Boone
By Robert Morgan
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 538
pages, $29.95
In his classic collection of essays “In the American Grain,” William Carlos Williams, critiquing the limitations of the puritanical tradition, wrote:
“There was, thank God, a great voluptuary born to the American settlements . . . one who by the single logic of his passion, which he rested on the savage life about him, destroyed at its spring that spiritually withering plague. For this he has remained since buried in a miscolored legend and left for rotten.”
Williams was writing of Daniel Boone, who, he contends, “was not, as commonly believed, of that riffraff of hunters and Indian-killers among which destiny had thrown him.” Yet separating Boone from the archetype that he became, even in his own lifetime, has been difficult as far back as his robust middle years.
As Robert Morgan points out in his intriguing new biography, “Boone,” this contemporary of George Washington’s lived to be 85 (he died in 1820) “and was a legend for the last thirty-six years of his life.” For Baby Boomers, at least, notions of the frontiersman may boil down to the coonskin-capped Fess Parker of the 1960s TV series “Daniel Boone,” whose theme song remarked that he “fought for America to make all Americans free” and marveled, “what a dream comer truer was he.” Yet Boone’s great dream was one of solitude, which kept him moving west and away from concentrations of people except his own extended family; he thought coonskin caps “uncouth, heavy, and uncomfortable” and wore a beaver felt hat instead; and he “was for the most part a reluctant soldier and Indian fighter.”
What he did was pull a finger from the dike: By cutting a path known as Boone’s Trace that would allow pack horses and settlers to flow west over the Allegheny Mountains (no, he did not discover the Cumberland Gap), by his extended efforts to protect the settlements and ward off British-led attacks and attempts at control of the interior, he released the enormous pressure that had been building for expansion west. As Morgan puts it, “The colonial governments could no more stop the gathering rush into Kentucky than they could have curbed a flood with a sieve.”
Much of the historical importance — and the particulars — of Boone’s life relates to struggles over the fate of Kentucky and the entire Ohio River Valley. Frederick Jackson Turner, in his “The Frontier in American History,” asserts that pressure from settlers there “was in large measure” responsible for the Louisiana Purchase (through the need of New Orleans as an outlet), and “it was the Ohio Valley which forced the nation away from a narrow colonial attitude into its career as a nation among other nations.”
That theme of being essentially an instrument of expansion has clung to Boone like wet buckskins, and yet Morgan effectively demonstrates the way Boone’s life exemplified different ideals later taken up by Romantic writers and artists in America and Europe, from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman to Lord Byron and the Hudson River School painters. The writers, working decades after Boone’s death, did not even need to invoke his name (although Byron did), since the Boone presence was “immanent as a model so familiar he [was] already implicit in the very fabric of American culture and mythology,” Morgan writes.
“Even Boone could not have imagined the scale and speed with which his story would grow and spread and influence the culture and imagination of the developing nation,” Morgan tells us. Despite this, Boone’s life was heavily attended by paradox: He was a great friend to many Indians and seemingly cozy with the British when as a prisoner he was taken to British-held Detroit by his Shawnee captors in the midst of the Revolution (1778), and his allegiances were mistrusted by some of his fellow settlers on the frontier. (This notwithstanding the fact that he escaped captivity, rode his getaway horse to death and covered 160 miles of wilderness in fewer than four days, only to arrange for the protection of Boonesborough from pending attack.)
A greater paradox is that the wilderness-worshiping Boone and the effects of his fame — he was followed everywhere by streams of people — helped destroy the very thing he so admired. The “collision between love of hunting and hunting skill, and a sustainable ecology, is at the heart of the contradiction in Boone’s life, and the history of modern America. The prowess and persistence of men like Boone made the decline of the game inevitable,” Morgan points out.
That is a dynamic Boone came to understand late in life, and while he never participated in the mass slaughter of buffalo, still “he was very much a part of the rush to strip the wilderness of its finest yield.” In his heyday, though, the land and its fruits seemed limitless, and, “No one could have believed in 1775 that the wilderness would vanish within their lifetime.” Cutting his trace with axmen that year, Boone and his party were attacked by Indians; they rigged a litter to carry one of the wounded to the Kentucky River a few miles away, and the young man never forgot the scene of hundreds of buffalo they spooked at a salt lick when they arrived, splashing away in the water, ” ‘Such a sight some of us never saw before,’ ” he wrote later.
Evoked throughout Morgan’s biography is that sense of a lost world, and a few primal scenes akin to those permeating the journals of Lewis and Clark. Camped in southwestern Virginia in 1761, Boone and a companion were attacked by wolves and fought them off with rifles and axes; asleep and alone near present-day Jonesborough, Tenn., one winter night Boone was awakened by Cherokees, one of whom lifted his snow-covered blanket and exclaimed, “Ah, Wide-Mouth, I have got you now.” The Cherokees may have given Boone that name for his penchant for storytelling and laughter; they took his furs and rifle but did not harm him, and Morgan suggests the incident shows how elusive Boone was, for he had been working in the heart of the Cherokee hunting grounds.
Over the years, two of Boone’s sons and one brother were killed by Indians, and he was present on two of the three occasions. He was captured more than once, forced to run a gantlet, and in starvation with the Indians was reduced to eating elm bark (which produced diarrhea), then oak bark (to treat the diarrhea), then a gelatin made from deer entrails (to treat the oak-bark constipation). Raised as a Quaker, a Bible-reader but not a churchgoer, and a Freemason as well, Boone was adopted by a Shawnee chief.
Much of Boone’s life smacks of the apocryphal, and while Morgan cautions, “It is hard for anyone, even a man of Daniel Boone’s modesty, cheer, courtesy, and resourcefulness, to survive his own legend,” he also concludes, “Boone’s story and character stand up remarkably well under critical scrutiny.” Morgan faces the same limitations other modern biographers have, including the fact that Boone has been much written about, and while the earliest biographies included interviews with Boone and close relatives, they were also subject to the conventions of their day (19th Century writers were particularly apt to “dip their pens into purple ink,” for example).
But Morgan also has the advantage of weighing existing accounts against each other, and much of “Boone” cherry-picks from sources that range from the earliest to relatively recent scholarship, which allows him to integrate such things as more contemporary views of American Indian contact and the role of frontier women, and Boone’s ownership of slaves, and to parse out various contested events and motivations in Boone’s life. (Rebecca Boone is characterized as “one of the hardiest and most resilient and resourceful women in American history,” for instance, a woman who held together the household and raised her and Daniel’s 10 children in a 56-year marriage that ended with her death in 1813 in Missouri. Morgan is generous in citing the work of scholar Annette Kolodny, who has written much on the topic, and in quoting other scholars whose work has touched on Boone, such as Richard Slotkin.)
Those familiar with the arc of Boone’s life will recall that his turn from the deep woods after his early achievements, into work of surveying and land speculation and storekeeping and river transport, was filled with chronic debt and litigation against him and business failure, even victimization in swindles.
“He seemed unable or unwilling to adapt to the aggressive commercial and legal culture that was overwhelming the new territory,” Morgan writes. Yet he came to himself again, so to speak, in his declining years, moving beyond U.S. territory in 1799 to what would become Missouri but was then a domain of Spain, receiving land, respect and tribute from the governors there. He was greeted with military honors, drums and salutes in St. Louis; an eyewitness recalled him riding into town on horseback, a rifle on his shoulder, knives in his belt and hunting dogs at his side.
Morgan notes, “The forest was the meeting place between white and Indian culture, where the two worlds challenged each other and mingled, mirrored, and merged. Boone’s genius was at its best in that complex, evolving zone, part Indian, part white, mostly natural.” In Missouri, an older man who hunted as far as the Yellowstone River and hid out from the Osage Indians, he was in his zone again.
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Art Winslow is a frequent contributor to the Tribune.
