Boys often choose as their heroes adventurers, real or fictitious.
My hero was both.
As a kid in the early 1960s, I wanted to be Daniel Boone. Specifically, I wanted to be the Boone of the 1964–1970 TV action series starring Fess Parker as the legendary Kentucky frontiersman and Ed Ames as his Oxford-educated half-Cherokee sidekick, Mingo.
Every week when the show aired on NBC, I was mesmerized as I sat in front of our big black-and-white TV.
My favorite toys included a Daniel Boone doll (they didn’t call them action figures then) and a muzzle-loader cap gun that fired cork balls. I wore a coonskin cap like “ol’ Dan,” devoured a children’s book about Boone, and traveled back in time as I roamed the woods with my friends on Irvine Road or visited the beach at Fort Boonesborough State Park, the site of Boone’s settlement in 1775.
It thrilled me to think I lived near the home of the most iconic American hero in history. Davy Crockett, Buffalo Bill, and Wyatt Earp were amateurs compared to Boone.
But most of what people of my generation think they know about Boone is wrong.
To get an idea of how different the man was from the legend, let’s deconstruct the lyrics from the theme song of the TV show.
Daniel Boone was “a big man,” but he was big across, not “tall as a mountain,” as the song says.
He was of average height, about five-eight, and was muscular and stout. A painting shows he was broad in the shoulders. Black Fish, the Shawnee chief who adopted him as a son after capturing him and his party at a salt lick, named him “Big Turtle.”
The statue at College Park, which previously overlooked the Kentucky River from the Clark County side of Boonesboro, is probably more accurate than the one of the lanky scout on the campus of Eastern Kentucky University whose toe I and other students rubbed for good luck.
In the TV show, Boone always wore a coonskin cap, but there’s no evidence that he ever wore one in real life. Instead, he wore a hat with a brim to shield his eyes from the sun and rain.
The song says Boone was “the rippin’est, roarin’est, fightin’est man the frontier ever knew.” But history reveals he was a peacemaker and diplomat who avoided fights if he could. He came from a Quaker family and learned the values of quietude early on.
Though he wasn’t a rip-roarer, he did like to sing and tell tales.
And although he was a bad speller, he was not illiterate. He liked to read the Bible and “Gulliver’s Travels” by Jonathan Swift.
According to the song, Boone “fought for Americans to make all Americans free.” But that is a little too sympathetic.
“The story of Daniel Boone is the story of America. From the Blue Ridge to the Bluegrass, from the Yadkin to the Yellowstone, no man sought and loved the wilderness with more passion and dedication. Yet none led more settlers and developers to destroy the wilderness in a few decades.”
Boone owned enslaved people, and although he respected the indigenous peoples of America, he didn’t advocate for their equality. Boone’s views of Native Americans may have been progressive for his time, but they were tempered by the facts that his son James was tortured to death by Indians, his daughter Jemima was kidnapped by them, Boone was a prisoner of the Shawnee, and his fort was besieged by warriors led by his adopted father, Black Fish, on behalf of the British in what was one of the final battles of the Revolutionary War.
Boone fought with the British in the French and Indian War and against them in the Revolution, although he was friendly with British Loyalists, including members of his wife Rebecca Bryan Boone’s family.
After the war, he emigrated from the new republic to settle in Missouri, in what was then the Louisiana Territory, where he and his family had to swear allegiance to the French and Spanish, as well as the Catholic Church.
It was only when Thomas Jefferson purchased Louisiana from Napoleon Bonaparte that Boone became an American again.
Boone was born on Nov. 2, 1734 (or Oct. 22 in the “Old Style”) near present Reading, Pennsylvania, and moved with his family to the Yadkin River Valley of North Carolina when he was a youth. He lived in at least six states before they were states.
As I grew older, my fascination with the man and the myth matured but did not wane. I learned more about how the real Daniel Boone influenced art and literature.
Alfred Lord Tennyson, Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and James Fenimore Cooper were inspired by the legend of Boone, who had become a folk hero on both sides of the Atlantic while he was still living, thanks in part to the writing of John Filson.
In his 2007 biography, “Boone,” Robert Morgan revealed much I didn’t already know.
For example, I didn’t know that Rebecca had Jemima with Boone’s brother, Ned, while her husband was away for many months and she assumed he was dead.
Nor did I know that he explored the American West as far as Yellowstone and the Rocky Mountains, and that, as an old man, he dreamed of going to the Cascades and the Pacific Coast.
There are many paradoxes about Boone. Consider this passage from Morgan’s biography:
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“The story of Daniel Boone is the story of America. From the Blue Ridge to the Bluegrass, from the Yadkin to the Yellowstone, no man sought and loved the wilderness with more passion and dedication. Yet none led more settlers and developers to destroy the wilderness in a few decades.”
In 1790, the last buffalo in the Bluegrass was killed. By then, the beavers were gone. So were the Cherokee and Shawnee. Most of Kentucky’s vast forests had been cleared. Instead of mostly small farms, by the early 19th century, thousands of acres of land were in large plantations.
Although he opened Kentucky and the West to expansion and was a surveyor, Boone wasn’t good at protecting his own claims in court. He died in 1820 in Missouri owning no more land than his burial plot. He is now buried with Rebecca in Frankfort, Kentucky.
Although he was not wealthy like Jefferson or a genius like Benjamin Franklin or eloquent like Abraham Lincoln, Boone contributed enormously to our country’s history.
He belongs in the pantheon of the greatest American heroes.
