10. Daniel Boone 1734-1820
Daniel Boone was born in 1734. His Quaker family moved from Pennsylvania to the backcountry of North Carolina when he was a young boy. Growing up on the frontier, Daniel Boone and his siblings, had little formal education. Like most contemporaries, Boone knew how to read and eventually became a merchant, surveyor, trapper, and hunter. As a young man he moved to Kentucky and when the Revolutionary War broke out, Boone fought for the Patriots as part of the Kentucky militia.
After the war, the Transylvania Company hired Daniel Boone to create a road through the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachian Mountains. Boone literally blazed a trail, accessible only by horseback or foot, connecting Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee. The Wilderness Trail provided a route for migrants to settle onto the American frontier.
Boone married Rebecca Bryan and they had 10 children. In order to support his family, Daniel became a commercial hunter, trapping and transporting hides of deer, beaver, otter, and bison to market for money. As a trapper, fur trader, and explorer, Boone had earned a reputation as an ideal frontiersman. In 1784, an acquaintance published a book about Boone entitled The Discovery Settlement and Present State of Kentucke. The book became very popular and was translated into French and German.
The stories of Daniel Boone’s hunting and trail-blazing exploits captured the imagination of Americans and Europeans, turning Boone into a folk hero. In reality, Boone had become indebted to the federal government due to speculative land deals that did not come to fruition in part due to strict regulations. When Nathan, Daniel’s youngest son, moved into Spanish Louisiana, Rebecca and Daniel went too, leaving America in 1799.
The Spanish provided the American folk hero and frontiersman with several land grants. When the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory, the verbal agreements between Boone and Spanish officials immediately dissolved. Again, the federal government impeded Boone’s potential fortune. Daniel Boone died on September 26, 1820, and was buried next to his wife in a small cemetery in Missouri.
In 1845, rumors circulated that Boone’s body had been removed from its burying place in Missouri and sent to a cemetery in Frankfort. For 138 years Missouri and Kentucky, the state that Boone mapped out, claimed to be Boone’s final resting place. In 1985, evidence suggested that the remains believed to be Boone in Kentucky were actually those of an enslaved African America.
