Born 1734,
Near Reading, Pennsylvania
Died September 26, 1820,
St. Charles, Missouri
During his adventurous life as a hunter, explorer, and pioneer, Daniel Boone weathered a series of setbacks and misfortunes that would have discouraged others. But his perseverance enabled him to contribute greatly to the exploration of the North American wilderness.
Boone was born near Reading, Pennsylvania, the son of Squire and Sarah Morgan Boone. When he was 15, his family moved to the Yadkin Valley in western North Carolina. As a young man, he fought briefly in the French and Indian War, serving as a wagon driver in General Edward Braddock’s expedition against Fort Duquesne in Pittsburgh. When Braddock’s army was defeated on July 9, 1755, Boone escaped on one of the wagon horses.
Returning to North Carolina, Boone married Rebecca Bryan. They built a log cabin and began farming, but a raid by Native Americans drove them from their home. Boone was able to find work as a wagoner for a tobacco plantation in Virginia. He later joined a group of volunteers fighting the Cherokee tribe in Tennessee. The defeat of the Cherokees allowed the Boone family to return to their farm in North Carolina. In the following years Boone began to spend more time hunting and trapping. After a trip to Florida in 1765, he tried to convince his wife to move to Pensacola, then the capital of the new British colony of West Florida, but she refused.
While serving in the war, Boone had met a hunter named John Finley, who told him about Kentucky, the land west of Virginia on the far slope of the Appalachians. Boone made his first trip to eastern Kentucky in the winter of 1767-68. Soon after Finley showed up at Boone’s farm, and the two planned another expedition.
Boone, Finley, and two other men left the Yadkin Valley in May 1769 with provisions supplied by Judge Richard Henderson, a land speculator in North Carolina. Traveling up the Watauga River valley and over the mountains, Boone’s party then descended into the valley of the south fork of the Holston River in what is now northeastern Tennessee. Crossing the Clinch and Powell rivers, they reached the Cumberland Gap, a pass in the Appalachian Mountains, where they went into Kentucky. At Station Camp Creek, in present-day Estill County, they split into two groups.
The winter of 1769-70 was very cold and difficult. In December Boone and a companion were captured by a Shawnee raiding party; they were able to escape after a week but lost most of their supplies and ammunition. Luckily they were soon reunited with Boone’s brother, Squire, and the fourth member of the party. But later one of the men went out hunting alone and was not seen again. Another returned home, leaving Boone and his brother alone.
In the spring of 1770 Boone’s brother returned to North Carolina to get more ammunition. Boone traveled alone through the Kentucky and Licking river valleys and explored the Ohio River down to the area around present-day Louisville. When his brother returned, Boone spent the summer hunting along the Kentucky River, and the next winter he trapped furs in the Green and Cumberland valleys. In March 1771 they headed back to North Carolina with a large number of furs. Near the Cumberland Gap the brothers met a band of Cherokee tribesmen, who took their horses, supplies, and furs. The Boones returned on foot to the Yadkin Valley with nothing to show for the two years they had spent in Kentucky.
Boone told his neighbors about the fertile lands of Kentucky and in 1773 convinced a group of settlers to accompany him back over the mountains. They were attacked at the Cumberland Gap in October 1773 by Native Americans, who killed Boone’s 16-year-old son, James, and five others. Against Boone’s advice the rest of the party returned to North Carolina. After spending the winter in an abandoned cabin in the Clinch River valley, Boone and his family crossed over the mountains again and returned home.
Meanwhile, Judge Henderson remained convinced that Kentucky offered great opportunities for land speculation. Although he did not have a charter, he organized the Transylvania Company to purchase land from Native Americans. He hired Boone to negotiate a purchase from the Cherokee tribe, which resulted in the Watauga Treaty. In March 1775 Henderson sent Boone with a party of 28 others to mark a trail across Cherokee territory into Kentucky as far as the Kentucky River. This was the beginning of what became known as the Wilderness Road. That spring Boone began building a fort on the Kentucky River, which later became Boonesboro (in present-day Madison County).
Henderson tried to organize a separate government for his Kentucky settlements, but the Continental Congress, which was then meeting in Philadelphia, disapproved. George Rogers Clark, a frontiersman and Revolutionary War leader, arrived to annex Kentucky as part of Virginia. Boone was appointed a justice and captain of the local militia. He spent the following years guiding parties of settlers to the new territory.
In February 1778 Boone was again captured by Shawnee warriors. He was first taken to Detroit, a British outpost, and then moved to a camp at Chillicothe, Ohio. According to some accounts, Boone was adopted by his captors and promised to persuade the new settlers to surrender. He escaped four months later, however, making his way back to Boonesboro just in time to prepare for an attack by Shawnee warriors aided by British forces. The settlers spent the summer strengthening their defenses. The attack came in September, but, after extensive fighting and repeated efforts at negotiation, the British and Shawnee finally retreated.
At the time Boone arrived in Boonesboro, he learned his wife had returned to North Carolina, as she assumed he was dead. After the defeat of the Shawnee, Boone returned to North Carolina to find his wife and bring her back to Kentucky. In October 1779 he also brought back with him a new party of settlers, who included Abraham Lincoln’s grandmother and grandfather. Upon arriving in Kentucky, however, they learned their deeds were not valid because the government had not accepted Henderson’s claims to Kentucky. In order to rectify the situation, Boone had to deliver $20,000 to Richmond, the capital of Virginia, to purchase new land warrants. Not long after his journey had begun, however, Boone was robbed of the entire amount.
Boone was elected to the Virginia legislature in 1781. The American Revolution was still being fought, and the legislature was meeting in Charlottesville, Virginia. In June 1781 the town was raided by British cavalry, and Boone and two other legislators were captured and held briefly. Before his election Boone had moved his family home to a place farther west called Boone’s Station. When he returned from Charlottesville to his remote farm, he was attacked by a group of Native Americans. During the skirmish his brother Edward was killed. Boone’s son Israel was also killed while defending an outpost named Bryan’s Station, located near present-day Lexington, Kentucky. These attacks led to a major campaign against the Native Americans, which eventually ended the threat to the Kentucky settlements.
In spite of holding many local offices, Boone had never been careful to register his own land claims. As a result, his rights to land were increasingly challenged, and he eventually lost all of the land he had settled up to this point. In the spring of 1786 Boone and his wife moved to Maysville, Kentucky, on the Ohio River, where they ran a tavern and a store for travelers coming down the river. Two years later they moved near the junction of the Kanawha and Ohio rivers, now in West Virginia. In 1791 Boone was chosen to represent his county in the first Virginia legislature formed after the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. During this time his wife kept the family store, and Boone also hunted and trapped in the Kanawha Valley.
Boone’s son Daniel Morgan Boone founded in 1796 a settlement called Femme Osage, then in Spanish territory. The area, now in the state of Missouri, is near the town of St. Charles north of the Missouri River. A few years later Boone and his wife joined their son. Boone was appointed a magistrate in the Spanish administration and served until the territory was taken over by the Americans in 1804. Although his title to Missouri lands was contested, it was finally confirmed by an Act of Congress in 1814.
In 1810 Boone traveled back to Kentucky to pay off his debts, an act that reportedly gave him enormous satisfaction but also left him with only 50 cents in his pocket. After the death of his wife in 1813, he went to live with his son Nathan. Boone died at the age of 85, having made a remarkable contribution to the settlement of the American frontier.
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