Daniel Boone

Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 39927-h.htm or 39927-h.zip: (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/39927/pg39927-images.html) or (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/39927/39927-h.zip)

Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See http://archive.org/details/danielboone00thwaiala

Transcriber's note:

Inconsistent hyphenation and spelling in the original document have been preserved. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (italics).

Text enclosed by equal signs is in bold face (=bold=).

The author used superscripted numbers to indicate which of several people with the same name are being referred to. The superscript notation has been replaced in the text with a number within curly brackets (e.g., George{1}, George{2}).

[Illustration: DANIEL BOONE. From the portrait by Chester Harding made in 1819, when Boone was eighty-five years old. (See pp. 237-239.)]

DANIEL BOONE

by

REUBEN GOLD THWAITES

Author of "Father Marquette," "The Colonies, 1492-1750," "Down Historic Waterways," "Afloat on the Ohio," etc.; Editor of "The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents," "Chronicles of Border Warfare," "Wisconsin Historical Collections," etc.

Illustrated

NEW YORK D. Appleton & Company 1902

Copyright, 1902 By D. Appleton and Company

Published September, 1902

TO THE MEMORY OF THE LATE

LYMAN COPELAND DRAPER, LL.D.

WHOSE UNPARALLELED COLLECTION OF MANUSCRIPT MATERIALS FOR WESTERN HISTORY IN THE LIBRARY OF THE WISCONSIN STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY HAS MADE PRACTICABLE THE PREPARATION OF THIS LITTLE BOOK

PREFACE

Poets, historians, and orators have for a hundred years sung the praises of Daniel Boone as the typical backwoodsman of the trans-Alleghany region. Despite popular belief, he was not really the founder of Kentucky. Other explorers and hunters had been there long before him; he himself was piloted through Cumberland Gap by John Finley; and his was not even the first permanent settlement in Kentucky, for Harrodsburg preceded it by nearly a year; his services in defense of the West, during nearly a half century of border warfare, were not comparable to those of George Rogers Clark or Benjamin Logan; as a commonwealth builder he was surpassed by several. Nevertheless, Boone's picturesque career possesses a romantic and even pathetic interest that can never fail to charm the student of history. He was great as a hunter, explorer, surveyor, and land-pilot--probably he found few equals as a rifleman; no man on the border knew Indians more thoroughly or fought them more skilfully than he; his life was filled to the brim with perilous adventures. He was not a man of affairs, he did not understand the art of money-getting, and he lost his lands because, although a surveyor, he was careless of legal forms of entry. He fled before the advance of the civilization which he had ushered in: from Pennsylvania, wandering with his parents to North Carolina in search of broader lands; thence into Kentucky because the Carolina borders were crowded; then to the Kanawha Valley, for the reason that Kentucky was being settled too fast to suit his fancy; lastly to far-off Missouri, in order, as he said, to get "elbow room." Experiences similar to his have made misanthropes of many another man--like Clark, for instance; but the temperament of this honest, silent, nature-loving man only mellowed with age; his closing years were radiant with the sunshine of serene content and the dimly appreciated consciousness of world-wide fame; and he died full of years, in heart a simple hunter to the last--although he had also served with credit as magistrate, soldier, and legislator. At his death the Constitutional Convention of Missouri went into mourning for twenty days, and the State of Kentucky claimed his bones, and has erected over them a suitable monument.