December 27, 2023 • 66 mins
We're returning to a Bear Grease classic this week and remembering Daniel Boone. Originally released over two years ago in August 2021, the episode remains one of Bear Grease’s most talked about episodes. New York Times best selling authors Steven Rinella and Robert Morgan lead the conversation about Boone's legacy, as Clay Newcomb searches for the real story of the American icon. This is undoubtedly a Bear Grease classic! When you're done listening, be sure to go pre-order the new audio original from Steve and Clay, "MeatEater's American History: The Long Hunters (1761-1775)."
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
We're reflecting back on the foundations of bear Grease. This week,
we're going back to one of the classics when we
really didn't know how to make the grease. We were
just kind of guessing, or at least I was guessing.
Episode fourteen on Daniel Boone was originally released on August eleventh,
twenty twenty one, which seems like an eternity ago. It
(00:27):
was a project that put a stake in the ground
for me, and the response to this episode surprised me.
It was our first deep dive series into American history.
This episode was the first one of three. Up until
this point, I wasn't sure how deep we could go
in this stuff, how long could we linger on one person.
(00:48):
There was some identity stuff going on too. Inside the podcast.
It was this a history podcast? Was this modern American
story podcast?
Speaker 2 (00:58):
What was Bear Grease?
Speaker 1 (01:00):
I honestly didn't know if people would like this series,
but it was wildly interesting to me, and two years later,
with the feedback we've received on this specific series, I
think it was one of our most impacting and I
want to go back to it.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
And from this series we modeled.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
A whole bunch of other historical series that we've all
learned a lot from However, I want to let you
know what we're doing here, because once the calendar rolls
into twenty twenty four, we're not going to be going
back to the classics. We're going to be making some
original episodes, And without foreshadowing too much, I'll let you
know that our first episode in twenty twenty four will
(01:43):
be about a modern poaching story, but I think the
human element of it will surprise you.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
But for now, in this holiday season, we're.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Going to take a deep breath and go back to
a bear Grease classic. So, without further ado, my breth,
I hope you enjoy Daniel Boone Foundations of an American archetype.
Happy New Year to everyone.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Hey everyone, this is Phil Clay wanted me to remind
you all that on January ninth, Meat Eater's next big
audiobook project is dropping. It's titled meat Eaters American History
The Long Hunters seventeen sixty one to seventeen seventy five.
It features our very own Clay Newcombe as well as
Stephen Rnella, diving deep into the storied lives of these
hunters and frontiersmen. Over the course of these fabled fourteen
(02:34):
years that were so pivotal in the history of America.
It's not available in print. This is an audio only format,
and it's truly special. I've never seen the guys more
excited about anything since I've worked here. And if listening
to this episode about Daniel Boone gets you fired up
to learn more about these men during this time, you
can follow the link in the description to pre order
your copy today. Again, Meat Eaters American History The Long
(02:56):
Hunters comes out on January ninth, but you can pre
order it today. We really hope you do. And now
back to the show.
Speaker 4 (03:12):
So, as a storyteller, as a marketer, as a brander,
I like to say, there are kind of, you know,
twelve ish characters, and there are a handful, maybe nine
types of stories. And the best stories combine like these
universal storylines with these universal character types.
Speaker 5 (03:30):
When I was just a little kid, people would say
of people that like to haunt and fish run around
the woods, people would say, he's a modern day Daniel Boone.
He wants to be just like Daniel Boone.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
On this episode of the Bear Grease Podcast, will be
exploring a story as American as Cornbread and Black Eyed peas.
We're talking about one of America's first heroes, Daniel Boone.
We'll sift through the myth and truth and discuss why
by heck we're still talking about him two hundred years
after his death. We'll learn about the mechanism of archetypes,
(04:06):
and I'll interview two New York Times bestselling authors, Stephen
Ranella and Robert Morgan about their fascination with Boone. The
truth is wilder than the myth. This is part one
of our series on Old Daniel Boone, and in it
will walk through the first thirty five years of his life.
(04:28):
You're not gonna wanna miss this one, but first let
me request of you two things.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
This series is.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
Different than previous Beargrease podcasts. It's a big bite to
tell the life story of someone like Boone and try
to understand their impact on American culture. And honestly, it
was more challenging than I thought it would be. But
if you'll stick around with me through.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
This, you'll be glad you did.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Lastly, take a quick inventory of everything you know about
out Daniel Boone to give you a jumpstart. I'll help
you fit Dan into a timeline. He was born in
seventeen thirty four and died in eighteen twenty. But what
did he do in between? My name is Klay Nukem,
(05:26):
and this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore
things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places,
and where we'll tell the story of Americans who lived
their lives close to the land. Presented by FHF gear,
American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear that's designed
(05:48):
to be as rugged as the place as we explore.
Speaker 6 (06:00):
Man Man and I like the eagle that just fall
as a mountain.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Was Okay, this is Josh Lambridge filmmaker. Tell me everything
you know about Daniel.
Speaker 7 (06:17):
I know he was a big man. I know he
fought for America to keep all Americans free.
Speaker 6 (06:21):
That's what I know.
Speaker 7 (06:22):
Youmber watching the old Disney Daniel Boone was a man, Yes,
a big man, because he fought for America to keep
all Americans free.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
I'm shocked you know that song.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
Okay, a couple of things.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Daniel Boone was five foot eight and weighed one hundred
and seventy five pounds.
Speaker 7 (06:43):
That literally just destroyed my mind. I thought Daniel bunn
was like Paul Bunyan okay, and.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
The other thing in the song it talks about him
wearing a coonskin cap, which he didn't he he did.
Speaker 7 (06:56):
I don't know where you're getting your information, but I've
seen the movies he work and was getting kept.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
This is my other buddy, Jonathan. Tell me everything you
know about Daniel Boone. How much time do you got?
Speaker 1 (07:11):
Tell me everything.
Speaker 8 (07:12):
I literally don't know much other than his name and
that he was an American, that he was a pioneer.
He worked with the He worked with the Native Americans
to discover things and discover the woods. He was an outdoorsman,
discover the woods, discover the woods, discover things inside of
the woods. I feel like I want to say he
(07:34):
was at the Alamo. I really, like naturally want to
say he was a part of the Alamo. But then
I feel like it was a guy the Jim Booe
is that that's Jim Boos of the Alamo.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
Like then I kept saying Bowe he was a human, yes, And.
Speaker 8 (07:48):
Then I kept saying David Bowie. I kept getting Daniel
Boone and David Bowie mixed up in my head. That's
really all I know about Daniel Boone.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
The Action Adventure series Daniel Boone ran on television from
nineteen sixty four to nineteen seventy on NBC. But that
wasn't the beginning of our interest with Boone. America in
the world has been fascinated with him since seventeen eighty four,
when a former schoolteacher named John Filson published a single
(08:25):
chapter in his book which the book was about the
American Frontier in Kentucky, and the chapter was called the
Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone. Boone was fifty years old
at the time, and this catalyzed his fame, not just
in America but in Europe. Not long after Boone's death
(08:45):
in eighteen twenty, his first biography was written, and authors
have feverishly written about him for the last two hundred years.
Just in twenty twenty one, a new Boone biography came out.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
What did this man do?
Speaker 1 (08:59):
And why are we infatuated with the life of this
back woodsman?
Speaker 2 (09:05):
This is Steve Ranella.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
I think the.
Speaker 5 (09:09):
People know that he was a woodsman and they know
he was a frontiersman. The reason they know that is
the guy became famous. He became famous in his own life.
He was you know, he could almost argue He's one
of those first He was one of those people that
kind of became famous for being famous, Like the fame
was self perpetual. The fame was self perpetuating because there
(09:30):
were a lot of people, A lot of people were
engaged in the things that Boone was engaged in. So
you have this guy, like, why do we know so
much about him? But there were other long hunters. They
can't figure out what their names were.
Speaker 6 (09:42):
Do you really expect me to run mister Boone the
way I see it running beach dying?
Speaker 1 (09:53):
The myth and lore around Boone is thick, and I'd
like to whittle this down to the truth. But is
that even possible. Time is like a carousel ride. There's
a point when you get on in another when you
get off. You don't get to choose who you ride with.
(10:15):
History allows us to look back at people who got
off the ride before us, but it often leaves me
feeling cheated. There's something intimate about an in person conversation,
eye contact, human voice to human ear, and physical proximity.
(10:36):
One man who I would have ridden a mule across
the country to meet, just to look in his eyes,
to see his hands, and to exchange a few words
with would have been Daniel Boone. Carousel has cheated me
out of getting a first hand sense of who he was.
Boone is shrouded in deep mystery. He's an American legend,
(11:00):
icon and archetype. To sum up Boone's life, he was
a backwoodsman that taught us to cherish solitude and wilderness,
which was a foreign concept to the world. Raised a Quaker,
he was influenced heavily by Native Americans and was even
adopted as a Shawnee. He was a frontiersman known for
making the Cumberland Gap famous and settling the Kentucky Frontier.
(11:23):
He embodied the westward expansion of America, which led this
country to what it is today. He was uneducated but
influenced America's literary giants. He fought in the Revolutionary War
for America, but was tried for treason by the Americans.
He attained global fame in his lifetime, owned over thirty
(11:43):
thousand acres in Kentucky, but he died a common and
poor man. He was a contemporary of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson,
and Benjamin Franklin, and only their stories have been told
more in American history. Than Daniel Boom. It's common for
(12:05):
people to say that Boone is an American archetype. I
want to get a better understanding of what that means
and how they work. Seth Haynes is a published author
and the founder of through Line Strategy and Brand. A
couple of years ago, he introduced me to the idea
of archetypes as they're used in modern branding. Meet my buddy,
(12:27):
Seth Haynes.
Speaker 4 (12:29):
So, in my work as a writer and in my
work doing branding and marketing, we use archetypes a lot
as sort of shortcuts for characters. And there's you know,
some old work that's been done on this by Carl Youwing.
There's about twelve ish archetypes, twelveish universal characters. So as
a storyteller's a marketer, as a brander, I like to say,
(12:51):
there are kind of, you know, twelve ish characters, and
there are a handful, maybe nine types of stories. And
the best stories combine like these universal storylines with these
universal character types.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
So this is almost like something that's going on in
the background that we don't even realize, but we'll totally
identify with Yeah.
Speaker 4 (13:12):
And everyone in the world. I mean, I think if
you were to break down your life and say, here
are the people in my life, you could almost break
them down to Oh, yeah, this guy represents the character.
Speaker 6 (13:22):
Of an outlaw.
Speaker 4 (13:23):
You know, he's always a rebel, he's always on the run,
he's always in something. This person represents the character of
an explorer, someone who's always out in the wilderness looking
for something to get into, some expression of freedom. And
these character types are what we call archetypes. So an
archetypal expression is just simply like, this is the character
that I play in the universal story of life.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Can you give me an example of a national American
figure that we've used as an archetype, like like Johnny
Cash is like an outlaw archetype.
Speaker 4 (13:58):
Yeah, I love Johnny Cash is an archetype because I
actually think he's terribly complex. The man in Black is
I mean a thousand percent the rebel right. I mean,
if you picture Johnny Cash day, you'd see him, you know,
on a Harley with his guitaristlung over his shoulder or something,
and always pushing the boundaries, always pushing it back against
(14:18):
societal norms and so. And he's always trying to bring
even in his music, you know, Woody Guthrie is another
example of this, always trying to push against the norms
of society to find what's true and what's real. Johnny Cash, though,
I love because when you really look at his life,
like he was also extremely generous. I mean the stories
I've heard about Johnny Cash's generosity from everything from kids
(14:41):
to sick people to the elderly. He truly cared for
his community of people. So he had this public persona
that was very much rebel, but he also had this
private life that was very much caregiver. And so sometimes
I think we even find that we embody different archetypes
depending on where we are.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
That's a good that's a good example because what I
see inside these archetypes, and even inside of Boone, is
that they represent to people that really don't know them
this one dominant feature. Yeah, Like Johnny Cash is an outlaw,
outlaw music outlaw. He's complex, you realize he's a human,
and he has this bigger space. Like Boone is this
courageous explorer, you know, frontiersman, conquering wilderness.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
That's something that we like.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
But that was actually a pretty not I'm not going
to say a small part, but there was much more
to Boone's life than that. Yeah, but the point being,
we we are embracing something. It's kind of like a
shroud of marketing around a person.
Speaker 4 (15:40):
It's branding. Yeah, it's one hundred and so you know,
one of the things that we like to say when
we talk about branding is that branding is biological. And
so what we do as humans is we take a
character or take a person, and we impute to them
or give to them like the character type or the
story that you know best sort of resonates with us internally.
(16:02):
And I'll tell you, man, the biggest characters in American
history understand that, know that and embrace it. Yeah, and
it becomes part of their mystique and part of their branding,
and that's what gives them lasting influence.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
And that's what's wild about Boone is it was clear
that he, even in the seventeen hundreds, when there was
not social media, i mean like high level technology, was
someone writing with a quill and ink you know your story. Yep,
he played the part and it wasn't inauthentic. It wasn't
It wasn't like he was trying to drum up publicity
(16:37):
around his life. He was who he was, but at
the same time, he was pretty masterful at doing things,
saying things, and being things at the right time for people.
Speaker 6 (16:48):
To remember him. That's right.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
These archetypes basically are our human shortcuts to understand the
world around us. Yes, understanding the mechanisms of culture building
is important. I also think it's interesting that most of
what we know about Boone didn't come directly from him,
and there in Liza's mystery, Wildly two different drafts of
(17:15):
first hand interviews with him were defunct. One manuscript was
completed but lost. The other manuscript was incomplete but lost
to what the heck? Who's in charge here? However, in
eighteen fifty one, thirty one years after Boone's death, a young,
(17:36):
nerdy librarian and historian from New York named Lyman Draper,
traveled to Missouri to interview Daniel's youngest and only living son,
Nathan Boone, who at the time was seventy years old.
It was said that Draper was quote nearly obsessed by
the passing of the old frontiersman, and he determined to
(17:59):
collect as much material in interview as many survivors as possible.
Draper and Nathan give us the most intimate and accurate
look into Boone's life. You can actually buy them compiled
as a book titled My Father Daniel Boone. Here's an
excerpt from the manuscripts. My grandfather's squire Boone was a
(18:26):
weaver and a farmer. His residence was probably an olie.
He kept at least five or six looms going at
one time. He had his homestead and in the grass
season moved his stock back several miles distance to a
fine range where cowpens were made for herding cattle at
knights and a cabin was built in which Miss Boone
(18:47):
spent the dairy season in attending to her milk. During
the mild weather, her son Daniel went with her to
act as a herdsman. He went with the cattle during
the daily roaming through the woods and brought them back
each evening. This was his chief occupation from the age
of ten to seventeen. This move was an annual affair,
and Miss Boone always went personally to attend the dairy,
(19:10):
and her son Daniel was always attendant to watch her
and take care of the cattle. My father soon became
fond of the woods. Even at the age of ten,
he would carry a club a grub dug up by
the roots, nicely shaven down, leaving a rooty knob at
the end, which he called his herdsman's club. He became
(19:30):
an expert in using it to kill birds in small game.
This life enabled him to study their habits. When he
was twelve or thirteen, his father bought him a gun,
and he became a good marksman. The only problem was
that he often neglected his hurting duties to hunt, but
this experience gave him his love of woods and hunting.
(19:50):
Daniel's brother, Samuel, was born in seventeen twenty eight. According
to the records of Squire Boone Junior, Samuel had a
very intelligent wife who taught my father to read, spell
and write a little. This was all the education Daniel
ever had, as he never attended school, But he acquired
more education by his own efforts, particularly in writing, as
(20:12):
he could do little more than rudely write his own name.
In all my research on Boone, I was moved by
Nathan's account of his father. I envisioned me talking about
my own father or my son, recounting my life. Long
(20:33):
after my passing. We're going to camp around Boone for
a few episodes. He influenced the American hegemon the way
that we think and to understand who we are, I
think we need to acknowledge and be aware of the
Boone influence. I'm interested in how Boone has influenced my
life unknowingly. Stephen Ranella is the founder of a company
(21:02):
called meat Eater, the company that this Here Bear Grease
podcast is produced by. He's a New York Times bestselling
author an American hunter, but he's also known as a
national Boone expert. Renella began his young life in the
outdoors with dreams of being a full time trapper like
Boone was during periods of his life. It was a
(21:23):
real treat to get to sit with Steve and talk Boone.
There's been like countless Boon biographies written since the time
of just after he died.
Speaker 5 (21:37):
I just recently sent me a Boon book. Yeah, publishing
a boomboo.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
So okay, so people have this.
Speaker 5 (21:44):
I can't stop.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
And that is exactly what I want to talk to
you about. Why are we so well?
Speaker 1 (21:52):
I want to I want to dive into your personal
interest in Boone? Why were you so interested in Boone?
Speaker 6 (21:58):
Man?
Speaker 5 (21:58):
I was when I was just a little kid. People
would say of people that like to hunt and fish, okay,
run around the woods. People would say, he's a modern
day Daniel Boone. He wants to be just like Daniel Boone.
He's a real Daniel Boone. To it means like the
(22:18):
consummate woodsman, right, it's like the dedicated woodsman. I didn't
realize when I first started to hear that term, you know,
growing up with it, I didn't realize like how correct
it was. I think the people know that he was
a woodsman, and they know he was a frontiersman. The
reason they know that is the guy became famous. He
became famous in his own life.
Speaker 6 (22:39):
He was.
Speaker 5 (22:42):
You know, he could almost argue he's one of those
first he was one of those people that kind of
became famous for being famous.
Speaker 6 (22:47):
Like the fame.
Speaker 5 (22:50):
Was self perpetual. The fame was self perpetuating because there
were a lot of people. A lot of people were
engaged in the things that Boone was engaged in. There
were a lot of market hunters, there were a lot
of long hunters. There were a lot of people who
got tangled up in the American Revolution, in the Western
(23:12):
front of the American Revolution, there were a lot of
people who won and lost a ton of money speculating
in land. There were a lot of people that started
frontier settlements or stations out on the frontier. Tons of
people did this stuff. Boone wasn't the first one to
go through the Cumberland Gap. Me of course, he wasn't
the first one. Boone wasn't the first euro American to
(23:34):
go through the Cumberland Gap. But he owns that event
because like he got notoriety and I'm not I'm glad
it happened, and people started to ask questions. They talked
to his relatives, they talked to the children of his children,
and his body like built up. So you have this guy,
like why do we know so much about him? But
(23:57):
there were other long hunters. They can't figure out what
they're as were who were his contemporaries because I know
because it never like the seed never got started. The
idea that like to investigate an individual, that happened with Boone,
and the investigation continued and continued and continued to the
point where we put together this like really remarkable, this
(24:19):
really remarkable biography of dates and where he went, what
he did, and what his feelings about things were, and
then people tracked down the people he hung out with,
they tracked down his relatives. There's a later on a researcher,
like a historian his time or whatever, he went to
talk to Boone's kid. Yeah, relates the story where you
(24:43):
have insight into the story. I'm gonna tell you is
an example of like how thorough the investigation of Boone was. Right,
Boone became a little bit famous and was well known.
I mean, he wasn't like everybody else he was. He
was exemplary. I mean people recognized in his own time
that he was an outstanding woodsman. But as he became famous,
(25:04):
it prompted more and more people to go and interview
him and the people around him. So that little bit,
like imagine a snowball rolling down a hill and went
snow right, he had a little bit of fame, which
is the initial bit of the thing going. But it
it led to investigation, which led to investigation, which led
to an investigation where eventually you know, you have this
(25:26):
like this one individual of dozens of long hunters of
his contemporaries, this one individual who we put together a
ton of information about, and there's a there's an interesting thing.
It comes from like very late in his life. Someone
was interviewing one of his children one time, and the
kids describing this is this is after the after the
bulk of the Indian Wars are over. This is after
the American Revolution. His kids describe and being out hunting
(25:50):
with his father.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
I think maybe it would be best if we hear
it in the words of Nathan Boone himself. In the
fall of seventeen ninety four, father and I were out hunting.
We camped on the northern bank of the Ohio River,
some two or three miles above the mouth of Campaign Creek,
which was ten or twelve miles above Point Pleasant. It
(26:13):
was frosty weather and the leaves were falling. About the
second morning, a foggy morning, my father went off, leaving
me alone at the camp. A large fine buck came
within twenty or twenty five steps of camp. I seized
my small rifle. This was not my little bird rifle,
which used a ball about the size of a buckshot,
(26:33):
that one I used to kill birds and squirrels near
Crooked Creek back of Point Pleasant. This larger rifle was
made by my father and William Arbuckle, a gunsmith, I
rested his gun against one of the camp posts and fired,
but the deer ran off. Father heard the shot and
returned to camp. He asked me to point out where
the deer stood. There he found hair which the ball
(26:55):
had cut off. Then he followed the trail found blood.
Sixty or eighty yard guards. Further, he found the dead deer.
This was the first deer I ever killed. But my
father didn't leave me at camp anymore. He took me
with him two or three times and pointed out deer,
then showed me how to manage to get off shots.
I was not to move or attempt to steal up
(27:16):
on the deer when his head was up and chewing,
and when he was looking around, but to do so
when his head was down feeding and could not so
well see me. Following this advice, I killed one or
two other deer during this hunt. While we were together.
My father shot a bear and one or two others
when he was alone.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
The first day.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
From these two or three bear we saved all the meat,
and of the ten or fifteen deer, we saved the
best hindquarters. On the fifth night, about midnight, I had
been asleep for some time, but my father Daniel Boone
heard a chopping or hacking some distance above and across
the river. He awakened me, and he told me he
thought the noise was made by Indians, as he thought
(27:56):
it was made by their hatchet. He concluded that Indians
had probably seen the fire at our camp and were
making a raft to cross. We carried meat and skins
to our canoe, which was twenty five yards from camp,
and returned to our fire again. The night was clear
and frosty and a little foggy, so we remained at
our fire with our blankets for some time. After the
(28:18):
chopping ceased. We then went to our canoe. There we
stayed some ten minutes until we heard the Indians paddling
in the water. At that time we pushed off, and
Father ordered me to roll his blanket around myself and
lie down in the canoe. He sat in the stern,
put the paddle carefully in the water, and then gave
a push. We went forward noiselessly and were soon in
(28:41):
the main current, which washed us down the river. On
the way, Father put his head over the canoe close
to the water, and he said he thought he could
catch a glimpse of the Indians he had looked between
the surface of the water and the fog which did
not quite reach the water, and soon we were beyond harm.
Speaker 5 (28:58):
Stream escapes and the kid says, his kid says, in
that moment, I kind of understood the fear that that
man lived.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
With his whole life.
Speaker 5 (29:11):
So here you have like interviews with his kids talking
about his like analyzing the guy's emotional state. We don't
have that one of Boon's hunting partners. All we know
is like basically he got killed, want of dying in
a hollow tree and the story m hm. But with him, man,
we got all the goods. Yeah, almost too many goods
because there's a lot as you know, there's people that
(29:32):
are always bringing an artifact, Oh, this is Boone's gone,
this is Boone's hatchet, you know, it's all hogwash.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
Well, when Boone was in his mid fifties, this is
this is what I've calculated. When Boone was in his
mid fifties was when the first biography that included well
it wasn't a full biography, but a guy came down
and interviewed him and included him in this book that
went global, and it was about the American frontier. So
(30:00):
was it a combination that the eyes of the world
were on this boundary between the American colonies and this
vast frontier that we knew nothing about. I mean, this
was like the spot in the world that people were
interested in. And then this guy wrote and it was
included in part of this book. This guy wrote this
(30:24):
included Boone, and then all of a sudden, everybody's eyes
were on Boone.
Speaker 2 (30:27):
Sure, and he was mythologized first.
Speaker 5 (30:30):
It's kind of funny because like the first treatments of
him were overblown mythologizing. Yeah, you know, guys like him
and Davy Crockhead the same thing, like people like like
the Lump, these guys that got very different people ye,
born far apart, very you know, just very different. But
they're both hunters and they're both frontiers went to some extent,
(30:53):
but they both had this thing where they were living
with people telling crazy stories about them that weren't even true. Yeah,
he became later historians based on this infatuation with these
guys of these like superhuman individuals, you know, based on
the historians later kind of like a type of book
(31:14):
that would later be written about Boone was sorting out
fact from fiction fiction the man from the Legend, and
that became a whole you know, subgenre of Boone literature
is when people stopped and been like, okay, obviously that's
all both, but what was this guy like?
Speaker 6 (31:29):
Like?
Speaker 5 (31:29):
Yeah, what really was he like? And then when you
look at what he really was like, it's more interesting
than the mythologized version.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
There have been around ten legitimate Boone biographies written over
the last two hundred years, and they're still being written today. However,
one stands out to many, including Steve Brunella, as the
Bible of Boone biographies, and it's simply titled Boone. It's
written by Cornell University professor Sir Robert Morgan. I was
(32:02):
unsure if mister Morgan was still professionally active, but I
reached out to him and was delighted when he responded
back within a few hours, inviting me to his home
in New York. Mister Morgan is in his mid seventies
and has dedicated his life to writing on the Appalachian
region in which he grew up. He's a New York
Times best selling author who calls himself a poet that
(32:26):
writes some fiction. Poets are a unique lot. They're often
introspective and unusually contemplative. Sometimes you meet someone with a
spirit about them that seems to pervade the space they fill.
Mister Morgan is such a man. They wore a plaid
shirt and suspenders. His accomplished professional career hasn't overshadowed his
(32:51):
rural roots. I was struck by his stoic yet joyful demeanor,
his humility and confidence, and his exhaustive familiarity with Boone.
It's an honor to introduce you to mister Robert Morgan.
I've been fascinated with Boone really since I read your book,
(33:13):
probably ten years ago. And I would have known Boone
just from the typical way an American kid would have
known Boone, you know, just from the Disney movies, kind
of odd places sometimes that his name would come up,
but really knew nothing about him. And then when I
(33:33):
read your book, I was enthralled with who this guy
really was. What was your interest in Boone originally?
Speaker 6 (33:43):
Well, when I was growing up, my dad would talk
about him. He just loved to talk about Daniel Boone
and the Frontier, and he said we were related to
Boone through the Morgans. Boone's mother was a Morgan, and
this turns out to be true. It's very distant relation.
Boone and I have a common ancestor in Wales and
(34:05):
North Wales. But I think the first thing to know
about the Boone families is they were Quakers, and the
Boone family way down in the southwestern England around Exeter,
they were weavers and blacksmiths. So this had a lot
of influence on Boone's character all the way through his life.
(34:25):
And of course they taught pacifism quietness. The mother from
Wales was a musical person. She loved to sing, and
this also was an influence. So this family taught him
this very pacifistic way of life. And it's odd because
he's associated with Indian fighting and hunting, and of course
(34:48):
that's part of the myth that he killed lots of Indians.
He may have killed only one in his life. The
real Boone is somewhat different from the legend, and that
was part of the fun of researching and writing the
book to separate these two. The actual character Daniel Boone
and all these things in the movies and the legends
(35:11):
they do overlaps on. I think the legend has its
roots in Boone, but he's actually a very different person.
The monument in Frankfort, Kentucky has him killing panthers and
fighting with the Indians and that sort of thing, but
that's not the real Moon. He was very pacifistic, very
(35:32):
calm person, spoke calmly in a very low voice, the
evidence suggests. And one other thing it's important to remember
is that his father was kicked out of the Quakers
and became a Freemason. So this new very important organization
in the eighteenth century that taught the brotherhood of all men,
(35:56):
of all people. I think he was influenced by that,
and he later became a Mason himself. Very early. He
loved the forest. The family recognized that that he could hunt,
he could find animals, he could trap. He lived out
in the woods with his mother in the summertime. She
took care of the cows. And he wanted all ready
(36:18):
to live like an Indian then to spend time in
the forest, and there were Indians around.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
It's clear that he had a lot of Native American
influence even from an early age.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
That overlap of society.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
In the Pennsylvania area that would have been pretty common,
Like he would have just been out wandering around and
run into Native Americans that he could have befriended. That
would not have been hostile.
Speaker 6 (36:42):
Right, His parents hosted Indians. Indians would come and stay
there in their house from time to time. Pennsylvania and
especially that area had a much better relationship with Indigenous
people than most of the other states. The land was
bought from them for one thing, and I think there
(37:02):
was only one battle with Indians and all the history
of that part of Pennsylvania. So Boone got to know them.
He imitated them. He loved to be in the forest,
and I say in my biography that he was sort
of divided between the mother world of the forest where
(37:23):
he went with his mother, and the father world of
town and professions and blacksmithing and business money that sort
of thing. But there's no doubt he was more drawn
to the mother world of the forest all of his life.
The very beginning. He was drawn to live like an Indian,
(37:44):
like an Indian. It was always there from the very beginning.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
Yeah, this is Stephen Ranella.
Speaker 5 (37:53):
He became those this guy like brought home a lot
of game and also people that would begin relationships with
Indians who lived in his air. But when he lived there.
As he became older and became being a man, he
became and this is kind of like where his real
fame started to be.
Speaker 6 (38:06):
As Boone became a long hunter.
Speaker 5 (38:09):
He had always hunted for the family, okay, meaning he
would hunt bears, he would hunt deer. They liked to
eat bear meat, they liked to use deer meat, they
ate it. But mainly it was like the primary asset,
The primary good you got from deer was leather, and
people on the frontier preferred bear meat over deer meat.
I'm sure he had probably always been involved in some
(38:29):
commercial activities, but as he became a young man in
North Carolina, he became a commercial hunter. Not just hunting
for the pot right, not hunting for the family. But
he would go out hunt deer, hunt bear, trap, beaver, trap.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
Otter in order to sell goods.
Speaker 5 (38:47):
And that's really the occupation, that's like the livelihood that
kind of boons. Most of his life was really centered
around and a lot of his movements as he moved
ever westward in his big famous move was when he
moved into.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
The Kentucky territory.
Speaker 5 (39:02):
Was hunting out looking for good hunting ground.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
It's important to remember that these English commoners didn't know
how to hunt when they arrived in the New World.
In Europe, hunting was reserved for the nobility, so they
relied heavily on Native American methods of hunting and cooking game. Once,
when Daniel was young, he cooked a turkey over an
open fire and used a curved piece of bark to
capture the drippings to base the turkey. His mother asked
(39:34):
him where he learned this, and he said, quote the Indians.
In seventeen thirty six, a band of twenty five Delaware
Indians stayed at the Boone Homestead. Daniel would have just
been a toddler at the time, but the point is
that their lives overlapped with Indians since he was a child. However,
(39:54):
it wouldn't just be hunting that he'd learned from them.
He adopted select parts of their w worldview that he
saw as superior to the European worldview. I want to
read an excerpt from mister Morgan's book on European and
Native American worldviews. Colonists were surprised that Indians showed so
(40:17):
little interest in accumulating wealth. The two cultures generally misunderstood
each other Europeans often assumed that Indians had no religion
because they saw no recognizable ritual or symbols of worship.
The Indians had no word for animal or beast as
distinct from human. To them, all living things had spirits
(40:38):
or souls. Not only did the animals have spirits, but
the guardian spirits of people usually appeared as animals. Owning
land in the White Way made no more sense than
owning attractive air or sunlight. Indians were rich by desiring little.
William Cronin writes the English passion for accumulating well struck
(41:00):
the Indians as insanity. For this and other reasons, Indian
holy men often began to describe whites as created for
a different purpose. Both Indians and Whites suspected each other
of witchcraft. Indians were thought to worship the devil, and Indians,
in turn, were convinced that English were in league with
evil spirits. All too soon, the Indians concluded the invaders
(41:23):
were stupid and laughed, But the whites who got to
know Indians found them more honest and tolerant than most
of their own race. It was said by some that
Indians were more quote Christian than the English, showing greater
charity toward the land and its inhabitants. Later in Boone's
(41:45):
life we'd see that he never values accumulation of wealth
and frankly wasn't very good at it. Back to mister
Morgan describing Boone as a young man.
Speaker 6 (41:56):
But this famous quote from the father who was by
a relative, that Daniel Balley wasn't going to school. He
was skipping school, and he hadn't learned to spell. And
the father said, let the others learn to spell. Daniel
is the hunter. He will bring us the meat. So
while he was growing up there, he was a prankster. Also.
(42:18):
He was always playing tricks on people. He was a
fun person. That's why he was so popular. He had
lots of jokes. He could keep people laughing.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
He had a dynamic, charismatic personality.
Speaker 6 (42:31):
He was a leader from the very beginning. He was
the kind of person who was a magnet. If he
was in the room, everybody would be drawn to him.
He had that leadership ability. So from the very beginning
he was divided between that kind of leadership and the
white world and this solitary world of the forest. And
(42:51):
that also was with him from the very beginning to
the end of his life. This really begin to show
when they moved to North Carolina to the Yadkin Valley
about seventeen fifty or fifty one, because that was even wilder,
and he began to live in the forest, go for
(43:14):
longer hunts, go out trapping, and he became known.
Speaker 1 (43:19):
And he would have been a teenager at that time
when he moved to the Yadkin in North Carolina, he
would have.
Speaker 6 (43:25):
Been sixteen or seventeen.
Speaker 1 (43:27):
So just the prime budding age for a young man
and outdoorsman to really start to sew his oats.
Speaker 6 (43:36):
He soon became well known as a marksman and a
hunter and people, some people were jealous of him, but
he was so skillful as a tracker and a hunter
even then, even at the age of seventeen or eighteen,
that his legend began to grow.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
This is a good place to give a high level
overview of Boone's early life. He was born on October
twenty second, seventeen thirty four, near Reading, Pennsylvania. He was
a first generation American. His parents had come over from
England a few years prior. We've got to remember this
was before the Revolutionary War, so they weren't really Americans yet.
(44:27):
His dad, Squire, got in squabbles with the Quaker Church,
and they left Pennsylvania and moved into the wild country
of the Yadkin Valley in North Carolina, which at the
time would have been the boundaries of European settlement and
the colonies. It was here that Daniel started to make
a name for himself as a hunter and explorer. I
(44:48):
want to read another short excerpt from mister Morgan's book.
From the time he was a boy, Boone had a
flair for the dramat He seemed to know instinctively how
to make himself noticed, remembered. As a young man, he
began to create for himself the role of Daniel Boone,
(45:09):
and he spent much of his life perfecting that role.
Despite his later protestation that he was quote but a
common man, he seemed to wear from his early youth
that he was not just playing himself, but a type
what Emerson would later call a representative man. Boone would
embody in his actions and attitude, the aspirations and character
(45:32):
of the whole era. At least once Daniel became so
distracted by his own explorations that he forgot the hours
of the day his home, the fact that he was
supposed to help his mother before it got dark. Sarah
had to round up the cattle herself and do the milking,
strain the milk and put it in the spring house.
To stay cool, calm and prayerful, she worked a churning
(45:53):
butter from the clabvered milk. But when Daniel did not
come home by the next morning, and still had not
returned by noon, she had no choice but to walk
five miles back to town to get help. A search
party was formed and they combed over the Oly Hills
all the way to the never Seek Mountain range west
of the Monocacy Valley. They found no sign of Daniel
(46:15):
that afternoon, but starting out early the next morning, they
traveled further and spotted a column of smoke. Later in
the afternoon, they reached the source of the smoke and
found Daniel sitting on a bear skin and roasting fresh
bear meat over the fire. When asked if he was lost,
he said no, he had known where he was all
(46:36):
along on the south shoulder of the hill, nine miles
from the pasture. The search party accused him of scarying
his mother and forcing them all to waste time looking
for him, but he calmly answered he had started tracking
the bear and didn't want to lose it, and besides,
here was fresh meat for everybody. Whether the story is
(46:58):
true or just one of the legends that grew around
Boone later in life, it reveals as much about the
way he was perceived and remembered as it does about
his character. People later recalled that even from his boyhood,
there was a sense that Daniel had been singled out.
The story of the search party echoes the story in
Luke two forty nine of the twelve year old Jesus
(47:20):
Lost for Mary and Joseph. The boy is finally found
in the temple conversing with the elders. When he is
questioned and scolded, he explains that he had quote been
about his father's business. The sense of the story is
that Boone had already found his calling and destiny. It
is clear he also knew how to make a memorable impression.
Speaker 2 (47:42):
For Boone, there was something.
Speaker 1 (47:44):
Erotic about the woods, a playground, a place of sometimes
dangerous pleasure, and some would later suggest that with his
lifelong passion for hunting, there was a part of Boone
that never quite grew up. Back to mister Morgan as
he describes a big event in young Daniel's life.
Speaker 6 (48:07):
Then this big event in his life when he was
about twenty one. He was born in seventeen thirty four
and the French and Indian War started, So it's seventeen
fifty five and he goes with the militia up into
Virginia and joins George Washington's forces that are going to
join the British led by General Braddock, and everybody knows
(48:32):
the story of Braddock's defeat. They moved toward Fort Duquine
and they were ambushed by the French and the Indians
and a lot were killed. And Boone was not a soldier.
He was a teamster and a blacksmith teamster, meaning he
drove wagons. Drove wagons, but around the campfires he had
(48:54):
met a man called Finley, and Finley had told him
about his trip into Kentucky going down the Ohio River
as a peddler. He was a businessman, going all the
way to the falls which was now Louisville. But he
had traded with the Shawnees at the village of Esque Parkathiki,
which is where Winchester Kentucky is now Okay, and he
(49:17):
had seen the Bluegrass. So he told these stories of
this amazing place, so beautiful, buffalo elk, dear beavers, and
it didn't seem to be inhabited by Indians. There was
at one village of Escuepakathiki, and Boone determined then that
someday he was going to the Bluegrass.
Speaker 1 (49:39):
So this is when he was in his early twenties,
is when he met Finley Right, who told him about this.
And this would have been so this would have been
over the Appalachian Range, which at the time was this
impenetrable barrier. It's really bizarre to think about it now
because we have highway systems and do we have this
(50:00):
modern transportation. It's almost like you have to reel yourself
deeply back into history and erase how you can drive
in a car, get an airplane. I mean, these people
were confined massively by transportation, so Kentucky would have been
like another planet.
Speaker 6 (50:16):
It was considered unreasonable for several reason. The Indians its
dangerous to go there, had to climb over the mountains
Blue rig the Alleghanys to get there, and the Cumberlands,
but they were also forbidden to go there after the
French and Indian War that was to be divided up
for the officers and ordinary people weren't supposed to go. Now,
(50:38):
some white explorers had gone there, and doctor Thomas Walker,
I believe, had actually found what we call Cumberland Gap,
and he's the one who named it. We think.
Speaker 1 (50:53):
John Finley was twenty years older than Boone and told
Dan some marvelous tales of going into Kentucky. He would
have been the man in Boone's life who inadvertently steered
him into what many would say was his calling or destiny.
He must have noted that young Daniel was highly interested
in his stories of Kentucky, because ten years later he'd
(51:15):
go visit Boone at his house and proposed a wild plan.
Speaker 6 (51:22):
But Finley showed up a trader and he had a
little money. They planned this trip. They got together with
several people in the spring of seventeen sixty nine and
left on first of May.
Speaker 1 (51:37):
Now let's see, now Daniel would have been by this
time in his thirties. He would have been, so this
would have been ten years after he originally heard about
it from Findley.
Speaker 6 (51:46):
He wasn't able to outfit a group to go, and
he had other things on his mind. When he got
back from Braddock's defeat that trip, he was in love
with this beautiful girl, Rebecca Bryan, and they were married
not too long after, and Foon had a family soon
(52:06):
and you know, had to farm, and he had to
support them by working as a teamster and primarily as
a trapper hunting deer. In the summertime, he hunted deer
for the hides because the hide was in its best
condition and a hide was worth a Spanish dollar, so
(52:26):
a hide became a buck. Right in wintertime, he primarily
trapped for firm because that's when it was in its prime.
So that's what he was doing most of the time.
He also went off on a trip to Florida, of
all things. Yeah, and actually bought a bit of land
down there, but Rebecca refused to go.
Speaker 1 (52:48):
And so that was in seventeen sixty five that he
went to Florida. Didn't he owned land near Pensacola.
Speaker 6 (52:54):
He did. He bought some land and came back, arrived
on Christmas to take his family there, and Rebecca just
put her foot down she would not go.
Speaker 1 (53:04):
I have in my notes here. Boone was like a
typical timeshare Florida owner who bought his land and never
went back. During this time, like when you try to
understand the motivations for people to do these kind of things,
this was a time of exploration, of geographic exploration in
(53:26):
North America. I mean it was like, I don't want
to say trendy, but it was I guess in a
sense explorers. There was a lot of financial gain to
be made from well, from long hunters who could go
and make a good living long hunting into new territory.
But it was just a different time and a different mentality.
Speaker 6 (53:46):
It was said that Boone was fiddle footed, he just
couldn't stay still. But to think of it, I mean,
here was this continent and that much of it had
not been explored. Jefferson was very interested in exploring it,
for instance. But think of people coming from Europe, mostly
poor people who never had hunted. Hunting was for the
(54:09):
upper classes, even firearms, or for the upper classes, and
they arrived in North America and it's this vast wilderness
animals to hunt to trap, and if you get a
gun and you could go anywhere you wanted, you could
explore that. And for the Scotch Irish It really was
(54:30):
like a miracle that they had been moved from Scotland
to Ireland and then the land had been taken away
from them in Ireland. So you arrive here and basically
all you have to do is find a patch somewhere
and make sure the Indians are cleared out and you
could grow things, you could hunt, claim a new life.
(54:50):
So it was a very exciting time and exploring was
one of the main things they did, but particularly Boon's
time over the mountains. I say in the biography that
Kentucky was the key because once you could get to Kentucky,
that meant you could go further down the Ohio over
into Ohio, over into what became Indiana, Illinois, and beyond
(55:14):
that the Mississippi Valley and beyond that the Missouri Valley.
In these mountains, he heard of the Snowcap and that
was really thrilling. People were and the women, not just
the men, the women wanted to go there too. It
was a very exciting time.
Speaker 1 (55:34):
So we've covered about thirty years of Daniel's life. He
was a backwoods kid influenced by Quaker in Native American ideology.
By the time he was in his teens, he was
an accomplished hunter. When he was twenty one, he served
under the George Washington, like the father of our country,
George Washington, in the French and Indian War. In seventeen
(55:55):
fifty six he married the beautiful, black haired and black
eyed Rebecca Bryan, and they started on their way towards
having ten children. And if we're telling our story chronologically,
Dan is now thirty three years old. He's a common backwoodsman,
and it's now seventeen sixty seven. Now, mister Morgan will
get back to Daniel and John Finley's first trip into Kentucky.
Speaker 2 (56:19):
And it's worth.
Speaker 1 (56:20):
Noting for the boone nerds out there that Dan actually
had been into Kentucky for a short time on another trip,
but thought he was in Virginia. He later would realize
he had dipped into Kentucky and was unimpressed with what
he'd seen.
Speaker 6 (56:38):
Okay, they got together. There's a lot of disagreement about this,
but somebody funded this. Finley may have contributed to it.
But the job was how do you get there? You
could get there by going down the Ohio, but how
did you get to Kentucky as they called it. Well,
they figured out that the Indians for thousands of years
(56:59):
have been going there on the warriors Pathobi And if
they could find the warriors path, they could follow it
and it would take them through the gap into Kentucky.
Speaker 1 (57:10):
And this is a this is something they would have
just heard through interactions with Native Americans. They would they
would have heard them say, there's this, there's a gap
in the mountains.
Speaker 6 (57:20):
They would. I mean there was enough contact, particularly Boon.
I mean, he'd gotten to know a lot of Cherokees,
he had been cheated by them. He possibly had a
Cherokee wife. We don't know that, but some people said
he did. And by the way, they also say that
that Cherokee wife was African American, an escaped slave, as
I have actually met African Americans who claimed to be
(57:43):
descended from Daniel.
Speaker 1 (57:44):
But really I have what is your what is your
personal feeling? Do you think that's true?
Speaker 6 (57:50):
I think it's quite possible.
Speaker 1 (57:52):
Really, what about his Quaker upbringing and being like devoted
to his wife, like, how in contrasting that with character
we see in other parts of his life, would that
just have been I don't know, how would you explain it?
Speaker 6 (58:04):
I think there are many facets to woman's character and
many compartments in his mind. He had this amazing ability
to blend in with people and groups ever he was,
and this saved him many times that he understood other people.
(58:25):
He had a mind like Shakespeare. I mean, who could
get into the mind very different people and to be
sympathetic with them. I don't know that he had a
Cherokee wife, but I think it's possible. And you know,
if you were with an Indian group, you had to
be sleeping with one woman or they would think you
were a very bad it was.
Speaker 1 (58:45):
I read it was inhospitable if you were a guest
in some of these tribes, they would If you would
not do that, it would be.
Speaker 6 (58:53):
You thought you were better or you know, you were
not one of them. So I just say it's possible.
Speaker 1 (59:00):
And I guess the way he fit in so well
with the Native Americans. And we'll talk more about him
being kidnapped by the Shawnee and all that, but the
fact that he was able to blend in so well,
I can see how that would make sense. That he
might have just because too be able to fit in
so well.
Speaker 6 (59:16):
It may have been a necessity, so he would have
known about this gap they went north from the Yadkin
to what was called Wolf Hills, which we call Abingdon, Virginia,
and there they found the trail that Boone was good
enough to read the sign the tracks, so they followed
it to the southwest over Powells River and Pole's Mountain
(59:39):
and they came to the Cumberland Mountains. And this is
a really dramatic place. You can go there and these
mountains have cliffs on them, and there's the most forbidding things.
It really is like it's threatening, these high cliffs, just
mile after mile after mile, and keep going and then
suddenly you see this gap between them like a gun sight,
(01:00:03):
and there it is. They found it what doctor Thomas
Walker called Cumberland Gap. And you cross that and there's
a river. You got to cross the Cumberland River. You
go through another gap and then you reach the Knob Country.
And the famous paintings are a Boone on top of
(01:00:25):
a hill seeing into the bluegrass in Kentucky, and this
is called the Pisga Vision. Moses on Pisga he could
look into the promised land. But Boone could go into
the promised land. Moses couldn't go right, So you have
this amazing idol of Boone in his group Here for
(01:00:46):
the Deer Buffalo Elk Beaver.
Speaker 1 (01:00:54):
Boone is now into Kentucky and what happened there will
shape the rest of his life and Americas. What's interesting
is that it's in the next ten years that most
of what he's famous for, the things that defined his life,
will happen. Mister Morgan had something to say about this
to this day. We put this quote in a frame
(01:01:18):
in our house, and we did it when we were
about thirty years old, so this would have been about
ten years ago. But you said in his mid thirties,
a man either reaches out towards risk and glory or
stays within the routines of the expected and ordinary. It
is the age when men leave safe homes and jobs
and go on voyages and odyssees and perform transforming sacrifices.
(01:01:42):
It's the age when Walt Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass
and Columbus started planning his voyage to the Indies. It's
an age at which visionaries become profits, or explorers or inventors,
or make fools of themselves trying. So I would have
read this book when I was about thirty years old,
and it just feels so true. This window of time
(01:02:06):
in life is so important. And you went on to
give these examples of work that these artists and poets
and explorers did when they were in their thirties, and
you made the point that much of Boone's life was
defined by this ten year period basically from seventeen seventy
to about seventeen eighty. The Cumberland Gap in Kentucky and
(01:02:29):
all these things.
Speaker 6 (01:02:30):
Things he's famous for. Yeah, we're done in that time. Yeah, well,
I got the idea from the study of the Romantic
poets words Worths and Coleridge lived much longer, but almost
everything that we associate with them is done that in
the ten years. And Walt Whitman is the perfect example.
That Whitman wrote all of these great poems just about
(01:02:52):
in that period, it's a little bit more about eleven years,
and devoted the rest of his life to writing prose.
Basically did write some poems. But I was also thinking
of physicists and mathematicians and that they do their great
work relatively early. Mathematicians even earlier, but physicists and other
scientists usual a little bit later. Yeah, novelists also novelists
(01:03:15):
usually get going about the age of thirty and at
the age of forty early forties, they've done most of
their great work. A few exceptions, but not Yeah Lenny.
Speaker 1 (01:03:28):
On this first episode, we basically covered the first thirty
five years of Daniel's life up to him traversing the
Cumberland Gap and going into Kentucky. This is just the
beginning of the famed part of his life. And remember
at this point no one knew his name. Daniel would
live to be eighty six years old. In the remaining
(01:03:51):
fifty one years of his life are more wild than
the first. The man had a drive and a deep
love of life kept him moving. But I'm still trying
to understand why this story matters. Understanding national archetypes helps
us see the framework of our thinking, what we value
(01:04:13):
and the things that seek to define us. A deeper
look into national identity and an awareness of this gives
us the right to evaluate the good and the not
so good. In the coming episodes, we'll explore the rest
of Boone's life, including the heroic rescue of his daughter
from Indians and the lore of an illegitimate daughter, the
(01:04:35):
death of his son, and fortunes Won and Lost will
also explore the historical revision of Boone and the controversy
of us celebrating him. It's improbable to think that after
listening to a few podcasts you could understand the fullness
of who Boone was, and it's my hope that you
might explore Boone yourself. Ultimately, I hope that his character,
(01:04:58):
both positive and negative, will make us more relevant today
in continuing to define American identity in my old my
our exploration of Boone is an appeal to the masses
to remember where we came from, and it's a cry
to not forget the American backwoodsman, because we're still here
(01:05:23):
and we deserve a lasting place at the American table
because it's in our DNA. Folks, I cannot thank you
enough for listening to the Bear Grease podcast. We're pouring
out everything we've got into these and thank you for
(01:05:46):
the iTunes reviews, and I ask those of you who
haven't to give us a review on iTunes and share
this podcast with your buddies. Thanks A ton
We're reflecting back on the foundations of bear Grease. This week,
we're going back to one of the classics when we
really didn't know how to make the grease. We were
just kind of guessing, or at least I was guessing.
Episode fourteen on Daniel Boone was originally released on August eleventh,
twenty twenty one, which seems like an eternity ago. It
(00:27):
was a project that put a stake in the ground
for me, and the response to this episode surprised me.
It was our first deep dive series into American history.
This episode was the first one of three. Up until
this point, I wasn't sure how deep we could go
in this stuff, how long could we linger on one person.
(00:48):
There was some identity stuff going on too. Inside the podcast.
It was this a history podcast? Was this modern American
story podcast?
Speaker 2 (00:58):
What was Bear Grease?
Speaker 1 (01:00):
I honestly didn't know if people would like this series,
but it was wildly interesting to me, and two years later,
with the feedback we've received on this specific series, I
think it was one of our most impacting and I
want to go back to it.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
And from this series we modeled.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
A whole bunch of other historical series that we've all
learned a lot from However, I want to let you
know what we're doing here, because once the calendar rolls
into twenty twenty four, we're not going to be going
back to the classics. We're going to be making some
original episodes, And without foreshadowing too much, I'll let you
know that our first episode in twenty twenty four will
(01:43):
be about a modern poaching story, but I think the
human element of it will surprise you.
Speaker 2 (01:49):
But for now, in this holiday season, we're.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
Going to take a deep breath and go back to
a bear Grease classic. So, without further ado, my breth,
I hope you enjoy Daniel Boone Foundations of an American archetype.
Happy New Year to everyone.
Speaker 3 (02:11):
Hey everyone, this is Phil Clay wanted me to remind
you all that on January ninth, Meat Eater's next big
audiobook project is dropping. It's titled meat Eaters American History
The Long Hunters seventeen sixty one to seventeen seventy five.
It features our very own Clay Newcombe as well as
Stephen Rnella, diving deep into the storied lives of these
hunters and frontiersmen. Over the course of these fabled fourteen
(02:34):
years that were so pivotal in the history of America.
It's not available in print. This is an audio only format,
and it's truly special. I've never seen the guys more
excited about anything since I've worked here. And if listening
to this episode about Daniel Boone gets you fired up
to learn more about these men during this time, you
can follow the link in the description to pre order
your copy today. Again, Meat Eaters American History The Long
(02:56):
Hunters comes out on January ninth, but you can pre
order it today. We really hope you do. And now
back to the show.
Speaker 4 (03:12):
So, as a storyteller, as a marketer, as a brander,
I like to say, there are kind of, you know,
twelve ish characters, and there are a handful, maybe nine
types of stories. And the best stories combine like these
universal storylines with these universal character types.
Speaker 5 (03:30):
When I was just a little kid, people would say
of people that like to haunt and fish run around
the woods, people would say, he's a modern day Daniel Boone.
He wants to be just like Daniel Boone.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
On this episode of the Bear Grease Podcast, will be
exploring a story as American as Cornbread and Black Eyed peas.
We're talking about one of America's first heroes, Daniel Boone.
We'll sift through the myth and truth and discuss why
by heck we're still talking about him two hundred years
after his death. We'll learn about the mechanism of archetypes,
(04:06):
and I'll interview two New York Times bestselling authors, Stephen
Ranella and Robert Morgan about their fascination with Boone. The
truth is wilder than the myth. This is part one
of our series on Old Daniel Boone, and in it
will walk through the first thirty five years of his life.
(04:28):
You're not gonna wanna miss this one, but first let
me request of you two things.
Speaker 2 (04:35):
This series is.
Speaker 1 (04:36):
Different than previous Beargrease podcasts. It's a big bite to
tell the life story of someone like Boone and try
to understand their impact on American culture. And honestly, it
was more challenging than I thought it would be. But
if you'll stick around with me through.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
This, you'll be glad you did.
Speaker 1 (04:54):
Lastly, take a quick inventory of everything you know about
out Daniel Boone to give you a jumpstart. I'll help
you fit Dan into a timeline. He was born in
seventeen thirty four and died in eighteen twenty. But what
did he do in between? My name is Klay Nukem,
(05:26):
and this is the Bear Grease Podcast, where we'll explore
things forgotten but relevant, search for insight and unlikely places,
and where we'll tell the story of Americans who lived
their lives close to the land. Presented by FHF gear,
American made purpose built hunting and fishing gear that's designed
(05:48):
to be as rugged as the place as we explore.
Speaker 6 (06:00):
Man Man and I like the eagle that just fall
as a mountain.
Speaker 1 (06:08):
Was Okay, this is Josh Lambridge filmmaker. Tell me everything
you know about Daniel.
Speaker 7 (06:17):
I know he was a big man. I know he
fought for America to keep all Americans free.
Speaker 6 (06:21):
That's what I know.
Speaker 7 (06:22):
Youmber watching the old Disney Daniel Boone was a man, Yes,
a big man, because he fought for America to keep
all Americans free.
Speaker 1 (06:36):
I'm shocked you know that song.
Speaker 2 (06:38):
Okay, a couple of things.
Speaker 1 (06:40):
Daniel Boone was five foot eight and weighed one hundred
and seventy five pounds.
Speaker 7 (06:43):
That literally just destroyed my mind. I thought Daniel bunn
was like Paul Bunyan okay, and.
Speaker 1 (06:50):
The other thing in the song it talks about him
wearing a coonskin cap, which he didn't he he did.
Speaker 7 (06:56):
I don't know where you're getting your information, but I've
seen the movies he work and was getting kept.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
This is my other buddy, Jonathan. Tell me everything you
know about Daniel Boone. How much time do you got?
Speaker 1 (07:11):
Tell me everything.
Speaker 8 (07:12):
I literally don't know much other than his name and
that he was an American, that he was a pioneer.
He worked with the He worked with the Native Americans
to discover things and discover the woods. He was an outdoorsman,
discover the woods, discover the woods, discover things inside of
the woods. I feel like I want to say he
(07:34):
was at the Alamo. I really, like naturally want to
say he was a part of the Alamo. But then
I feel like it was a guy the Jim Booe
is that that's Jim Boos of the Alamo.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
Like then I kept saying Bowe he was a human, yes, And.
Speaker 8 (07:48):
Then I kept saying David Bowie. I kept getting Daniel
Boone and David Bowie mixed up in my head. That's
really all I know about Daniel Boone.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
The Action Adventure series Daniel Boone ran on television from
nineteen sixty four to nineteen seventy on NBC. But that
wasn't the beginning of our interest with Boone. America in
the world has been fascinated with him since seventeen eighty four,
when a former schoolteacher named John Filson published a single
(08:25):
chapter in his book which the book was about the
American Frontier in Kentucky, and the chapter was called the
Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone. Boone was fifty years old
at the time, and this catalyzed his fame, not just
in America but in Europe. Not long after Boone's death
(08:45):
in eighteen twenty, his first biography was written, and authors
have feverishly written about him for the last two hundred years.
Just in twenty twenty one, a new Boone biography came out.
Speaker 2 (08:58):
What did this man do?
Speaker 1 (08:59):
And why are we infatuated with the life of this
back woodsman?
Speaker 2 (09:05):
This is Steve Ranella.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
I think the.
Speaker 5 (09:09):
People know that he was a woodsman and they know
he was a frontiersman. The reason they know that is
the guy became famous. He became famous in his own life.
He was you know, he could almost argue He's one
of those first He was one of those people that
kind of became famous for being famous, Like the fame
was self perpetual. The fame was self perpetuating because there
(09:30):
were a lot of people, A lot of people were
engaged in the things that Boone was engaged in. So
you have this guy, like, why do we know so
much about him? But there were other long hunters. They
can't figure out what their names were.
Speaker 6 (09:42):
Do you really expect me to run mister Boone the
way I see it running beach dying?
Speaker 1 (09:53):
The myth and lore around Boone is thick, and I'd
like to whittle this down to the truth. But is
that even possible. Time is like a carousel ride. There's
a point when you get on in another when you
get off. You don't get to choose who you ride with.
(10:15):
History allows us to look back at people who got
off the ride before us, but it often leaves me
feeling cheated. There's something intimate about an in person conversation,
eye contact, human voice to human ear, and physical proximity.
(10:36):
One man who I would have ridden a mule across
the country to meet, just to look in his eyes,
to see his hands, and to exchange a few words
with would have been Daniel Boone. Carousel has cheated me
out of getting a first hand sense of who he was.
Boone is shrouded in deep mystery. He's an American legend,
(11:00):
icon and archetype. To sum up Boone's life, he was
a backwoodsman that taught us to cherish solitude and wilderness,
which was a foreign concept to the world. Raised a Quaker,
he was influenced heavily by Native Americans and was even
adopted as a Shawnee. He was a frontiersman known for
making the Cumberland Gap famous and settling the Kentucky Frontier.
(11:23):
He embodied the westward expansion of America, which led this
country to what it is today. He was uneducated but
influenced America's literary giants. He fought in the Revolutionary War
for America, but was tried for treason by the Americans.
He attained global fame in his lifetime, owned over thirty
(11:43):
thousand acres in Kentucky, but he died a common and
poor man. He was a contemporary of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson,
and Benjamin Franklin, and only their stories have been told
more in American history. Than Daniel Boom. It's common for
(12:05):
people to say that Boone is an American archetype. I
want to get a better understanding of what that means
and how they work. Seth Haynes is a published author
and the founder of through Line Strategy and Brand. A
couple of years ago, he introduced me to the idea
of archetypes as they're used in modern branding. Meet my buddy,
(12:27):
Seth Haynes.
Speaker 4 (12:29):
So, in my work as a writer and in my
work doing branding and marketing, we use archetypes a lot
as sort of shortcuts for characters. And there's you know,
some old work that's been done on this by Carl Youwing.
There's about twelve ish archetypes, twelveish universal characters. So as
a storyteller's a marketer, as a brander, I like to say,
(12:51):
there are kind of, you know, twelve ish characters, and
there are a handful, maybe nine types of stories. And
the best stories combine like these universal storylines with these
universal character types.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
So this is almost like something that's going on in
the background that we don't even realize, but we'll totally
identify with Yeah.
Speaker 4 (13:12):
And everyone in the world. I mean, I think if
you were to break down your life and say, here
are the people in my life, you could almost break
them down to Oh, yeah, this guy represents the character.
Speaker 6 (13:22):
Of an outlaw.
Speaker 4 (13:23):
You know, he's always a rebel, he's always on the run,
he's always in something. This person represents the character of
an explorer, someone who's always out in the wilderness looking
for something to get into, some expression of freedom. And
these character types are what we call archetypes. So an
archetypal expression is just simply like, this is the character
that I play in the universal story of life.
Speaker 1 (13:46):
Can you give me an example of a national American
figure that we've used as an archetype, like like Johnny
Cash is like an outlaw archetype.
Speaker 4 (13:58):
Yeah, I love Johnny Cash is an archetype because I
actually think he's terribly complex. The man in Black is
I mean a thousand percent the rebel right. I mean,
if you picture Johnny Cash day, you'd see him, you know,
on a Harley with his guitaristlung over his shoulder or something,
and always pushing the boundaries, always pushing it back against
(14:18):
societal norms and so. And he's always trying to bring
even in his music, you know, Woody Guthrie is another
example of this, always trying to push against the norms
of society to find what's true and what's real. Johnny Cash, though,
I love because when you really look at his life,
like he was also extremely generous. I mean the stories
I've heard about Johnny Cash's generosity from everything from kids
(14:41):
to sick people to the elderly. He truly cared for
his community of people. So he had this public persona
that was very much rebel, but he also had this
private life that was very much caregiver. And so sometimes
I think we even find that we embody different archetypes
depending on where we are.
Speaker 1 (14:59):
That's a good that's a good example because what I
see inside these archetypes, and even inside of Boone, is
that they represent to people that really don't know them
this one dominant feature. Yeah, Like Johnny Cash is an outlaw,
outlaw music outlaw. He's complex, you realize he's a human,
and he has this bigger space. Like Boone is this
courageous explorer, you know, frontiersman, conquering wilderness.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
That's something that we like.
Speaker 1 (15:25):
But that was actually a pretty not I'm not going
to say a small part, but there was much more
to Boone's life than that. Yeah, but the point being,
we we are embracing something. It's kind of like a
shroud of marketing around a person.
Speaker 4 (15:40):
It's branding. Yeah, it's one hundred and so you know,
one of the things that we like to say when
we talk about branding is that branding is biological. And
so what we do as humans is we take a
character or take a person, and we impute to them
or give to them like the character type or the
story that you know best sort of resonates with us internally.
(16:02):
And I'll tell you, man, the biggest characters in American
history understand that, know that and embrace it. Yeah, and
it becomes part of their mystique and part of their branding,
and that's what gives them lasting influence.
Speaker 1 (16:14):
And that's what's wild about Boone is it was clear
that he, even in the seventeen hundreds, when there was
not social media, i mean like high level technology, was
someone writing with a quill and ink you know your story. Yep,
he played the part and it wasn't inauthentic. It wasn't
It wasn't like he was trying to drum up publicity
(16:37):
around his life. He was who he was, but at
the same time, he was pretty masterful at doing things,
saying things, and being things at the right time for people.
Speaker 6 (16:48):
To remember him. That's right.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
These archetypes basically are our human shortcuts to understand the
world around us. Yes, understanding the mechanisms of culture building
is important. I also think it's interesting that most of
what we know about Boone didn't come directly from him,
and there in Liza's mystery, Wildly two different drafts of
(17:15):
first hand interviews with him were defunct. One manuscript was
completed but lost. The other manuscript was incomplete but lost
to what the heck? Who's in charge here? However, in
eighteen fifty one, thirty one years after Boone's death, a young,
(17:36):
nerdy librarian and historian from New York named Lyman Draper,
traveled to Missouri to interview Daniel's youngest and only living son,
Nathan Boone, who at the time was seventy years old.
It was said that Draper was quote nearly obsessed by
the passing of the old frontiersman, and he determined to
(17:59):
collect as much material in interview as many survivors as possible.
Draper and Nathan give us the most intimate and accurate
look into Boone's life. You can actually buy them compiled
as a book titled My Father Daniel Boone. Here's an
excerpt from the manuscripts. My grandfather's squire Boone was a
(18:26):
weaver and a farmer. His residence was probably an olie.
He kept at least five or six looms going at
one time. He had his homestead and in the grass
season moved his stock back several miles distance to a
fine range where cowpens were made for herding cattle at
knights and a cabin was built in which Miss Boone
(18:47):
spent the dairy season in attending to her milk. During
the mild weather, her son Daniel went with her to
act as a herdsman. He went with the cattle during
the daily roaming through the woods and brought them back
each evening. This was his chief occupation from the age
of ten to seventeen. This move was an annual affair,
and Miss Boone always went personally to attend the dairy,
(19:10):
and her son Daniel was always attendant to watch her
and take care of the cattle. My father soon became
fond of the woods. Even at the age of ten,
he would carry a club a grub dug up by
the roots, nicely shaven down, leaving a rooty knob at
the end, which he called his herdsman's club. He became
(19:30):
an expert in using it to kill birds in small game.
This life enabled him to study their habits. When he
was twelve or thirteen, his father bought him a gun,
and he became a good marksman. The only problem was
that he often neglected his hurting duties to hunt, but
this experience gave him his love of woods and hunting.
(19:50):
Daniel's brother, Samuel, was born in seventeen twenty eight. According
to the records of Squire Boone Junior, Samuel had a
very intelligent wife who taught my father to read, spell
and write a little. This was all the education Daniel
ever had, as he never attended school, But he acquired
more education by his own efforts, particularly in writing, as
(20:12):
he could do little more than rudely write his own name.
In all my research on Boone, I was moved by
Nathan's account of his father. I envisioned me talking about
my own father or my son, recounting my life. Long
(20:33):
after my passing. We're going to camp around Boone for
a few episodes. He influenced the American hegemon the way
that we think and to understand who we are, I
think we need to acknowledge and be aware of the
Boone influence. I'm interested in how Boone has influenced my
life unknowingly. Stephen Ranella is the founder of a company
(21:02):
called meat Eater, the company that this Here Bear Grease
podcast is produced by. He's a New York Times bestselling
author an American hunter, but he's also known as a
national Boone expert. Renella began his young life in the
outdoors with dreams of being a full time trapper like
Boone was during periods of his life. It was a
(21:23):
real treat to get to sit with Steve and talk Boone.
There's been like countless Boon biographies written since the time
of just after he died.
Speaker 5 (21:37):
I just recently sent me a Boon book. Yeah, publishing
a boomboo.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
So okay, so people have this.
Speaker 5 (21:44):
I can't stop.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
And that is exactly what I want to talk to
you about. Why are we so well?
Speaker 1 (21:52):
I want to I want to dive into your personal
interest in Boone? Why were you so interested in Boone?
Speaker 6 (21:58):
Man?
Speaker 5 (21:58):
I was when I was just a little kid. People
would say of people that like to hunt and fish, okay,
run around the woods. People would say, he's a modern
day Daniel Boone. He wants to be just like Daniel Boone.
He's a real Daniel Boone. To it means like the
(22:18):
consummate woodsman, right, it's like the dedicated woodsman. I didn't
realize when I first started to hear that term, you know,
growing up with it, I didn't realize like how correct
it was. I think the people know that he was
a woodsman, and they know he was a frontiersman. The
reason they know that is the guy became famous. He
became famous in his own life.
Speaker 6 (22:39):
He was.
Speaker 5 (22:42):
You know, he could almost argue he's one of those
first he was one of those people that kind of
became famous for being famous.
Speaker 6 (22:47):
Like the fame.
Speaker 5 (22:50):
Was self perpetual. The fame was self perpetuating because there
were a lot of people. A lot of people were
engaged in the things that Boone was engaged in. There
were a lot of market hunters, there were a lot
of long hunters. There were a lot of people who
got tangled up in the American Revolution, in the Western
(23:12):
front of the American Revolution, there were a lot of
people who won and lost a ton of money speculating
in land. There were a lot of people that started
frontier settlements or stations out on the frontier. Tons of
people did this stuff. Boone wasn't the first one to
go through the Cumberland Gap. Me of course, he wasn't
the first one. Boone wasn't the first euro American to
(23:34):
go through the Cumberland Gap. But he owns that event
because like he got notoriety and I'm not I'm glad
it happened, and people started to ask questions. They talked
to his relatives, they talked to the children of his children,
and his body like built up. So you have this guy,
like why do we know so much about him? But
(23:57):
there were other long hunters. They can't figure out what
they're as were who were his contemporaries because I know
because it never like the seed never got started. The
idea that like to investigate an individual, that happened with Boone,
and the investigation continued and continued and continued to the
point where we put together this like really remarkable, this
(24:19):
really remarkable biography of dates and where he went, what
he did, and what his feelings about things were, and
then people tracked down the people he hung out with,
they tracked down his relatives. There's a later on a researcher,
like a historian his time or whatever, he went to
talk to Boone's kid. Yeah, relates the story where you
(24:43):
have insight into the story. I'm gonna tell you is
an example of like how thorough the investigation of Boone was. Right,
Boone became a little bit famous and was well known.
I mean, he wasn't like everybody else he was. He
was exemplary. I mean people recognized in his own time
that he was an outstanding woodsman. But as he became famous,
(25:04):
it prompted more and more people to go and interview
him and the people around him. So that little bit,
like imagine a snowball rolling down a hill and went
snow right, he had a little bit of fame, which
is the initial bit of the thing going. But it
it led to investigation, which led to investigation, which led
to an investigation where eventually you know, you have this
(25:26):
like this one individual of dozens of long hunters of
his contemporaries, this one individual who we put together a
ton of information about, and there's a there's an interesting thing.
It comes from like very late in his life. Someone
was interviewing one of his children one time, and the
kids describing this is this is after the after the
bulk of the Indian Wars are over. This is after
the American Revolution. His kids describe and being out hunting
(25:50):
with his father.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
I think maybe it would be best if we hear
it in the words of Nathan Boone himself. In the
fall of seventeen ninety four, father and I were out hunting.
We camped on the northern bank of the Ohio River,
some two or three miles above the mouth of Campaign Creek,
which was ten or twelve miles above Point Pleasant. It
(26:13):
was frosty weather and the leaves were falling. About the
second morning, a foggy morning, my father went off, leaving
me alone at the camp. A large fine buck came
within twenty or twenty five steps of camp. I seized
my small rifle. This was not my little bird rifle,
which used a ball about the size of a buckshot,
(26:33):
that one I used to kill birds and squirrels near
Crooked Creek back of Point Pleasant. This larger rifle was
made by my father and William Arbuckle, a gunsmith, I
rested his gun against one of the camp posts and fired,
but the deer ran off. Father heard the shot and
returned to camp. He asked me to point out where
the deer stood. There he found hair which the ball
(26:55):
had cut off. Then he followed the trail found blood.
Sixty or eighty yard guards. Further, he found the dead deer.
This was the first deer I ever killed. But my
father didn't leave me at camp anymore. He took me
with him two or three times and pointed out deer,
then showed me how to manage to get off shots.
I was not to move or attempt to steal up
(27:16):
on the deer when his head was up and chewing,
and when he was looking around, but to do so
when his head was down feeding and could not so
well see me. Following this advice, I killed one or
two other deer during this hunt. While we were together.
My father shot a bear and one or two others
when he was alone.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
The first day.
Speaker 1 (27:34):
From these two or three bear we saved all the meat,
and of the ten or fifteen deer, we saved the
best hindquarters. On the fifth night, about midnight, I had
been asleep for some time, but my father Daniel Boone
heard a chopping or hacking some distance above and across
the river. He awakened me, and he told me he
thought the noise was made by Indians, as he thought
(27:56):
it was made by their hatchet. He concluded that Indians
had probably seen the fire at our camp and were
making a raft to cross. We carried meat and skins
to our canoe, which was twenty five yards from camp,
and returned to our fire again. The night was clear
and frosty and a little foggy, so we remained at
our fire with our blankets for some time. After the
(28:18):
chopping ceased. We then went to our canoe. There we
stayed some ten minutes until we heard the Indians paddling
in the water. At that time we pushed off, and
Father ordered me to roll his blanket around myself and
lie down in the canoe. He sat in the stern,
put the paddle carefully in the water, and then gave
a push. We went forward noiselessly and were soon in
(28:41):
the main current, which washed us down the river. On
the way, Father put his head over the canoe close
to the water, and he said he thought he could
catch a glimpse of the Indians he had looked between
the surface of the water and the fog which did
not quite reach the water, and soon we were beyond harm.
Speaker 5 (28:58):
Stream escapes and the kid says, his kid says, in
that moment, I kind of understood the fear that that
man lived.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
With his whole life.
Speaker 5 (29:11):
So here you have like interviews with his kids talking
about his like analyzing the guy's emotional state. We don't
have that one of Boon's hunting partners. All we know
is like basically he got killed, want of dying in
a hollow tree and the story m hm. But with him, man,
we got all the goods. Yeah, almost too many goods
because there's a lot as you know, there's people that
(29:32):
are always bringing an artifact, Oh, this is Boone's gone,
this is Boone's hatchet, you know, it's all hogwash.
Speaker 1 (29:37):
Well, when Boone was in his mid fifties, this is
this is what I've calculated. When Boone was in his
mid fifties was when the first biography that included well
it wasn't a full biography, but a guy came down
and interviewed him and included him in this book that
went global, and it was about the American frontier. So
(30:00):
was it a combination that the eyes of the world
were on this boundary between the American colonies and this
vast frontier that we knew nothing about. I mean, this
was like the spot in the world that people were
interested in. And then this guy wrote and it was
included in part of this book. This guy wrote this
(30:24):
included Boone, and then all of a sudden, everybody's eyes
were on Boone.
Speaker 2 (30:27):
Sure, and he was mythologized first.
Speaker 5 (30:30):
It's kind of funny because like the first treatments of
him were overblown mythologizing. Yeah, you know, guys like him
and Davy Crockhead the same thing, like people like like
the Lump, these guys that got very different people ye,
born far apart, very you know, just very different. But
they're both hunters and they're both frontiers went to some extent,
(30:53):
but they both had this thing where they were living
with people telling crazy stories about them that weren't even true. Yeah,
he became later historians based on this infatuation with these
guys of these like superhuman individuals, you know, based on
the historians later kind of like a type of book
(31:14):
that would later be written about Boone was sorting out
fact from fiction fiction the man from the Legend, and
that became a whole you know, subgenre of Boone literature
is when people stopped and been like, okay, obviously that's
all both, but what was this guy like?
Speaker 6 (31:29):
Like?
Speaker 5 (31:29):
Yeah, what really was he like? And then when you
look at what he really was like, it's more interesting
than the mythologized version.
Speaker 1 (31:39):
There have been around ten legitimate Boone biographies written over
the last two hundred years, and they're still being written today. However,
one stands out to many, including Steve Brunella, as the
Bible of Boone biographies, and it's simply titled Boone. It's
written by Cornell University professor Sir Robert Morgan. I was
(32:02):
unsure if mister Morgan was still professionally active, but I
reached out to him and was delighted when he responded
back within a few hours, inviting me to his home
in New York. Mister Morgan is in his mid seventies
and has dedicated his life to writing on the Appalachian
region in which he grew up. He's a New York
Times best selling author who calls himself a poet that
(32:26):
writes some fiction. Poets are a unique lot. They're often
introspective and unusually contemplative. Sometimes you meet someone with a
spirit about them that seems to pervade the space they fill.
Mister Morgan is such a man. They wore a plaid
shirt and suspenders. His accomplished professional career hasn't overshadowed his
(32:51):
rural roots. I was struck by his stoic yet joyful demeanor,
his humility and confidence, and his exhaustive familiarity with Boone.
It's an honor to introduce you to mister Robert Morgan.
I've been fascinated with Boone really since I read your book,
(33:13):
probably ten years ago. And I would have known Boone
just from the typical way an American kid would have
known Boone, you know, just from the Disney movies, kind
of odd places sometimes that his name would come up,
but really knew nothing about him. And then when I
(33:33):
read your book, I was enthralled with who this guy
really was. What was your interest in Boone originally?
Speaker 6 (33:43):
Well, when I was growing up, my dad would talk
about him. He just loved to talk about Daniel Boone
and the Frontier, and he said we were related to
Boone through the Morgans. Boone's mother was a Morgan, and
this turns out to be true. It's very distant relation.
Boone and I have a common ancestor in Wales and
(34:05):
North Wales. But I think the first thing to know
about the Boone families is they were Quakers, and the
Boone family way down in the southwestern England around Exeter,
they were weavers and blacksmiths. So this had a lot
of influence on Boone's character all the way through his life.
(34:25):
And of course they taught pacifism quietness. The mother from
Wales was a musical person. She loved to sing, and
this also was an influence. So this family taught him
this very pacifistic way of life. And it's odd because
he's associated with Indian fighting and hunting, and of course
(34:48):
that's part of the myth that he killed lots of Indians.
He may have killed only one in his life. The
real Boone is somewhat different from the legend, and that
was part of the fun of researching and writing the
book to separate these two. The actual character Daniel Boone
and all these things in the movies and the legends
(35:11):
they do overlaps on. I think the legend has its
roots in Boone, but he's actually a very different person.
The monument in Frankfort, Kentucky has him killing panthers and
fighting with the Indians and that sort of thing, but
that's not the real Moon. He was very pacifistic, very
(35:32):
calm person, spoke calmly in a very low voice, the
evidence suggests. And one other thing it's important to remember
is that his father was kicked out of the Quakers
and became a Freemason. So this new very important organization
in the eighteenth century that taught the brotherhood of all men,
(35:56):
of all people. I think he was influenced by that,
and he later became a Mason himself. Very early. He
loved the forest. The family recognized that that he could hunt,
he could find animals, he could trap. He lived out
in the woods with his mother in the summertime. She
took care of the cows. And he wanted all ready
(36:18):
to live like an Indian then to spend time in
the forest, and there were Indians around.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
It's clear that he had a lot of Native American
influence even from an early age.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
That overlap of society.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
In the Pennsylvania area that would have been pretty common,
Like he would have just been out wandering around and
run into Native Americans that he could have befriended. That
would not have been hostile.
Speaker 6 (36:42):
Right, His parents hosted Indians. Indians would come and stay
there in their house from time to time. Pennsylvania and
especially that area had a much better relationship with Indigenous
people than most of the other states. The land was
bought from them for one thing, and I think there
(37:02):
was only one battle with Indians and all the history
of that part of Pennsylvania. So Boone got to know them.
He imitated them. He loved to be in the forest,
and I say in my biography that he was sort
of divided between the mother world of the forest where
(37:23):
he went with his mother, and the father world of
town and professions and blacksmithing and business money that sort
of thing. But there's no doubt he was more drawn
to the mother world of the forest all of his life.
The very beginning. He was drawn to live like an Indian,
(37:44):
like an Indian. It was always there from the very beginning.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
Yeah, this is Stephen Ranella.
Speaker 5 (37:53):
He became those this guy like brought home a lot
of game and also people that would begin relationships with
Indians who lived in his air. But when he lived there.
As he became older and became being a man, he
became and this is kind of like where his real
fame started to be.
Speaker 6 (38:06):
As Boone became a long hunter.
Speaker 5 (38:09):
He had always hunted for the family, okay, meaning he
would hunt bears, he would hunt deer. They liked to
eat bear meat, they liked to use deer meat, they
ate it. But mainly it was like the primary asset,
The primary good you got from deer was leather, and
people on the frontier preferred bear meat over deer meat.
I'm sure he had probably always been involved in some
(38:29):
commercial activities, but as he became a young man in
North Carolina, he became a commercial hunter. Not just hunting
for the pot right, not hunting for the family. But
he would go out hunt deer, hunt bear, trap, beaver, trap.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
Otter in order to sell goods.
Speaker 5 (38:47):
And that's really the occupation, that's like the livelihood that
kind of boons. Most of his life was really centered
around and a lot of his movements as he moved
ever westward in his big famous move was when he
moved into.
Speaker 2 (39:00):
The Kentucky territory.
Speaker 5 (39:02):
Was hunting out looking for good hunting ground.
Speaker 1 (39:10):
It's important to remember that these English commoners didn't know
how to hunt when they arrived in the New World.
In Europe, hunting was reserved for the nobility, so they
relied heavily on Native American methods of hunting and cooking game. Once,
when Daniel was young, he cooked a turkey over an
open fire and used a curved piece of bark to
capture the drippings to base the turkey. His mother asked
(39:34):
him where he learned this, and he said, quote the Indians.
In seventeen thirty six, a band of twenty five Delaware
Indians stayed at the Boone Homestead. Daniel would have just
been a toddler at the time, but the point is
that their lives overlapped with Indians since he was a child. However,
(39:54):
it wouldn't just be hunting that he'd learned from them.
He adopted select parts of their w worldview that he
saw as superior to the European worldview. I want to
read an excerpt from mister Morgan's book on European and
Native American worldviews. Colonists were surprised that Indians showed so
(40:17):
little interest in accumulating wealth. The two cultures generally misunderstood
each other Europeans often assumed that Indians had no religion
because they saw no recognizable ritual or symbols of worship.
The Indians had no word for animal or beast as
distinct from human. To them, all living things had spirits
(40:38):
or souls. Not only did the animals have spirits, but
the guardian spirits of people usually appeared as animals. Owning
land in the White Way made no more sense than
owning attractive air or sunlight. Indians were rich by desiring little.
William Cronin writes the English passion for accumulating well struck
(41:00):
the Indians as insanity. For this and other reasons, Indian
holy men often began to describe whites as created for
a different purpose. Both Indians and Whites suspected each other
of witchcraft. Indians were thought to worship the devil, and Indians,
in turn, were convinced that English were in league with
evil spirits. All too soon, the Indians concluded the invaders
(41:23):
were stupid and laughed, But the whites who got to
know Indians found them more honest and tolerant than most
of their own race. It was said by some that
Indians were more quote Christian than the English, showing greater
charity toward the land and its inhabitants. Later in Boone's
(41:45):
life we'd see that he never values accumulation of wealth
and frankly wasn't very good at it. Back to mister
Morgan describing Boone as a young man.
Speaker 6 (41:56):
But this famous quote from the father who was by
a relative, that Daniel Balley wasn't going to school. He
was skipping school, and he hadn't learned to spell. And
the father said, let the others learn to spell. Daniel
is the hunter. He will bring us the meat. So
while he was growing up there, he was a prankster. Also.
(42:18):
He was always playing tricks on people. He was a
fun person. That's why he was so popular. He had
lots of jokes. He could keep people laughing.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
He had a dynamic, charismatic personality.
Speaker 6 (42:31):
He was a leader from the very beginning. He was
the kind of person who was a magnet. If he
was in the room, everybody would be drawn to him.
He had that leadership ability. So from the very beginning
he was divided between that kind of leadership and the
white world and this solitary world of the forest. And
(42:51):
that also was with him from the very beginning to
the end of his life. This really begin to show
when they moved to North Carolina to the Yadkin Valley
about seventeen fifty or fifty one, because that was even wilder,
and he began to live in the forest, go for
(43:14):
longer hunts, go out trapping, and he became known.
Speaker 1 (43:19):
And he would have been a teenager at that time
when he moved to the Yadkin in North Carolina, he
would have.
Speaker 6 (43:25):
Been sixteen or seventeen.
Speaker 1 (43:27):
So just the prime budding age for a young man
and outdoorsman to really start to sew his oats.
Speaker 6 (43:36):
He soon became well known as a marksman and a
hunter and people, some people were jealous of him, but
he was so skillful as a tracker and a hunter
even then, even at the age of seventeen or eighteen,
that his legend began to grow.
Speaker 1 (44:05):
This is a good place to give a high level
overview of Boone's early life. He was born on October
twenty second, seventeen thirty four, near Reading, Pennsylvania. He was
a first generation American. His parents had come over from
England a few years prior. We've got to remember this
was before the Revolutionary War, so they weren't really Americans yet.
(44:27):
His dad, Squire, got in squabbles with the Quaker Church,
and they left Pennsylvania and moved into the wild country
of the Yadkin Valley in North Carolina, which at the
time would have been the boundaries of European settlement and
the colonies. It was here that Daniel started to make
a name for himself as a hunter and explorer. I
(44:48):
want to read another short excerpt from mister Morgan's book.
From the time he was a boy, Boone had a
flair for the dramat He seemed to know instinctively how
to make himself noticed, remembered. As a young man, he
began to create for himself the role of Daniel Boone,
(45:09):
and he spent much of his life perfecting that role.
Despite his later protestation that he was quote but a
common man, he seemed to wear from his early youth
that he was not just playing himself, but a type
what Emerson would later call a representative man. Boone would
embody in his actions and attitude, the aspirations and character
(45:32):
of the whole era. At least once Daniel became so
distracted by his own explorations that he forgot the hours
of the day his home, the fact that he was
supposed to help his mother before it got dark. Sarah
had to round up the cattle herself and do the milking,
strain the milk and put it in the spring house.
To stay cool, calm and prayerful, she worked a churning
(45:53):
butter from the clabvered milk. But when Daniel did not
come home by the next morning, and still had not
returned by noon, she had no choice but to walk
five miles back to town to get help. A search
party was formed and they combed over the Oly Hills
all the way to the never Seek Mountain range west
of the Monocacy Valley. They found no sign of Daniel
(46:15):
that afternoon, but starting out early the next morning, they
traveled further and spotted a column of smoke. Later in
the afternoon, they reached the source of the smoke and
found Daniel sitting on a bear skin and roasting fresh
bear meat over the fire. When asked if he was lost,
he said no, he had known where he was all
(46:36):
along on the south shoulder of the hill, nine miles
from the pasture. The search party accused him of scarying
his mother and forcing them all to waste time looking
for him, but he calmly answered he had started tracking
the bear and didn't want to lose it, and besides,
here was fresh meat for everybody. Whether the story is
(46:58):
true or just one of the legends that grew around
Boone later in life, it reveals as much about the
way he was perceived and remembered as it does about
his character. People later recalled that even from his boyhood,
there was a sense that Daniel had been singled out.
The story of the search party echoes the story in
Luke two forty nine of the twelve year old Jesus
(47:20):
Lost for Mary and Joseph. The boy is finally found
in the temple conversing with the elders. When he is
questioned and scolded, he explains that he had quote been
about his father's business. The sense of the story is
that Boone had already found his calling and destiny. It
is clear he also knew how to make a memorable impression.
Speaker 2 (47:42):
For Boone, there was something.
Speaker 1 (47:44):
Erotic about the woods, a playground, a place of sometimes
dangerous pleasure, and some would later suggest that with his
lifelong passion for hunting, there was a part of Boone
that never quite grew up. Back to mister Morgan as
he describes a big event in young Daniel's life.
Speaker 6 (48:07):
Then this big event in his life when he was
about twenty one. He was born in seventeen thirty four
and the French and Indian War started, So it's seventeen
fifty five and he goes with the militia up into
Virginia and joins George Washington's forces that are going to
join the British led by General Braddock, and everybody knows
(48:32):
the story of Braddock's defeat. They moved toward Fort Duquine
and they were ambushed by the French and the Indians
and a lot were killed. And Boone was not a soldier.
He was a teamster and a blacksmith teamster, meaning he
drove wagons. Drove wagons, but around the campfires he had
(48:54):
met a man called Finley, and Finley had told him
about his trip into Kentucky going down the Ohio River
as a peddler. He was a businessman, going all the
way to the falls which was now Louisville. But he
had traded with the Shawnees at the village of Esque Parkathiki,
which is where Winchester Kentucky is now Okay, and he
(49:17):
had seen the Bluegrass. So he told these stories of
this amazing place, so beautiful, buffalo elk, dear beavers, and
it didn't seem to be inhabited by Indians. There was
at one village of Escuepakathiki, and Boone determined then that
someday he was going to the Bluegrass.
Speaker 1 (49:39):
So this is when he was in his early twenties,
is when he met Finley Right, who told him about this.
And this would have been so this would have been
over the Appalachian Range, which at the time was this
impenetrable barrier. It's really bizarre to think about it now
because we have highway systems and do we have this
(50:00):
modern transportation. It's almost like you have to reel yourself
deeply back into history and erase how you can drive
in a car, get an airplane. I mean, these people
were confined massively by transportation, so Kentucky would have been
like another planet.
Speaker 6 (50:16):
It was considered unreasonable for several reason. The Indians its
dangerous to go there, had to climb over the mountains
Blue rig the Alleghanys to get there, and the Cumberlands,
but they were also forbidden to go there after the
French and Indian War that was to be divided up
for the officers and ordinary people weren't supposed to go. Now,
(50:38):
some white explorers had gone there, and doctor Thomas Walker,
I believe, had actually found what we call Cumberland Gap,
and he's the one who named it. We think.
Speaker 1 (50:53):
John Finley was twenty years older than Boone and told
Dan some marvelous tales of going into Kentucky. He would
have been the man in Boone's life who inadvertently steered
him into what many would say was his calling or destiny.
He must have noted that young Daniel was highly interested
in his stories of Kentucky, because ten years later he'd
(51:15):
go visit Boone at his house and proposed a wild plan.
Speaker 6 (51:22):
But Finley showed up a trader and he had a
little money. They planned this trip. They got together with
several people in the spring of seventeen sixty nine and
left on first of May.
Speaker 1 (51:37):
Now let's see, now Daniel would have been by this
time in his thirties. He would have been, so this
would have been ten years after he originally heard about
it from Findley.
Speaker 6 (51:46):
He wasn't able to outfit a group to go, and
he had other things on his mind. When he got
back from Braddock's defeat that trip, he was in love
with this beautiful girl, Rebecca Bryan, and they were married
not too long after, and Foon had a family soon
(52:06):
and you know, had to farm, and he had to
support them by working as a teamster and primarily as
a trapper hunting deer. In the summertime, he hunted deer
for the hides because the hide was in its best
condition and a hide was worth a Spanish dollar, so
(52:26):
a hide became a buck. Right in wintertime, he primarily
trapped for firm because that's when it was in its prime.
So that's what he was doing most of the time.
He also went off on a trip to Florida, of
all things. Yeah, and actually bought a bit of land
down there, but Rebecca refused to go.
Speaker 1 (52:48):
And so that was in seventeen sixty five that he
went to Florida. Didn't he owned land near Pensacola.
Speaker 6 (52:54):
He did. He bought some land and came back, arrived
on Christmas to take his family there, and Rebecca just
put her foot down she would not go.
Speaker 1 (53:04):
I have in my notes here. Boone was like a
typical timeshare Florida owner who bought his land and never
went back. During this time, like when you try to
understand the motivations for people to do these kind of things,
this was a time of exploration, of geographic exploration in
(53:26):
North America. I mean it was like, I don't want
to say trendy, but it was I guess in a
sense explorers. There was a lot of financial gain to
be made from well, from long hunters who could go
and make a good living long hunting into new territory.
But it was just a different time and a different mentality.
Speaker 6 (53:46):
It was said that Boone was fiddle footed, he just
couldn't stay still. But to think of it, I mean,
here was this continent and that much of it had
not been explored. Jefferson was very interested in exploring it,
for instance. But think of people coming from Europe, mostly
poor people who never had hunted. Hunting was for the
(54:09):
upper classes, even firearms, or for the upper classes, and
they arrived in North America and it's this vast wilderness
animals to hunt to trap, and if you get a
gun and you could go anywhere you wanted, you could
explore that. And for the Scotch Irish It really was
(54:30):
like a miracle that they had been moved from Scotland
to Ireland and then the land had been taken away
from them in Ireland. So you arrive here and basically
all you have to do is find a patch somewhere
and make sure the Indians are cleared out and you
could grow things, you could hunt, claim a new life.
(54:50):
So it was a very exciting time and exploring was
one of the main things they did, but particularly Boon's
time over the mountains. I say in the biography that
Kentucky was the key because once you could get to Kentucky,
that meant you could go further down the Ohio over
into Ohio, over into what became Indiana, Illinois, and beyond
(55:14):
that the Mississippi Valley and beyond that the Missouri Valley.
In these mountains, he heard of the Snowcap and that
was really thrilling. People were and the women, not just
the men, the women wanted to go there too. It
was a very exciting time.
Speaker 1 (55:34):
So we've covered about thirty years of Daniel's life. He
was a backwoods kid influenced by Quaker in Native American ideology.
By the time he was in his teens, he was
an accomplished hunter. When he was twenty one, he served
under the George Washington, like the father of our country,
George Washington, in the French and Indian War. In seventeen
(55:55):
fifty six he married the beautiful, black haired and black
eyed Rebecca Bryan, and they started on their way towards
having ten children. And if we're telling our story chronologically,
Dan is now thirty three years old. He's a common backwoodsman,
and it's now seventeen sixty seven. Now, mister Morgan will
get back to Daniel and John Finley's first trip into Kentucky.
Speaker 2 (56:19):
And it's worth.
Speaker 1 (56:20):
Noting for the boone nerds out there that Dan actually
had been into Kentucky for a short time on another trip,
but thought he was in Virginia. He later would realize
he had dipped into Kentucky and was unimpressed with what
he'd seen.
Speaker 6 (56:38):
Okay, they got together. There's a lot of disagreement about this,
but somebody funded this. Finley may have contributed to it.
But the job was how do you get there? You
could get there by going down the Ohio, but how
did you get to Kentucky as they called it. Well,
they figured out that the Indians for thousands of years
(56:59):
have been going there on the warriors Pathobi And if
they could find the warriors path, they could follow it
and it would take them through the gap into Kentucky.
Speaker 1 (57:10):
And this is a this is something they would have
just heard through interactions with Native Americans. They would they
would have heard them say, there's this, there's a gap
in the mountains.
Speaker 6 (57:20):
They would. I mean there was enough contact, particularly Boon.
I mean, he'd gotten to know a lot of Cherokees,
he had been cheated by them. He possibly had a
Cherokee wife. We don't know that, but some people said
he did. And by the way, they also say that
that Cherokee wife was African American, an escaped slave, as
I have actually met African Americans who claimed to be
(57:43):
descended from Daniel.
Speaker 1 (57:44):
But really I have what is your what is your
personal feeling? Do you think that's true?
Speaker 6 (57:50):
I think it's quite possible.
Speaker 1 (57:52):
Really, what about his Quaker upbringing and being like devoted
to his wife, like, how in contrasting that with character
we see in other parts of his life, would that
just have been I don't know, how would you explain it?
Speaker 6 (58:04):
I think there are many facets to woman's character and
many compartments in his mind. He had this amazing ability
to blend in with people and groups ever he was,
and this saved him many times that he understood other people.
(58:25):
He had a mind like Shakespeare. I mean, who could
get into the mind very different people and to be
sympathetic with them. I don't know that he had a
Cherokee wife, but I think it's possible. And you know,
if you were with an Indian group, you had to
be sleeping with one woman or they would think you
were a very bad it was.
Speaker 1 (58:45):
I read it was inhospitable if you were a guest
in some of these tribes, they would If you would
not do that, it would be.
Speaker 6 (58:53):
You thought you were better or you know, you were
not one of them. So I just say it's possible.
Speaker 1 (59:00):
And I guess the way he fit in so well
with the Native Americans. And we'll talk more about him
being kidnapped by the Shawnee and all that, but the
fact that he was able to blend in so well,
I can see how that would make sense. That he
might have just because too be able to fit in
so well.
Speaker 6 (59:16):
It may have been a necessity, so he would have
known about this gap they went north from the Yadkin
to what was called Wolf Hills, which we call Abingdon, Virginia,
and there they found the trail that Boone was good
enough to read the sign the tracks, so they followed
it to the southwest over Powells River and Pole's Mountain
(59:39):
and they came to the Cumberland Mountains. And this is
a really dramatic place. You can go there and these
mountains have cliffs on them, and there's the most forbidding things.
It really is like it's threatening, these high cliffs, just
mile after mile after mile, and keep going and then
suddenly you see this gap between them like a gun sight,
(01:00:03):
and there it is. They found it what doctor Thomas
Walker called Cumberland Gap. And you cross that and there's
a river. You got to cross the Cumberland River. You
go through another gap and then you reach the Knob Country.
And the famous paintings are a Boone on top of
(01:00:25):
a hill seeing into the bluegrass in Kentucky, and this
is called the Pisga Vision. Moses on Pisga he could
look into the promised land. But Boone could go into
the promised land. Moses couldn't go right, So you have
this amazing idol of Boone in his group Here for
(01:00:46):
the Deer Buffalo Elk Beaver.
Speaker 1 (01:00:54):
Boone is now into Kentucky and what happened there will
shape the rest of his life and Americas. What's interesting
is that it's in the next ten years that most
of what he's famous for, the things that defined his life,
will happen. Mister Morgan had something to say about this
to this day. We put this quote in a frame
(01:01:18):
in our house, and we did it when we were
about thirty years old, so this would have been about
ten years ago. But you said in his mid thirties,
a man either reaches out towards risk and glory or
stays within the routines of the expected and ordinary. It
is the age when men leave safe homes and jobs
and go on voyages and odyssees and perform transforming sacrifices.
(01:01:42):
It's the age when Walt Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass
and Columbus started planning his voyage to the Indies. It's
an age at which visionaries become profits, or explorers or inventors,
or make fools of themselves trying. So I would have
read this book when I was about thirty years old,
and it just feels so true. This window of time
(01:02:06):
in life is so important. And you went on to
give these examples of work that these artists and poets
and explorers did when they were in their thirties, and
you made the point that much of Boone's life was
defined by this ten year period basically from seventeen seventy
to about seventeen eighty. The Cumberland Gap in Kentucky and
(01:02:29):
all these things.
Speaker 6 (01:02:30):
Things he's famous for. Yeah, we're done in that time. Yeah, well,
I got the idea from the study of the Romantic
poets words Worths and Coleridge lived much longer, but almost
everything that we associate with them is done that in
the ten years. And Walt Whitman is the perfect example.
That Whitman wrote all of these great poems just about
(01:02:52):
in that period, it's a little bit more about eleven years,
and devoted the rest of his life to writing prose.
Basically did write some poems. But I was also thinking
of physicists and mathematicians and that they do their great
work relatively early. Mathematicians even earlier, but physicists and other
scientists usual a little bit later. Yeah, novelists also novelists
(01:03:15):
usually get going about the age of thirty and at
the age of forty early forties, they've done most of
their great work. A few exceptions, but not Yeah Lenny.
Speaker 1 (01:03:28):
On this first episode, we basically covered the first thirty
five years of Daniel's life up to him traversing the
Cumberland Gap and going into Kentucky. This is just the
beginning of the famed part of his life. And remember
at this point no one knew his name. Daniel would
live to be eighty six years old. In the remaining
(01:03:51):
fifty one years of his life are more wild than
the first. The man had a drive and a deep
love of life kept him moving. But I'm still trying
to understand why this story matters. Understanding national archetypes helps
us see the framework of our thinking, what we value
(01:04:13):
and the things that seek to define us. A deeper
look into national identity and an awareness of this gives
us the right to evaluate the good and the not
so good. In the coming episodes, we'll explore the rest
of Boone's life, including the heroic rescue of his daughter
from Indians and the lore of an illegitimate daughter, the
(01:04:35):
death of his son, and fortunes Won and Lost will
also explore the historical revision of Boone and the controversy
of us celebrating him. It's improbable to think that after
listening to a few podcasts you could understand the fullness
of who Boone was, and it's my hope that you
might explore Boone yourself. Ultimately, I hope that his character,
(01:04:58):
both positive and negative, will make us more relevant today
in continuing to define American identity in my old my
our exploration of Boone is an appeal to the masses
to remember where we came from, and it's a cry
to not forget the American backwoodsman, because we're still here
(01:05:23):
and we deserve a lasting place at the American table
because it's in our DNA. Folks, I cannot thank you
enough for listening to the Bear Grease podcast. We're pouring
out everything we've got into these and thank you for
(01:05:46):
the iTunes reviews, and I ask those of you who
haven't to give us a review on iTunes and share
this podcast with your buddies. Thanks A ton
Host
Clay Newcomb
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