”
• 4. Henderson’s “Infamous Company of Land Pyrates”: Transylvania
• 5. Cutting the Wilderness Road
• 6. Revolution and Rescue on the Frontier
• 7. Shel-tow-ee, Son of Blackfish
• 8. Patriot or Traitor?: Boonesborough Besieged
• 9. From Pauper to Legislator
• 10. “Our Affairs Became More and More Alarming”: The Disaster at Blue Licks
• 11. “Your Land Is All Survayd”: Prosperity, Debt, and Retreat
• 12. “I Want More Elbow-Room”: Bound for Missouri
• 13. One Last Hunt: The Final Decade
• 14. “The Sons of Daniel Boone”: A Hero’s Legend and Legacy
• Notes
• A Bibliographic Note and Bibliography
• Index