Daniel Boone: The Man and the Myth That Swallowed Him

Daniel Boone was a real person and also, for much of American history, barely distinguishable from the myth that was built around him. The real Boone was born in Pennsylvania in seventeen thirty-four to a Quaker family, moved to North Carolina as a young man, and became a hunter, trapper, and scout along the frontier of British America. He was skilled, observant, durable, and comfortable in the woods in a way that very few Europeans in the eighteenth century could claim.

In seventeen sixty-nine he crossed the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky with five other men and spent two years exploring what was then Cherokee and Shawnee hunting territory. He did not discover Kentucky; Indigenous nations had been living there for thousands of years. He was among the first English-speaking colonists to write about it.

The transformation of Boone into national legend began in seventeen eighty-four, when a Pennsylvania school teacher named John Filson published a promotional book about Kentucky that included, in an appendix, a supposed first-person narrative by Boone titled 'The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon.' Filson wrote it entirely himself. Boone, who was barely literate, was credited with eloquent passages about nature, solitude, and the sublime beauty of the wilderness. The book was reprinted in France and England. Lord Byron cited it. The Romantic movement adopted Boone as an American archetype.

The actual Boone spent decades trying to convert his Kentucky explorations into land wealth, was repeatedly cheated by surveyors and legal technicalities, lost most of his claims, and eventually moved to Missouri to escape his creditors. He died in eighteen twenty at the age of eighty-five, solvent at last but far from the comfortable estate the myth suggested he had earned. The forest bearing his name, covering just over seven hundred thousand acres of eastern Kentucky, is a better monument than he could have hoped for.