Daniel Boone at Pilot Knob

It was on the first of May in the year 1769 that I resigned my domes­tic hap­pi­ness for a time and left my fam­i­ly and peace­able habi­ta­tion on the Yadkin River in North-Carolina to wan­der through the wilder­ness of America in quest of the coun­try of Kentucke, in com­pa­ny with John Finley, John Stewart, Joseph Holden, James Monay and William Cool.

We pro­ceed­ed suc­cess­ful­ly, and after a long fatigu­ing jour­ney through a moun­tain­ous wilder­ness, in a west­ward direc­tion, on the sev­enth day of June fol­low­ing, we found our­selves on Red-River, where John Finley had for­mer­ly been trad­ing with the Indians and, from the top of an emi­nence, saw with plea­sure the beau­ti­ful lev­el of Kentucke.

                                                                  John Filson
                                                                  “Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon”

Introduction

So begins the adven­tures of Daniel Boone in Kentucky.  The above state­ment Boone gave to John Filson is clear to any­one famil­iar with the Red River coun­try in Powell County, Kentucky.  Historians place John Finley’s trad­ing post at the Shawnee town of Eskippakithiki in a place known as the Indian Old Fields in east­ern Clark County.  One emi­nence dom­i­nates this fer­tile plain:  Pilot Knob in near­by Powell County.  Separating these two sites is Lulbegrud Creek, a fork of Red River.  The asso­ci­a­tion of Pilot Knob with this emi­nence is so obvi­ous that the Kentucky Historical Society held its June 7 Boone Day cel­e­bra­tion there in 1953.  Nevertheless, there are those who still find fault with the state­ment Filson recorded.

John Filson gave us the first his­to­ry and accu­rate map of Kentucky.  In the year 1784, he pub­lished his clas­sic work, The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke.  To his his­to­ry, Filson append­ed Boone’s memoir—“The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon”—which turned Boone into an inter­na­tion­al celebrity. 

Over the years, how­ev­er, var­i­ous writ­ers have quib­bled with almost every aspect of Filson’s work.  Pointing out small inac­cu­ra­cies in the text, they claim that Filson got his facts all wrong.  They main­tain that Boone nev­er spoke the words attrib­uted to him—a cri­tique of Filson’s flow­ery lan­guage.  Some have argued that the Boone nar­ra­tive was not even writ­ten by Filson.  Each of these issues will be exam­ined below.

Critiques of Filson’s Boone

Daniel Boone has long been an American icon and con­tin­ues to attract the atten­tion of mod­ern authors and read­ers.  The spate of books and arti­cles about Boone con­tin­ues unabat­ed.  Among these are relent­less cri­tiques of Filson’s work.

Critics jumped on Filson ear­ly. In 1884, Filson’s first biog­ra­ph­er, Reuben T. Durrett, took issue with the open­ing sen­tence of Filson’s History:

Filson makes James McBride to have been the dis­cov­er­er of Kentucky in 1754, when he cut his name on a tree at the mouth of the Kentucky River. McBride was in no sense the dis­cov­er­er of Kentucky.

Durrett cor­rect­ly states that French traders and oth­er explor­ers had ear­li­er views of Kentucky.  However, Filson’s state­ment was not so much in error as it was a lim­i­ta­tion of his sources.  Filson did not arrive in Kentucky until 1782 (or pos­si­bly 1783) and pub­lished his his­to­ry a year lat­er.  He learned of McBride from oth­er sources (“cer­tain accounts”).  Filson had no library, no his­tor­i­cal soci­ety, and no Kentucky schol­ars to tap for infor­ma­tion.  In this instance, he took the infor­ma­tion he had been giv­en and pre­sent­ed it with qual­i­fi­ca­tions.  Holding Filson account­able for not learn­ing of the first explor­ers to view Kentucky seems a tad severe.

Another crit­i­cism is that Filson’s account was intend­ed as pro­mo­tion­al lit­er­a­ture to bring more set­tlers to Kentucky and, thus, increase the val­ue of Filson’s own land hold­ings.  Filson prob­a­bly did hope that his work would pay off, but that doesn’t dimin­ish its val­ue.  We should be thank­ful that any­one both­ered to pub­lish a use­ful his­to­ry at that extreme­ly ear­ly date.  Without it, we would not have had Daniel Boone’s own account of ear­ly events in Kentucky.

Our main con­cern here is the pur­port­ed mis­takes in the “Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon.”  Here again, Durrett takes the lead, point­ing out Filson’s inaccuracies.

The lit­tle work is not with­out its faults, such as rep­re­sent­ing herds of buf­fa­lo igno­rant of the vio­lence of man, when the Indians had been killing them for ages unknown; trees gay with blos­soms on the 22^d of December, when the forests of Kentucky sel­dom show a leaf; views of the Ohio River and the moun­tains at the same time from an emi­nence in Kentucky, when there is no known point from which such a sight could be had with­out the use of a tele­scope, which Boone does not say he had; and mak­ing the plain old pio­neer com­pare the ragged tops of the Cumberland Mountains to the ruins of Palmyra and Persepolis, when it may be doubt­ed if he could dis­tin­guish these ancient cities from Gog and Magog, or that he had any just con­cep­tion of the clas­si­cal allusion.

The first of these sounds like tak­ing a school­boy to task rather than list­ing his his­tor­i­cal errors.  And the last—reference to the ruins of Palmyra and Persepolis—falls into the cat­e­go­ry of “Filson’s florid prose.”  In spite of “its faults,” Durrett had no prob­lem adding that the “Adventures”

is the most inter­est­ing, as well as the most valu­able, part of the work. It is the gem of the col­lec­tion.  It is the lit­tle foun­tain from which have flowed so many enchant­i­ng streams of Indian con­flict and pio­neer adven­ture in the “dark and bloody ground.”  It begins with Boone’s first com­ing to Kentucky, in 1769, and gives the scenes in which he was engaged until 1784, when the work was pub­lished.  The events in the career of Boone thus nar­rat­ed were the ini­tial steps of Kentucky’s set­tle­ment, and make up the charm­ing first chap­ter of our Western annals.

Durrett was not only an admir­er of Filson’s work, he also named the his­tor­i­cal soci­ety he found­ed in 1884 after Kentucky’s first historian—The Filson Club.

Others con­tin­ued to harp on Filson’s inac­cu­ra­cies.  John Bakeless, who penned a schol­ar­ly biog­ra­phy of Boone (1939), stat­ed that Kentucky’s first historian

mix­es up dates bad­ly, rep­re­sents Boone’s hasty esti­mates of Indian forces as if they were exact cal­cu­la­tions, and blun­ders in describ­ing inci­dents.  His errors can be shown eas­i­ly enough from con­tem­po­rary doc­u­ments and from the rem­i­nis­cences of contemporaries.

Again, we can defend Filson by not­ing that he was record­ing Boone’s mem­oir and did not have access to “con­tem­po­rary doc­u­ments” to ver­i­fy Boone’s accuracy. 

An even more severe crit­i­cism comes from his­to­ri­an Reuben Gold Thwaites (1902): “The auto­bi­og­ra­phy is often wrong as to facts, and pos­sess­es but minor val­ue as his­tor­i­cal material.”

Filson’s Boone has “minor val­ue as his­tor­i­cal mate­r­i­al”?  A pret­ty damn­ing assess­ment.  Thwaites was employed at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, where Lyman C. Draper had spent half a cen­tu­ry assem­bling a mas­sive col­lec­tion of mate­r­i­al on Daniel Boone.  Given the access Thwaites had to all this his­tor­i­cal mate­r­i­al, it is per­haps not sur­pris­ing that he belit­tles Filson’s ear­ly effort.  In doing so, how­ev­er, he chose to ignore the long list of ver­i­fi­able events in Boone’s life that were first described in detail and pub­lished by Filson:

• long hunt in Kentucky (1769)
• first attempt to set­tle Kentucky and death of son James (1773)
• lead­ing a com­pa­ny of set­tlers to Boonesborough (1775)
• kid­nap­ping and res­cue of Boone’s and Callaway’s daugh­ters (1776)
• cap­ture of Boone and the salt mak­ers at Lower Blue Licks (1778)
• his cap­tiv­i­ty and escape that sum­mer (1778)
• siege of Fort Boonesborough (1778)
• death of his broth­er Ned (1780)
• bat­tle of Blue Licks and death of son Israel (1782)

The actu­al list of events is much longer and, in spite of Thwaites’ asser­tion, has been an invalu­able aid to his­to­ri­ans, includ­ing Lyman Draper him­self, who did not take issue with Filson’s work. 

One thing Filson did not do was invent sto­ries about Boone out of whole cloth, as oth­er ear­ly writ­ers were wont to do.  Timothy Flint wrote a best-sell­ing biog­ra­phy that has Boone fight­ing bears, escap­ing pur­su­ing Indians on a swing­ing vine, and mak­ing him into a greater-than-life hero.  Daniel Bryan com­posed a hero­ic epic, Mountain Muse, Comprising the Adventures of Daniel Boone, which so incensed Boone that he regret­ted he could not sue him for slander.

Over the years, many authors have con­tin­ued to take Filson to task for putting words in Boone’s mouth—words they claim he would nev­er have spo­ken.  Robert Morgan, a recent Boone biog­ra­ph­er, rose to Filson’s defense for the so-called “stilt­ed style of the nar­ra­tion.”  Morgan argued that Boone may have spo­ken dif­fer­ent­ly to an edu­cat­ed east­ern­er than he would to a back­woods­man.  And Michael Lofaro wrote that, in spite of the “bom­bas­tic lan­guage, the infor­ma­tion gleaned from Filson’s per­son­al inter­views with Boone and his com­pan­ions still man­aged to shine through the rhetoric.”

The final charge, which still aris­es occasionally—that Filson did not author the Boone narrative—is eas­i­ly dis­pelled.  The sin­gle source for this claim comes from an inter­view with the pio­neer Josiah Collins in 1844.

Boone’s Filson was writ­ten by Humphrey Marshall.  Boone lived at that time at the cross-plains [Athens], 10 miles from Lexington.  Gen. [Marquis] Callamees and I had a con­ver­sa­tion about some state­ments in that & he said Humphrey Marshall was to blame about that & that he ought not to have writ­ten it.  It was always under­stood that Humphrey Marshall wrote Boone’s state­ment as pub­lished by Filson.

John Walton, Filson’s biog­ra­ph­er, addressed this issue on two fronts.  First, Filson was lav­ish in his acknowl­edge­ments of those who helped him with his book and map.  It seems unlike­ly he would have failed to give cred­it to Marshall who would have been in a posi­tion to embar­rass him for the omis­sion.  Secondly, Marshall wrote his own his­to­ry of Kentucky and gave explic­it cred­it to his sources, includ­ing “Boone’s Narrative of 1784 by Filson.”

Conclusion

It is unfor­tu­nate that authors over the years have obscured the mean­ing and ques­tioned the val­ue of Filson’s account of the “Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon.”  To do so, they have had to ignore Filson’s state­ment that he per­son­al­ly inter­viewed Boone regard­ing his adven­tures and “pub­lished them from his own mouth.”  And that the work was read, edit­ed, and endorsed by Levi Todd and James Harrod, two of Kentucky’s not­ed pio­neers.  And, final­ly, that Boone him­self once declared to a vis­i­tor that it was “All true.  Every word true.”

Regarding Boone’s emi­nence, the ref­er­ence to Red River “where John Finley had for­mer­ly been trad­ing with the Indians” still rings clear.  We need look no far­ther than Pilot Knob in Powell County.