Daniel Boone as an Icon

Daniel Boone as an Icon

Sources

Many Boones. One of the most popular frontier figures was Daniel Boone, famous backswoodsman, foe of Indians, and one of the first settlers of the state of Kentucky. Boone’s legend grew in the first half of the nineteenth century; he became the subject of many biographies, poems, adventure tales, paintings, and sculptures. Each of these works emphasized different elements of the Boone legend, and in doing so, affirmed different visions of the frontier. For Westerners, Boone was a hero, a solitary, courageous man of action. For some Easterners he became either a gentleman-hunter or an emblem of unrestrained, degenerate, radical democracy. In the South, Boone was a chivalric “knight-errant.”

Filson. Boone’s first literary appearance was in John Filson’s Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke (1784). Filson was a Pennsylvannia schoolteacher and speculator who traveled through the Kentucky frontier with Boone as his guide. His narrative blends elements of the Puritan “errand into the wilderness,” captivity narratives, and a romantic vision of man redeemed by nature. Filson’s Boone escapes the corrupt elements of Eastern and European civilization but never succumbs to the savage temptations of the wilderness. He is ever mindful of his role as the vanguard of civilization. In the conclusion to his narrative he admits that “my footsteps have often been marked with blood,” but he nevertheless gives thanks that the “all superintending providence” has “turned cruel war into peace” and “brought order out of confusion.” Filson’s narrative was followed by The Mountain Muse (1813), a Miltonic epic published by Boone’s nephew, Daniel Bryan. In Bryan’s vision a gentlemanly Boone is chosen by the Spirit of Enterprise to bring civilization, knowledge, and philanthropy to the heathen of the trans-Allegheny. Boone himself found this grand treatment distasteful; he is reported to have wished he could sue Bryan “for slander.”

Midcentury Boones. James Hall’s Letters from the West (1822–1828) suggested a more Western perspective. His Boone appears as a common man who rejects the riches of the East for the open wilderness. Similarly, in John McClung’s Sketches of Western Adventure (1832) Boone is a simple man of action, a hunter who enjoys the hardship, adventure, and danger of the frontier with little regard for the values of civilization. John Peck’s Life of Daniel Boone (1847), on the other hand, appearing in the Library of American Biography, a popular encyclopedia of famous American lives, presented Boone as a family man affirming American domestic and Christian values. The Southern writer William Gilmore Simms depicted Boone as a chivalrous and aristocratic rescuer of beautiful damsels in distress. The most popular Boone narrative was Timothy Flint’s Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone (1833), which the historian Henry Nash Smith calls “perhaps the most widely read book about a Western character published during the first half of the nineteenth-century.” Flint’s Boone was a blend of Eastern and Western characteristics. He is an instinctive hunter, a lover of nature, and emulator of Indians fleeing “the tide of emigration.” He is also a gentlemanly agent of civilization; his patriotic heart swells “with joy” at the vision of a settled Kentucky. Still, not all writers saw Boone as a hero; C. Wilder, an Eastern publisher, critiqued Boone as a barbarian in an 1823 reprint of Filson’s chapter on Boone.

Boone and the Visual Arts. Visual representations of Boone are equally varied. In 1820, a few months before Boone’s death, Chester Harding sought out and met the backwoodsman more than a hundred miles outside of St. Louis. Harding is the only artist known to paint a portrait of Boone from life. From this original, Harding made two variants, a half-length and full-length portrait. The half-length, Boone in a Fur Collar (circa 1820), borrowed from familiar portraits of Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson. Such allusions placed Boone among the young country’s most revered statesmen and suggested that he was both a yeomanlike child of nature and an Enlightenment figure of progress and civilization. The full-length portrait, Col. Daniel Boone (1820), placed the aged Boone in a landscape setting, holding his rifle and accompanied by his hunting dog. This work follows in the tradition of eighteenth-century English hunting portraits, but Boone’s buckskin clothes and Kentucky rifle suggest a democratic frontiersman rather than an aristocratic man of leisure. In this painting Boone is the Jacksonian common man doing his part to open the West. Boone’s image was put to use by a number of other artists. Sometime after Texas applied for and was denied statehood in 1836, Boone’s image was incorporated into the design of Texan banknotes. Though Boone never actually set foot in Texas, his appearance on the state’s currency served to affirm Texans’ view of themselves as true American pioneers. The Hudson River School painter Thomas Cole suggested a different Boone in his Daniel Boone Seated Outside His Cabin (1826). Among a romantic American landscape of forest, rock formations, and lake, the aged Boone is seated on a rock outside his cabin, with his dog nearby. The inspiration for this portrait was Lord Bryon’s description of Boone in Don Juan (1819–1824), but Cole also drew upon Christian iconographic traditions. Immersed in an immense and sublime landscape, Cole’s Boone is a wilderness saint, epitomizing the romantic notion of moral enlightenment achieved in nature. Contemporary with, but in contrast to, Cole’s painting is Enrico Causcici’s relief sculpture for the Rotunda of the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. Titled The Conflict Between Daniel Boone and the Indians (1826–1827), Causcici’s sculpture depicts Boone defeating two Indians in hand-to-hand combat, an image celebrating the victory of American civilization and superiority over alleged savages.

Boone and Manifest Destiny. This vision of Boone as active conqueror became more popular as Americans began to believe it was their Manifest Destiny to occupy the entire North American continent. In 1840 the state of Kentucky purchased William Allen’s portrait of Boone as a replacement for Harding’s. Allen’s Boone is more active and dynamic than Harding’s; this Boone is a vigilant guardian, hand on his rifle and ready for action. By the time George Caleb Bingham painted The Emigration of Daniel Boone into Kentucky (1851), Boone had come to be regarded as a mythical figure in the Western history of the United States. Bingham’s Boone is, in one critic’s words, “a modern-day Moses leading the American Chosen People into the new Promised Land.” Perhaps the culmination of this canonization of Boone is Emanuel Leutze’s mural, Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way (1861–1862). Painted during the Civil War and adorning the west wall of the House of Representatives in the Capitol in Washington, D.C., Leutze’s mural depicts “the grand-peaceful conquest of the great west.” In rondels on side panels, Boone’s portrait, along with that of the explorer William Clark, hangs near depictions of Moses, Hercules, the Argonauts, and the Magi.

Sources

Dawn Glanz, How the West Was Drawn: American Art and the Settling of the Frontier (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1978);

Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1950);

Richard Slotkin, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1973).