Early on in Boone, biographer Robert Morgan suggests--or perhaps I only heard him suggest--that Daniel Boone is largely a figure of legend, that the stories around him surpassed the extent of his actual role in the opening of the western frontier. Those stories began, we learn, even in Boone's own life, when a biography by interviewer John Filson became a runaway success. It must have been strange for Boone, who fled civilization and society for the comforts of the wilderness, to become a celebrity in Philadelphia and London. But by the time I finished Morgan's book, I was convinced that Boone was actually much more important than his symbolic or legendary aspect. As Morgan describes it, it was Boone that helped blaze the road through the Cumberland Gap that was once called Boone's Trace and is now called the Wilderness Road, thus opening up the fertile fields of Kentucky to American settlement. Boone's hand is in the creation of the first villages on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains, and it was Boone who was at the forefront of the Indian Wars that secured safety for American settlers at the expense of the Shawnees and Cherokee.
In Morgan's account, Boone is a man of contradictions. (Isn't every subject of a biography a man of contradictions? Maybe we're all men and women of contradictions.) Boone loved the wilderness from a young age, and spent months at a time in the backwoods of the Appalachians. But he was also a devout family man, who dragged his wife Rebecca and many children from North Carolina to Virginia to Kentucky to West Virginia to Missouri, who was a doting father and grandfather. One perhaps apocryphal story goes that Boone came home from one of his extended excursions to find a mathematically impossible child in Rebecca's arms, shrugged his shoulders, and rejoiced at having another child. He loved the wilderness he explored, but "none did more to lead settlers and developers to destroy that wilderness in a few short decades." Boone was a friend to Native Americans, whom he respected and admired, and by whom he was respected and admired in turn, but became embroiled in the conflicts that resulted in the dispossession of thousands of acres of land.
By far the most interesting part of Boone are the chapters that describe the time that Boone was kidnapped by the Shawnees under a chief named Blackfish, who adopted Boone as a son and renamed him Sheltowee, or "Big Turtle" (aw). Morgan, an accomplished poet and novelist, carefully and skillfully evokes the difference between white and Indian culture of the late 18th century, stressing that the Shawnees would have not have seen, as Boone's fellow settlers would, an essential racial difference between them; turning a conquered enemy into a family member seems to have been a persistent practice among the tribes of the Midwest. The capture of Boone was, for Blackfish, a political maneuver meant to protect the Shawnee claim to the area and aid the British, with whom the Shawnee were allied. And yet what emerges from Morgan's account is a true camaraderie between Boone and his captors, perhaps even a true feeling of paternal affection from Blackfish to Boone, and vice versa. Doubtless Boone, who never craved the trappings of polite civilization, enjoyed the lifestyle he lived among the Shawnee. Morgan's depiction of Boone caught between his genuine affection for his Shawnee family and the pressures of his life's work to open the west, culminating in Boone defeating the Shawnee for good at the Battle of Blue Licks, has the heart-rending nature of a good novel.
In many ways, Morgan points out, Boone's life was a failure. He was never able to outrun his debts or turn his westering into a profitable venture. Time and time again, he was cheated out of the land he claimed, or simply refused to engage with the legal paperwork to claim it. He was pressed into becoming a legislator, a job to which he was ill-suited and undistinguished--the consequence of his real achievements catching up to him. One wonders if becoming a living legend was fair recompense for Boone's extensive legal and financial troubles. But one of my favorite details in the book is that, toward the end of his life, Boone was able to join an expedition to the west that went as far as the Yellowstone. I wonder what that must have felt like, for the frontiersman to see just how much frontier there was remaining, and how much grandeur there still remained in the country's wide open spaces.
