Daniel Boone

Squire Boone wove cloth and worked iron in the Oley Valley, and the Quakers expelled him in 1747 after a second child married outside the meeting. Three years later he sold up and moved the family to the Yadkin River in North Carolina. Daniel never went to church again, though he had all his children baptized. His schooling came to almost nothing - his father is supposed to have said the girls could do the spelling and Dan would do the shooting - but John Mack Faragher found him as literate as most men of his time, traveling with a Bible and Gulliver's Travels and reading aloud to hunters at the fire. At 15 he was the best shot in the region. He married Rebecca Bryan on August 14, 1756.

In May 1769 he went west with John Findley and four others, through the Cumberland Gap into the bluegrass, and on December 22 the Shawnee took his skins and told him not to return. He returned. Richard Henderson hired him in March 1775 to open the country for a colony called Transylvania. Boone brought the Cherokee to a meeting at Sycamore Shoals, cut Boone's Trace through the gap, and on September 8 walked his family into Boonesborough. Shawnee warriors took him at the Licking River salt springs on February 7, 1778, adopted him as Sheltowee, and held him until June 16, when he slipped away and covered 160 miles in five days to warn the settlement. Two officers then charged him with treason. The court acquitted him and promoted him, and he rarely spoke of it again.

The trail cost him two sons. A war party tortured and killed James on October 9, 1773, along with an enslaved man named Charles, and Israel died at Blue Licks in August 1782. Shawnee hunters shot his brother Ned, mistook him for Daniel, and took the head as proof. Boone himself was prosperous enough at Limestone to own seven enslaved people, a large holding for Kentucky then, and in 1786 he bought a woman of about 20 for ninety pounds. What he never held was land. In 1780 he collected roughly 20,000 dollars from settlers to buy their warrants and had the cash stolen from his room at a Williamsburg tavern. Lawyers and taxes took the rest of his claims, a warrant went out for his arrest in 1798, and in 1799 he left the United States for Spanish Louisiana.

John Filson published the adventures in 1784 on Boone's 50th birthday and made him famous in two languages. Timothy Flint's 1833 memoir added the bear fights and the escapes by vine, and the family thought it absurd. Boone had already objected: nothing embittered his old age, he said, like the circulation of absurd stories that he retired as civilization advanced. He told his son he was sure of killing one man, at Blue Licks, and said Indians had always been kinder to him than whites. In 1845 Kentucky dug him up and reburied him at Frankfort. In 1983 an anthropologist examined a plaster cast of the skull and said it might be an African American's. Two cemeteries claim him.

Daniel Boone's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Boone's Trace, later the Wilderness Road other
  Cut through the Cumberland Gap for the Transylvania Company 1775
• Fort Boonesborough building
  The Kentucky River settlement he brought his family to on September 8 1775
• Boone's Station building
  His own settlement near Boonesborough 1779
• The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boon book
  John Filson wrote it from interviews with Boone and made him a celebrity 1784
• Missouri River long hunt mission
  More than 2,000 miles round trip at 76, reportedly as far as the Yellowstone 1810

• 1750 aged ~16 The family leaves Pennsylvania for the Yadkin River in North Carolina Squire Boone had been expelled from the Quaker meeting three years earlier.
• August 14, 1756 aged 21 Marries Rebecca Bryan, a neighbour in the Yadkin valley
• May 1769 aged 34 Sets out for Kentucky with John Findley and four other men On December 22 the Shawnee confiscated his skins and ordered him never to come back.
• October 9, 1773 aged 38 His oldest son James is tortured and killed on the way to Kentucky The party abandoned the expedition. The killing helped set off Dunmore's War.
• March 1775 aged 40 Blazes Boone's Trace through the Cumberland Gap for Richard Henderson He founded Boonesborough that September.
• February 7, 1778 aged 43 Captured at the salt springs and adopted by the Shawnee as Sheltowee
• June 16, 1778 aged 43 Escapes and covers 160 miles in five days to warn Boonesborough He was court-martialled for treason after the siege that September, acquitted, and promoted.
• August 19, 1782 aged 47 His son Israel is killed at the Battle of Blue Licks
• 1799 aged ~65 Leaves the United States for Spanish Louisiana The Spanish made him syndic and commandant of the Femme Osage district.

• Davy Crockett 1786–1836
  Frontiersman, soldier, and politician who became a folk hero of the American frontier. the next man cast in the part
• John James Audubon 1785–1851
  Naturalist and illustrator whose Birds of America shaped American ornithology and the society bearing his name. claimed to have hunted with him
• Tecumseh 1768–1813
  Shawnee leader who sought a broad Indigenous confederacy to resist U.S. territorial expansion. fought the settlement he opened
• Abraham Lincoln 1809–1865
  16th President who preserved the Union during the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. his grandfather came west with Boone
• Kit Carson 1809–1868
  Frontiersman and scout who guided John C. Frémont and became a legend of the American West. inherited the type
• Theodore Roosevelt 1858–1919
  26th President known for progressive reforms, conservation efforts, and assertive foreign policy. named a club for him