Boone, Daniel

Boone, Daniel (1734–1820), born in Pennsylvania, moved to North Carolina, and from 1769 to 1771 made an extended exploration of Kentucky. As an agent of the Transylvania Company, he led a band of colonists along the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap to the site of Boonesborough, where a fort was erected in 1775. After the region was made a county of Virginia (1776), he held many local offices, and his activities in behalf of the settlement were interrupted only by a brief captivity (Feb.–June 1778) by Shawnees. When his improperly registered land tracts were lost by a series of ejectment suits, he moved to Point Pleasant (now West Virginia), and in 1798 or 1799 moved again to a tract granted him by the Spanish in the Femme Osage valley, Missouri. The legend of Boone as the discoverer of Kentucky and the greatest of frontiersmen was begun with the biography written by John Filson and extended by Byron in the eighth canto of Don Juan (1823), as well as by many laudatory references in contemporary literature and tall tales. Audubon, who met Boone in Missouri, retold one of his adventures in the Ornithological Biography. He is a frequent figure in fiction, as in Churchill's The Crossing, Elizabeth Madox Roberts's The Great Meadow, and Caroline Gordon's Green Centuries.