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).

Daniel Boone

An American frontiersman and explorer, Daniel Boone (1734-1820) was the greatest woodsman in United States history. Hero of much farfetched fiction, Boone survived both legend making and debunking to emerge a genuine hero.

For all the myths about him, Daniel Boone was very much a real man born near Reading, Pa., on Nov. 2, 1734. At the age of 12 he became a hunter. He accompanied his family to North Carolina's Buffalo Lick on the Yadkin River in 1751 and, after working for his father, became a teamster and blacksmith. In 1755 he accompanied Brig. Gen. Edward Braddock as a wagoner on the ill-fated march to Ft. Duquesne. While on this march he met a teamster named John Finley, an old hunter, whose talk of the Kentucky wilderness eventually influenced Boone's career as a woodsman and explorer. When Braddock's command was destroyed at Turtle Creek (near modern Pittsburgh) by a French and Indian ambush, Boone fled for his life on horseback.

Early Expeditions

Daniel Boone married Rebecca Bryan on Aug. 14, 1756, and settled down in the Yadkin Valley, firmly believing that he had all the requisites of a good life—"a good gun, a good horse, and a good wife." But Finley's stories of fabled "Kentucke" never really vanished from his mind. In 1767 Boone led his first expedition as far westward as the area of Floyd County, Ky. On May 1, 1769, with Finley and four other companions, Boone opened the way to the Far West by blazing a trail through the Cumberland Gap. This trail soon became a highway to the frontier. As an agent for Richard Henderson and his Transylvania Company, Boone led the first detachment of colonists to Kentucky, reaching the site of Boonesborough on April Fool's Day 1775. There he began to build a fort to protect the settlement from the Indians, and that year he brought west another party, which included his own family.

Boone became the leader of the Kentucky settlement, as hunter, surveyor, and Indian fighter. He was a major of the Virginia militia when Kentucky was added to that state as an enormous county. The first of a series of misfortunes for Boone occurred in July 1776, when his daughter, Jemima, was captured by Shawnee and Cherokee tribespeople. He rescued her but 2 years later was himself captured by Shawnee tribespeople. Though he escaped and helped defend Boonesborough against Indian raiders, while on his way east with more than $20,000 in settlers' money (with which he was to buy land warrants) he was robbed of the entire sum. The settlers who angrily demanded satisfaction were repaid by Boone in land. But from this time on, Boone was dogged by debts, lawsuits, and land-record technicalities until, as one of his kin said—exaggerating slightly—at the time of his death he did not own enough land to make a decent grave.

Moving Westward

Moving to Boone's Station, the scout held a succession of offices, including lieutenant colonel of Fayette County, legislative delegate, sheriff, county lieutenant, and deputy surveyor. In 1786 he moved to Maysville and was elected to the legislature. Misfortune continued to dog him, however: he lost his land because it had been improperly entered in the records. In 1788 he abandoned his beloved Kentucky and moved to Point Pleasant in what is now West Virginia. He was appointed lieutenant colonel of Kanawha County in 1789 and its legislative delegate in 1791.

When Boone lost the last of the Kentucky lands that he had discovered, protected, settled, and improved, he also lost faith. He moved all the way west to Spain's Alta Luisiana (or Upper Louisiana, now Missouri), where he obtained a land grant at the mouth of Femme Osage Creek. He had moved because the "Dark and Bloody Ground" of yore was filling up with settlers and he did not like to be crowded; when asked why he had left Kentucky, he answered, "Too many people! Too crowded, too crowded! I want some elbow room." Actually, however, he hoped to settle on some land that would not be taken away from him by legalistic trickery. The Spaniards were pleased to have the famous Kentuckian as a colonist and gave him a large land grant, making him magistrate of his district. He must have viewed the subsequent annexation of Louisiana Territory by the United States with mixed emotions, including apprehension. His fears were justified when, once again, U.S. land commissioners voided Boone's claim. However, in 1814 Congress confirmed a part of his Spanish grant.

Daniel Boone's greatest satisfaction was neither in opening up new territory to settlement nor in becoming the subject of laudatory books but simply in being able to journey back to Kentucky about 1810 to pay off his outstanding debts; he was left with only 50 cents. After his wife died 3 years later, the famous Kentuckian spent most of his remaining years in quiet obscurity in the Missouri home of his son, where he died on Sept. 26, 1820.

Boone was moderately well known for the wilderness exploits that had been described in several books when Lord Byron devoted seven stanzas of his poem Don Juan to him in 1823. The poet made the recently deceased woodsman world famous, with the result that Boone became a target for belittlers and debunkers as well as mythmakers. The latter sought to inflate his real-life adventures; the former tried to destroy his legend. All failed because the difference between legend and reality in Boone's case was so small. If he was not a dime-novel superman in buckskins, he was an unsurpassed woodsman; and he was strong, brave, loyal, and, above all, honest. Although he was hardly the "happiest of men" (as Byron described him) and had been forced to flee from American land sharks to Spanish territory, he shrugged off his shabby treatment and accepted his fate without rancor. In short, the rough woodsman was something of a stoic. He was also a true gentleman and a great figure of American history.

Further Reading

John Bakeless, Daniel Boone (1939), makes it unnecessary to consult such older works as Reuben G. Thwaites, Daniel Boone (1902), and Ella Hazel A. Spraker, The Boone Family (1922). Good background studies of the American frontier include Ray Allen Billington, Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier (1949; 3d ed. 1967) and America's Frontier Heritage (1966), and Thomas D. Clark, Frontier America: The Story of the Westward Movement (1959; 2d ed. 1969). □

Boone, Daniel (c.1734–1820) US pioneer. Moving west from his native Pennsylvania, Boone made trips into the unexplored area of Kentucky from 1767 onwards, organizing settlements and successfully defending them against hostile Native Americans. He later moved further west to Missouri, being granted land there in 1799. As a hunter, trail-blazer, and fighter against the Native Americans he became a legend in his own lifetime.