August 11, 2021 • 63 mins
On this episode of the Bear Grease Podcast, we’ll 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 the heck we’re still talking about him 200 years after his death. We’ll learn about the mechanism of archetypes, and Clay Newcomb will interview two New York Times best-selling authors Robert Morgan and Steven Rinella about their fascination with Boone. We'll learn that the truth is wilder than the myth. This is part one of our series on Ol’ Dan’l Boone, and in it we’ll walk through the first 35 years of Boone’s life. You’re not going to want to miss this one.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
M so as a storyteller, as a marketer, as a brander.
I like to say, they're 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. When I was a
(00:24):
little kid, people would say of people that like to
hunt and fish run around the woods, people would say,
he's a modern day Daniel Boom. He wants to be
just like Daniel Boom. On this episode of the Bargarase podcast,
will be exploring a story as American as cornbread and
black eyed Peas. We're talking about one of America's first heroes,
(00:48):
Daniel Boone. Will sift through the myth and truth and
discuss why the heck we're still talking about him two
hundred years after his death. We'll learn about the mechanism
of archetypes, and I'll interview two New York Times bestselling authors,
Stephen Ranella and Robert Morgan about their fascination with Boone.
(01:09):
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. You're not gonna wanna miss this one, but
first let me request of you two things. This series
(01:30):
is different than previous Burgers podcasts. It's a big bike
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 this, you'll
be glad you did. Lastly, take a quick inventory of
(01:51):
everything you know about Daniel Boone to give you a
jump start. I'll help you fit Dan into a timeline.
He would was born in seventeen thirty four and died
in eighteen twenty, But what did he do in between?
(02:18):
My name is Clay Nukelem 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 f HF Gear, American made purpose built hunting
(02:39):
and fishing gear as designed to be as rugged as
the places we explore. That Okay, this is Josh Lambridge Spillmaker.
(03:08):
Tell me everything you know about Daniel. I know he
was a big man, I know he fought for America
to keep all Americans free. That's what I know. You're
watching the old Disney Daniel Boone was a man. It's
a big man because he fought for America to capel American.
(03:29):
I'm shocked. You know that song. Okay, a couple of things.
Daniel Boone was five ft eight and way a hundred
and seventy five pounds. That literally just destroyed my my.
I thought Daniel Boon was like Paul Bunyon. Okay, and
the other thing in the song, it talks about him
wearing a coonskin cap, which he didn't he did. I
(03:49):
don't know where you're getting their information, but I've seen
the movies. He wore a coonskin cap. This is my
other buddy, Jonathan, tell me, uh, every thing you know
about Daniel Boone. How much time do you got tell
me everything. I literally don't know much other than his
name and that he was an American, that he was
(04:11):
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 was at the Alamo. I really, like
naturally want to say he was a part of the Alamo.
(04:33):
But then I feel like it was a guy the
the Jim Booe was that, that's the Jim Boos at
the Alamo. Like then I kept saying, and 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. The action adventure series Daniel
(04:57):
Boone ran on television from nineteens 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 seventy four, when a former school teacher
named John Philson published a single chapter in his book
(05:20):
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 in eighteen twenty, his first
(05:41):
biography was written, and authors have feverishly written about him
for the last two hundred years. Just in one a
new Boone biography came out. What did this man do?
And why are we infatuated with the life of this
back woodsman? This is Steve and Ella. I think the
(06:02):
people know that he was a woodsman and they know
he was a frontiersman. The reason I 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
self perpetu The fame was self perpetuating because there were
(06:24):
a lot of people, A lot of people were engaged
in the things that Boone was engaged here. 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. Do you really expect
me to run Mr Boone the way I see it running,
Beach Dyan. The myth and lore around Boone is thick,
(06:49):
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 and another. When
you get off, you don't get to choose who you
ride with. History allows us to look back at people
(07:11):
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. One man who I would have ridden a
(07:32):
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 firsthand sense of who
he was. Boone is shrouded in deep mystery. He's an
(07:52):
American legend icon and archetype. To sum up Boone's life,
he was a backwoodsman that taught us to chair fish, solitude,
and wilderness, which was a foreign concept to the world.
Raised the 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
(08:15):
Kentucky Frontier. 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
(08:37):
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 Boone. It's common for
(08:59):
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 Haines 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
(09:20):
buddy Seth Paynes. 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 some old work that's been done
on this by Carl Eung. There's about twelvish archetypes twelvish
(09:40):
universal characters. So as the storyteller, as a marketer, as
a brander, I like to say, they're 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. Um so and
so this is almost like something that's going on in
(10:01):
the background that we don't even realize, but we'll totally
identify with yeah, and 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 of an outlaw. You know, he's always
a rebel, he's always on the run, he's always something.
This person represents the character of an explorer, someone who's
(10:24):
always out in the wilderness looking for something to get into,
some expression of freedom. And these character types, or 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. Can you give me an example of
a national American figure that we've used as an archetype,
(10:46):
like like Johnny Cash. It's like an outlaw archetype. Yeah,
I love Johnny Cash as an archetype because I actually
think he's terribly complex. The Man in Black is I
mean a thousand present the rebel right. I mean, if
you picture Johnny Cash day, you'd see him, you know,
on a Harley with his guitar slung over his shoulder
(11:07):
or something, and always pushing the boundaries, always pushing it
back against societal norms and so and he's always trying
to to bring even in his music, you know, Wood
he Got Through 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
(11:28):
also extremely generous. I mean the stories I've heard about
Johnny Cash's generosity for everything from kids, to sick people
to the elderly. Um, 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
(11:51):
where we are. That's a good that's a good example
because what I see inside these archetypes and even inside
of Boon is that they repres sent to people that
really don't know them. This one dominant feature. 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.
(12:18):
That's something that we like. But that was actually a
pretty not I'm not gonna say a small part, but
there was much more to Boone's life than that. But
the point being, we we are embracing something. It's kind
of like a shroud of marketing around a person. It's branding. Yeah,
it's a hun and so you know, one of the
things that we like to say when we talk about
(12:39):
branding is that branding is biological. And so what we
do is humans, is we take a character or take
a person, and we impute to them or give to them.
Like the character type of the story that that you
know best sort of resonates with us internally. And I'll
tell you, man, the biggest characters in American history understand that,
(13:01):
know that and embrace it, and it becomes part of
their mystique and part of their branding, and that's what
gives them lasting influence. And that's what's wild about Boon
is it was clear that he, even 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, it's your story. He played the
(13:24):
part and it wasn't inauthentic. It wasn't it was It
wasn't like he was trying to drum up publicity 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 to
remember him. These archetypes basically are our human shortcuts to
(13:48):
understand the world around us. 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
(14:08):
firsthand 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
(14:29):
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
(14:53):
collect as much material and 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
(15:20):
weaver and a farmer. His residence was probably an only
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 cow pens were made for hurting cattle
at nights, and a cabin was built in which Miss
Boone spent the dairy season in attending to her milk.
(15:44):
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 Ms Boone always went personally to attend the dairy,
and her son Daniel was always attendant to watch her
(16:07):
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 rudy knob at
the end, which he called his herdsman's club. He became
an expert in using it to kill birds in small game.
(16:27):
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.
Daniel's brother, Samuel, was born in seventeen twenty eight. According
(16:47):
to the records of Squire Boone Jr. 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
he could do little more than rudely write his own name.
(17:16):
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
after my passing. We're gonna camp around Boone for a
few episodes. He influenced the American Hedgemont the way that
we think and to understand who we are. I think
(17:39):
we need to acknowledge and be aware of the boon influence.
I'm interested in how Boone has influenced my life unknowingly.
Stephen Runnella is the founder of a company called meat Eater,
the company that this Here Bear Grease podcast is produced by.
He's in New York's best selling author, an American Hunter,
(18:02):
but he's also known as a national Boone expert. Runella
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 real treat to get
to sit with Steve and talk Boone. There's been like
countless boon biography has written since the time of just
(18:25):
after he died. Has recently sent me up still So okay,
so people have this I can, and that is exactly
what I want to talk to you about. Why are
we so well? I want to I want to dive
into your personal interest in Boone? Why were you so
(18:48):
interested in boon Man when 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. It means like the consummate woodsman, right, It's
(19:11):
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 I know that
as the guy became famous, he became famous in his
own life. He was you know, he could almost argue
(19:35):
he's one of those first he was one of those
people that kind of became famous for being famous, Like
the fame self perpetu. The fame was self perpetuating because Um,
there were a lot of people, a lot of people
were engaged and the things that Boone was engaged in.
(19:57):
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 front of the American Revolution. There were a lot
of people who one 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
(20:17):
of people did this stuff. Boone wasn't the first one
to go through the Cumberland Gap, and of course he
wasn't the first one. Boone wasn't the first year American
to go through the Cumberland Gap. But he owns that
event because like he got he got a notoriety and
I'm not I'm glad it happened. And people started to
(20:38):
ask questions. They talked to his relatives, they talked to
the children of his children, and and his body like
built up. So you have this guy, like why do
we know um so much? About him. But there were
all their long hunters. They came figure out what their
names were. Yeah, who were his contemporaries? Because I know
because it never like the seed never got started, the
(20:59):
idea that like to to to investigate an individual, that
happened with Boone, And the investigation continued and continue to
continue to the point where we put together for like
really remarkable. Um, it's really remarkable biography of dates and
where he went, what he did, what his feelings about
things were. Um. And then people tracked down the people
(21:20):
he hung out with, they tracked down his relatives. There's
a later on a researcher like a historian his time
whever he went to talk to Boone's kid. Yeah, relates
the story where you have insight into Um. The story
I'm gonna tell you is an example of like how
thorough the investigation of Boone was. Right, Boone became a
(21:44):
little bit famous and was well known. I mean, he
wasn't like everybody else he was. He was exemplary. People
recognized in his own time that he was an outstanding woodsman.
But as he became famous, 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
(22:05):
a hill and went snow right. He had a little
bit of fame, which is the initial bit of the
thing going. But it led to investigation, which led to investigation,
which led to an investigation. Were eventually you know, you
have this like this one individual of of dozens of
long hunters, of his contemporaries, this one individual who we
put together a ton of information about, and there's a
(22:25):
there's an interesting thing that comes from like very late
in his life. Someone was interviewing one of his children
one time, and the kids describing this is that this
is after the after the bulk of the Indian Wars
are over, this is after the American Revolution. His kids
describing being out hunting with his father. I think maybe
it would be best if we hear it in the
(22:47):
words of Nathan Boone himself. In the fall of 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 was frosty weather and
the leaves were falling. About the second morning, a foggy morning.
(23:10):
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 the ball about
the size of a buckshot, that one I used to
kill birds and squirrels near Crooked Creek back of Point Pleasant.
(23:30):
This larger rifle was made by my father and William R. Buckle,
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 had cut off. Then he followed
the trail found blood. Sixty year eighty yards further he
(23:52):
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 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
(24:14):
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 the first day.
From these two or three bear we saved all the meat,
and of the ten or fifteen deer, we saved the
best hind quarters. On the fifth night, about midnight, I
(24:35):
had been asleep for some time, but my father, Daniel Boone,
heard of 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
it was made by their hatchet. He concluded that Indians
had probably seen the fire at our camp, and we're
making a raft to cross. We carried meat and skins
(24:57):
to our canoe, which was twenty five yards 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 chopping ceased.
We then went to our canoe. There we stayed some
ten minutes until we heard the Indians paddling in the water.
(25:18):
At that time, We pushed off, and father ordered me
to roll his blanket around myself and lie down in
the canoe. He said, in the stern put the paddle
carefully in the water, and then gave a push. We
went forward noiselessly and were soon in the main current,
which washed us down the river. On the way, Father
put his head over the canoe, close to the water,
(25:39):
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 stream and
escapes and the kids says. His kid says, in that moment,
I kind of understood the year that that man lived
(26:02):
with his whole life. 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 Boone's hunting partners.
All we know is like basically he got killed one
of dying in a hollow tree and the story mm hmm.
But with him, man, we got all the goods. Yeah,
almost too many goods, because there's a lot as you know,
(26:23):
there's people that are always bringing an artifact. Oh this
is Boone's gone. This is Boone's hatchet. You know, it's
all hardwash. 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 includes well,
it wasn't a full biography, but a guy came down
and interviewed him and included him in this book that
(26:48):
went global and it was about the American frontier. So
was it a combination that the war the eyes of
the world. We're on this boundary between the American colony
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
(27:11):
was included in part of this book. Sky wrote, this
included Boone, and then all of a sudden, everybody's eyes
were on Boone and he was mythologized first. It's kind
of funny because like the first treatments of him were
overblown mythologizing. You know, um, guys like him and Davy
(27:31):
Crockett had the same thing, like very people like like
the lump these guys together with very different people born
far apart um, you know, just very different. But they're
both hunters, and they're both frontiersmen to some extent, but
they both had this thing where they were living with
people telling crazy stories about them that weren't even true.
And it became later historians based on this infatuation with
(27:55):
these guys, these like superhuman individuals, you know, uh, based
on the historians later kind of like a type of
book 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, sub genre of
Boone literature is when people stopped and been like, Okay,
(28:18):
obviously that's all both, but what was this guy like? Like?
What really was he like? And then when you look
at what he really was like, it's more interesting than
the mythologized version. 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,
(28:41):
including Steve Ronnella, as the Bible of Boon biographies, and
it's simply titled Boone. It's written by Cornell University professor
Robert Morgan. I was unsure if Mr Morgan was still
professionally active. But I reached out to him and was
delighted when he was handed back within a few hours,
(29:02):
inviting me to his home in New York. Mr 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 bestselling author who calls himself
a poet that writes some fiction. Poets are a unique lot.
(29:24):
They're often introspective and unusually contemplated. Sometimes you meet someone
with a spirit about them that seems to pervade the
space they fell. Mr Morgan is such a man. They
were applaid shirt and suspenders. His accomplished professional career hasn't
overshadowed as rural roots. I was struck by his stoic
(29:45):
yet joyful demeanor, his humility and confidence, and his exhaustive
familiarity with Boone. It's an honor to introduce you to
Mr Robert Morgan. I I've been fascinated with Boone really
since I read your book, probably ten years ago. And
(30:06):
I would have known Boon just from the typical way
an American kid would have known Boone, you know, just
from from the Disney movies, kind of odd places sometimes
that his his name would come up, but really knew
nothing about him. And then when I read your book,
I was enthralled with who this guy really was. What
(30:31):
was your interest in Boone originally? Well, when I was
growing up, my dad would talk about him. He 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, is a very distant relation. Boone and I
(30:54):
have a common ancestor in Wales and North Wales. But
I think the first thing to know about the Boon
families is they were Quakers, and the Boone family in
way down in in the southwestern England around Exeter, they
were weavers and blacksmiths. So this had a lot of
(31:14):
influence on Boone's character all the way through his life.
And of course they talked pacifism, quietness. The mother from
Wales was a musical person. It's love to sing, and
this also was an influence. So this family taught him
this very pacifistic way of life. And it's odd because
(31:36):
he's associated with Indian fighting and hunting, and of course
that's part of the myth that he killed lots of Indians.
He may have killed only one in his life. The
real Boon 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
(32:00):
and all these things in the movies and the legends,
they do overlap some. I think the legend is has
its roots and Boon, but he's actually a very different person. Uh.
The monument in in Frankfort, Kentucky has him killing panthers
and fighting with the Indians and that sort of thing.
And and but that's not the real Moon. He was
(32:22):
very pacifistic, very calm person, spoke calmly in a very
low voice, and 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
(32:44):
the brotherhood of all men, 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 he could hunt, he could fine animals,
he could trap. He lived out in the woods with
his mother in the summertime. She took care of the cows,
(33:07):
and he wanted it already to live like an Indian
then to spend time in the forest, and there were
Indians around. It's clear that he had a lot of
Native American influence even from an early age. That overlap
of society in the Pennsylvania area. That would have been
pretty common, Like he would have just been out wandering
(33:28):
around and run into Native Americans that he could have befriended.
That would not have been hostile, right his His parents
hosted Indians. Indians become and stay there in their house
from time to time. Pennsylvania and especially that area had
a much better relationship with with indigenous people than most
(33:48):
of the other states. The land was bought from them
for one thing, and I think there's only one battle
with Indians and all the history of that part of Pennsylvania.
Soon 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
(34:12):
world of the forest where 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. At the very beginning,
he was drawn to live like an Indian. Then like
(34:35):
an Indian. It was always there from the very beginning.
This is Stephen Ronella. He became those this guy like
brought home a lot of game and also people that
would begin relationships with Indians that lived in his area.
But when he lived there, as he became older and
became being a man, he became and this is kind
(34:56):
of like where his real fame started to be a
boon became a long hunter. He had always hunted for
the family, okay, meaning he would hunt bears, he would
hunt deer. They like to eat bear meat, they like
to use dear meat, they ate it, but mainly was
like the primary asset. The primary good you got from
deer was leather, and people on the frontier preferred bear
(35:17):
meat over dear meat. I'm sure he had probably always
been involved in some like 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,
otter in order to sell goods. And that's really the
(35:40):
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. His big
famous move was when he moved into the Kentucky territory,
was hunting out looking for good hunting ground. It's important
(36:02):
to remember that these English commoners didn't know how to
hunt when they arrived in the New World and 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
(36:25):
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 Boon 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,
(36:46):
it wouldn't just be hunting that he learned from them.
He adopted select parts of their worldview that he saw
as superior to the European worldview. I want to read
an excerpt for Mr Morgan's book on your European and
Native American world views. Colonists were surprised that Indians showed
(37:08):
so 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
(37:29):
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 a tract of air or sunlight. Indians were rich
by desiring Little William Cronin rights. The English passion for
(37:50):
accumulating wealth struck 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 the English
were in league with evil spirits. All too soon, the
(38:12):
Indians concluded the invaders 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 towards the land and its inhabitants.
(38:35):
Later in Boone's life, we'd see that he never values
accumulation of wealth, and frankly wasn't very good at it.
Back to Mr Morgan describing Boone as a young man,
but this famous quote from the father who was told
by a relative that Daniel Leely wasn't going to school.
(38:56):
He was skipping school, and he hadn't learned to spell.
And the father say, let the others learn to spell.
Daniel is the hunter. He was a will bring us
the meat. So while he was growing up there he
he was a prankster. Also, 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
(39:18):
keep people laughing. He had a dynamic person charismatic personality.
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
(39:43):
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 Adkin Valley
about seventeen fifty or fifty one, because that was even wilder,
and he began to live in the forest, go for
(40:06):
longer hunts, go out trapping, and he became known. And
he would have been a teenager at that time when
he moved to the Yadkin in North Carolina, he would
have been sixteen or seventeen, so just the prime budding
age for a young man and outdoorsman to really start
to so was Oates. He soon became well known as
(40:30):
a marksman and a hunter and the people. Some people
were jealous of him, but he was so skillful as
a tracker, as a hunter even then, even even at
the age of seventeen or eighteen, that his legend began
to grow. This is a good place to give a
(40:59):
high level review of Boone's early life. He was born
on October sevent thirty four, near Reading, Pennsylvania. He was
the 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.
(41:20):
His dad's 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 in
the colonies. It was here that Daniel started to make
a name for himself as a hunter and explorer. I
(41:40):
want to read another short excerpt from Mr Morgan's book.
From the time he was a boy, Boone had a
flair for the dramatic. 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
(42:01):
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
(42:24):
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 kettle herself and do the milking,
strain the milk and put it in the springhouse. To
stay cool, calm and prayerful, she worked at churning butter
(42:46):
from the clavered 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 Olie Hills all
the way to the never Seek Mountain range west of
the Monocacy Valley. They found no sign of Daniel that afternoon,
(43:09):
but starting out. Early the next morning, they traveled further
in 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 along
(43:29):
on the south shoulder of the hill, nine miles from
the pasture. The search party accused him of scaring 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 true or
(43:51):
just one of the legends that grew around Boon 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 lost from
(44:13):
Marion Joseph. The boys 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. For Boone, there
(44:35):
was something 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 Boon that never quite grew up. Back to Mr Morgan,
as he describes a big event in young Daniel's life,
(45:00):
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 John's George Washington's forces that are going to
join the British led by General Braddock, and everybody knows
(45:24):
the story of Braddock's defeat. They moved towards the Fort
Duquesne and uh 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 blacksmith teamster,
meaning he he drove wagons, drove wagons, but around the campfires.
(45:45):
He had met a man called Finlay, and Finlay had
told him about his trip into Kentucky. He had going
down the Ohio River as a peddler, he was a businessman,
going all the way to the falls where was now Louisville.
That he had traded with the Shawnees at the village
of Eski Parka Thiki, which is where Winchester, Kentucky is now,
(46:09):
and he 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 escu Parka Thiki, and Boon
determined them that someday he was going to the Bluegrass.
(46:31):
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 it's really bizarre to think about it
now because we have highway systems and do we have
(46:52):
this modern transportation. It's almost like you have to reel
yourself deeply back into history and a race. How you
con driving a car, get an airplane. I mean, these
people were confined massively by transportation, so Kentucky would have
been like another planet. It was considered unreasonable for several reasons.
The Indians it's dangerous to go there, had to climb
(47:15):
over the mountains Blue Ridge, the Alleghanies to get there,
and the Cumberlands. But they were also forbidden to go
there after the French and Indian War, that that was
to be divided up for the officers and ordinary people
weren't supposed to go. Now, some white explorers had gone there,
and uh Dr Thomas Walker I believe had actually found
(47:38):
what we call Cumberland Gap, and he's the one who
named it. We think John Finley was twenty years older
than Boone and told Dan some marvelous tales of going
into Kentucky. Findley would have been the man in Boone's
life who inadvertently steered him into what many would say
was his calling death Deny. He must have noted that
(48:02):
young Daniel was highly interested in his stories of Kentucky,
because ten years later he'd go visit Boon at his
house and proposed a wild plan, but Finlay showed up
as a traitor and he had a little money. They
planned this trip. They got together with several people in
(48:24):
the spring of seventeen sixty nine and left on first
of May. 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 Finlay. He wasn't able to to
outfit a group to go, and he had other things
on his mind. When he got back from Braddock's defeat
(48:47):
that trip, he was in love with this beautiful girl,
Rebecca Brian and they were married, uh not too long after.
And Boon had a family soon and you know how
to find arm and he had to support them by
by working as a teamster. And and U primarily as
a trapper, hunting deer. In the summertime that he hunted
(49:10):
deer for the hides because the hide was in its
best condition and a hide was worth a Spanish dollar,
so a hide became a buck. Right in wintertime, he
primarily trapped for fur because that's when it was in
its prime, so That's what he was doing most of
the time, right. He also went off on a trip
(49:33):
to Florida, of all things, Yeah, and actually bought him
a bit of of land down there, but Rebecca refused
to go. And so that was in seventeen sixty five
that he went to Florida. He didn't he owned land
near Pensacola. He did. He bought some land and came back,
arrived on Christmas to take his family there, and Rebecca
(49:54):
just put her foot down she would not go. I
have in my notes here Boon was like a typical
timeshare Florida owner who bought his land and never went back.
And during 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
(50:18):
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, in a different mentality.
(50:38):
Who was said that Boone was fiddle footed that 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 I think of people coming from Europe,
mostly poor people who never had to hunt it. Hunting
(51:01):
was for the 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 you
get a gun and you could go anywhere you wanted.
You could, you could explore that. And for the Scotch
(51:21):
Irish it really was 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 and make sure the Indians
are cleared out, and you could grow things, you could hunt,
(51:41):
claim a new life. 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, and you could go further
down the Ohio over into Ohio over into what became Indiana, Illinois,
(52:05):
and beyond that the Mississippi Valley, and beyond that the
Missouri Valley and these mountains. You heard of the snow
Cap and uh, that was really thrilling. People were and
the women, not just the men, the women wanted to
go there too. It was it was a very exciting time.
(52:26):
So we've covered about thirty years of Daniel's life. He
was a backwoods kid, influenced by Quaker and 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
(52:47):
fifty six, he married the beautiful, black haired and black
eyed Rebecca Brian 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 Mr Morgan will
get back to Daniel and John Finlay's first trip into Kentucky.
(53:12):
And it's worth noting for the boon 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. Okay, they they got together.
(53:33):
There's a lot of disagreement about this, but somebody funded
this finlay may have 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 have been
going there on the warriors Path, and if they could
(53:56):
find the warriors Path, they could follow it out of it,
take them through the gap into Kentucky. And this is
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. They would.
I mean there was enough contact, particularly Boone. I mean
(54:16):
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, because I have
actually met African Americans who claimed to be descended from Daniel. Really,
(54:37):
I have what what is your what is your personal feeling?
Do you think that's true? I think it's quite possible. 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? I
think there are many facets character and many compartments in
(55:02):
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 he understood other people. He
had a mind like Shakespeare. I mean, who could get
into the mind very different people and to be sympathetic
(55:23):
with them. I don't know that he had a Cherokee wife,
but I think it's possible. And uh, 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 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
(55:44):
be you you thought you were better, or you know,
you were not one of them. So I just say
it's possible. Well, I guess the way he fit in
so well with the Native Americans, and we'll talk more
about him being kidnapped by the shine and that, but
the fact that he was able to blend in so well,
I can see how that would make sense. That he
(56:05):
might have just because to be able to fit in
so well, it may have been a necessity, so he
would have known about this gap. They went north from
the Atkin 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,
(56:25):
so they followed it to the southwest over Powell's River
and Powell's Mountain, 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. It's like it's threatening,
these high cliffs, just mile after mile after mile and
(56:49):
keep going and then suddenly you see this gap between them,
like a gun side, and there it is. They found
it what Dr. 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
(57:11):
you reached the Knob Country. And the famous paintings are
a boon on top of the hill seeing into the
blue grass Kentucky, and this is called the Pizga Vision.
Moses on Pizga he could look into the Promised Land.
But Boone could go into the promised land. Moses couldn't
(57:32):
go right right. So you have this amazing idol of
the boon in his group here for the deer, buffalo
and elk beaver. Boone is now into Kentucky and what
happened there will shape the rest of his life and
(57:52):
America's 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. Mr Morgan had something
to say about this to this day. We put this
quote in in a frame in our house, and we
did it when we were about thirty years old, so
(58:14):
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. It's the age when Walt Whitman
(58:35):
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.
(58:56):
This this window of time 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
(59:19):
Cumberland Gap in Kentucky and all these things things he's
famous for. Yeah, we've done in that time. Yeah, Well
it's uh. I got the idea from the study of
the Romantic poets words Worth in Coleridge lived much longer,
but almost everything that we associate with them has done
in that in the ten years and more. Equipment is
(59:40):
the perfect example that Whitman wrote all of these great poems,
it's about in that period, it's a little bit more
about eleven years, and devoted the rest of his life
to writing prose. Basically write some poems. Uh, but I
was also thinking of physicists and mathematicians, and yeah that
they do their great work relatively early. Mathematics actions even earlier,
(01:00:00):
but physicist and other scientists use it a little bit later. Novelist. Also,
novelists usually get going about the age of thirty and
at the age of forty early forties, like none most
of the great work a few exceptions, but on this
(01:00:21):
first episode we've 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 eighties six years old. In the remaining fifty one
(01:00:44):
years of his life are more wild than the first.
The man had a drive and a deep love of
life that 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 and
(01:01:05):
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 will explore the rest of Boone's life,
including the heroic rescue of his daughter from Indians and
the lore of an illegitimate daughter, the death of his son,
(01:01:29):
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 Boon was,
and it's my hope that you might explore Boone yourself. Ultimately,
(01:01:49):
I hope that his character, both positive and negative, will
make us more relevant today and continuing to define American
identity in I Oh 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,
(01:02:13):
because we're still here and we deserve a lasting place
at the American table because it's in our d n A. Folks,
I cannot thank you enough for listening to the Beargrease podcast.
(01:02:34):
We're pouring out everything we've got into these and thank
you for the iTunes reviews, and I asked those of
you who haven't to give us a review on iTunes
and share this podcast with your buddies. Thanks A ton
M so as a storyteller, as a marketer, as a brander.
I like to say, they're 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. When I was a
(00:24):
little kid, people would say of people that like to
hunt and fish run around the woods, people would say,
he's a modern day Daniel Boom. He wants to be
just like Daniel Boom. On this episode of the Bargarase podcast,
will be exploring a story as American as cornbread and
black eyed Peas. We're talking about one of America's first heroes,
(00:48):
Daniel Boone. Will sift through the myth and truth and
discuss why the heck we're still talking about him two
hundred years after his death. We'll learn about the mechanism
of archetypes, and I'll interview two New York Times bestselling authors,
Stephen Ranella and Robert Morgan about their fascination with Boone.
(01:09):
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. You're not gonna wanna miss this one, but
first let me request of you two things. This series
(01:30):
is different than previous Burgers podcasts. It's a big bike
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 this, you'll
be glad you did. Lastly, take a quick inventory of
(01:51):
everything you know about Daniel Boone to give you a
jump start. I'll help you fit Dan into a timeline.
He would was born in seventeen thirty four and died
in eighteen twenty, But what did he do in between?
(02:18):
My name is Clay Nukelem 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 f HF Gear, American made purpose built hunting
(02:39):
and fishing gear as designed to be as rugged as
the places we explore. That Okay, this is Josh Lambridge Spillmaker.
(03:08):
Tell me everything you know about Daniel. I know he
was a big man, I know he fought for America
to keep all Americans free. That's what I know. You're
watching the old Disney Daniel Boone was a man. It's
a big man because he fought for America to capel American.
(03:29):
I'm shocked. You know that song. Okay, a couple of things.
Daniel Boone was five ft eight and way a hundred
and seventy five pounds. That literally just destroyed my my.
I thought Daniel Boon was like Paul Bunyon. Okay, and
the other thing in the song, it talks about him
wearing a coonskin cap, which he didn't he did. I
(03:49):
don't know where you're getting their information, but I've seen
the movies. He wore a coonskin cap. This is my
other buddy, Jonathan, tell me, uh, every thing you know
about Daniel Boone. How much time do you got tell
me everything. I literally don't know much other than his
name and that he was an American, that he was
(04:11):
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 was at the Alamo. I really, like
naturally want to say he was a part of the Alamo.
(04:33):
But then I feel like it was a guy the
the Jim Booe was that, that's the Jim Boos at
the Alamo. Like then I kept saying, and 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. The action adventure series Daniel
(04:57):
Boone ran on television from nineteens 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 seventy four, when a former school teacher
named John Philson published a single chapter in his book
(05:20):
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 in eighteen twenty, his first
(05:41):
biography was written, and authors have feverishly written about him
for the last two hundred years. Just in one a
new Boone biography came out. What did this man do?
And why are we infatuated with the life of this
back woodsman? This is Steve and Ella. I think the
(06:02):
people know that he was a woodsman and they know
he was a frontiersman. The reason I 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
self perpetu The fame was self perpetuating because there were
(06:24):
a lot of people, A lot of people were engaged
in the things that Boone was engaged here. 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. Do you really expect
me to run Mr Boone the way I see it running,
Beach Dyan. The myth and lore around Boone is thick,
(06:49):
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 and another. When
you get off, you don't get to choose who you
ride with. History allows us to look back at people
(07:11):
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. One man who I would have ridden a
(07:32):
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 firsthand sense of who
he was. Boone is shrouded in deep mystery. He's an
(07:52):
American legend icon and archetype. To sum up Boone's life,
he was a backwoodsman that taught us to chair fish, solitude,
and wilderness, which was a foreign concept to the world.
Raised the 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
(08:15):
Kentucky Frontier. 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
(08:37):
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 Boone. It's common for
(08:59):
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 Haines 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
(09:20):
buddy Seth Paynes. 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 some old work that's been done
on this by Carl Eung. There's about twelvish archetypes twelvish
(09:40):
universal characters. So as the storyteller, as a marketer, as
a brander, I like to say, they're 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. Um so and
so this is almost like something that's going on in
(10:01):
the background that we don't even realize, but we'll totally
identify with yeah, and 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 of an outlaw. You know, he's always
a rebel, he's always on the run, he's always something.
This person represents the character of an explorer, someone who's
(10:24):
always out in the wilderness looking for something to get into,
some expression of freedom. And these character types, or 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. Can you give me an example of
a national American figure that we've used as an archetype,
(10:46):
like like Johnny Cash. It's like an outlaw archetype. Yeah,
I love Johnny Cash as an archetype because I actually
think he's terribly complex. The Man in Black is I
mean a thousand present the rebel right. I mean, if
you picture Johnny Cash day, you'd see him, you know,
on a Harley with his guitar slung over his shoulder
(11:07):
or something, and always pushing the boundaries, always pushing it
back against societal norms and so and he's always trying
to to bring even in his music, you know, Wood
he Got Through 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
(11:28):
also extremely generous. I mean the stories I've heard about
Johnny Cash's generosity for everything from kids, to sick people
to the elderly. Um, 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
(11:51):
where we are. That's a good that's a good example
because what I see inside these archetypes and even inside
of Boon is that they repres sent to people that
really don't know them. This one dominant feature. 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.
(12:18):
That's something that we like. But that was actually a
pretty not I'm not gonna say a small part, but
there was much more to Boone's life than that. But
the point being, we we are embracing something. It's kind
of like a shroud of marketing around a person. It's branding. Yeah,
it's a hun and so you know, one of the
things that we like to say when we talk about
(12:39):
branding is that branding is biological. And so what we
do is humans, is we take a character or take
a person, and we impute to them or give to them.
Like the character type of the story that that you
know best sort of resonates with us internally. And I'll
tell you, man, the biggest characters in American history understand that,
(13:01):
know that and embrace it, and it becomes part of
their mystique and part of their branding, and that's what
gives them lasting influence. And that's what's wild about Boon
is it was clear that he, even 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, it's your story. He played the
(13:24):
part and it wasn't inauthentic. It wasn't it was It
wasn't like he was trying to drum up publicity 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 to
remember him. These archetypes basically are our human shortcuts to
(13:48):
understand the world around us. 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
(14:08):
firsthand 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
(14:29):
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
(14:53):
collect as much material and 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
(15:20):
weaver and a farmer. His residence was probably an only
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 cow pens were made for hurting cattle
at nights, and a cabin was built in which Miss
Boone spent the dairy season in attending to her milk.
(15:44):
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 Ms Boone always went personally to attend the dairy,
and her son Daniel was always attendant to watch her
(16:07):
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 rudy knob at
the end, which he called his herdsman's club. He became
an expert in using it to kill birds in small game.
(16:27):
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.
Daniel's brother, Samuel, was born in seventeen twenty eight. According
(16:47):
to the records of Squire Boone Jr. 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
he could do little more than rudely write his own name.
(17:16):
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
after my passing. We're gonna camp around Boone for a
few episodes. He influenced the American Hedgemont the way that
we think and to understand who we are. I think
(17:39):
we need to acknowledge and be aware of the boon influence.
I'm interested in how Boone has influenced my life unknowingly.
Stephen Runnella is the founder of a company called meat Eater,
the company that this Here Bear Grease podcast is produced by.
He's in New York's best selling author, an American Hunter,
(18:02):
but he's also known as a national Boone expert. Runella
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 real treat to get
to sit with Steve and talk Boone. There's been like
countless boon biography has written since the time of just
(18:25):
after he died. Has recently sent me up still So okay,
so people have this I can, and that is exactly
what I want to talk to you about. Why are
we so well? I want to I want to dive
into your personal interest in Boone? Why were you so
(18:48):
interested in boon Man when 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. It means like the consummate woodsman, right, It's
(19:11):
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 I know that
as the guy became famous, he became famous in his
own life. He was you know, he could almost argue
(19:35):
he's one of those first he was one of those
people that kind of became famous for being famous, Like
the fame self perpetu. The fame was self perpetuating because Um,
there were a lot of people, a lot of people
were engaged and the things that Boone was engaged in.
(19:57):
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 front of the American Revolution. There were a lot
of people who one 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
(20:17):
of people did this stuff. Boone wasn't the first one
to go through the Cumberland Gap, and of course he
wasn't the first one. Boone wasn't the first year American
to go through the Cumberland Gap. But he owns that
event because like he got he got a notoriety and
I'm not I'm glad it happened. And people started to
(20:38):
ask questions. They talked to his relatives, they talked to
the children of his children, and and his body like
built up. So you have this guy, like why do
we know um so much? About him. But there were
all their long hunters. They came figure out what their
names were. Yeah, who were his contemporaries? Because I know
because it never like the seed never got started, the
(20:59):
idea that like to to to investigate an individual, that
happened with Boone, And the investigation continued and continue to
continue to the point where we put together for like
really remarkable. Um, it's really remarkable biography of dates and
where he went, what he did, what his feelings about
things were. Um. And then people tracked down the people
(21:20):
he hung out with, they tracked down his relatives. There's
a later on a researcher like a historian his time
whever he went to talk to Boone's kid. Yeah, relates
the story where you have insight into Um. The story
I'm gonna tell you is an example of like how
thorough the investigation of Boone was. Right, Boone became a
(21:44):
little bit famous and was well known. I mean, he
wasn't like everybody else he was. He was exemplary. People
recognized in his own time that he was an outstanding woodsman.
But as he became famous, 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
(22:05):
a hill and went snow right. He had a little
bit of fame, which is the initial bit of the
thing going. But it led to investigation, which led to investigation,
which led to an investigation. Were eventually you know, you
have this like this one individual of of dozens of
long hunters, of his contemporaries, this one individual who we
put together a ton of information about, and there's a
(22:25):
there's an interesting thing that comes from like very late
in his life. Someone was interviewing one of his children
one time, and the kids describing this is that this
is after the after the bulk of the Indian Wars
are over, this is after the American Revolution. His kids
describing being out hunting with his father. I think maybe
it would be best if we hear it in the
(22:47):
words of Nathan Boone himself. In the fall of 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 was frosty weather and
the leaves were falling. About the second morning, a foggy morning.
(23:10):
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 the ball about
the size of a buckshot, that one I used to
kill birds and squirrels near Crooked Creek back of Point Pleasant.
(23:30):
This larger rifle was made by my father and William R. Buckle,
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 had cut off. Then he followed
the trail found blood. Sixty year eighty yards further he
(23:52):
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 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
(24:14):
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 the first day.
From these two or three bear we saved all the meat,
and of the ten or fifteen deer, we saved the
best hind quarters. On the fifth night, about midnight, I
(24:35):
had been asleep for some time, but my father, Daniel Boone,
heard of 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
it was made by their hatchet. He concluded that Indians
had probably seen the fire at our camp, and we're
making a raft to cross. We carried meat and skins
(24:57):
to our canoe, which was twenty five yards 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 chopping ceased.
We then went to our canoe. There we stayed some
ten minutes until we heard the Indians paddling in the water.
(25:18):
At that time, We pushed off, and father ordered me
to roll his blanket around myself and lie down in
the canoe. He said, in the stern put the paddle
carefully in the water, and then gave a push. We
went forward noiselessly and were soon in the main current,
which washed us down the river. On the way, Father
put his head over the canoe, close to the water,
(25:39):
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 stream and
escapes and the kids says. His kid says, in that moment,
I kind of understood the year that that man lived
(26:02):
with his whole life. 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 Boone's hunting partners.
All we know is like basically he got killed one
of dying in a hollow tree and the story mm hmm.
But with him, man, we got all the goods. Yeah,
almost too many goods, because there's a lot as you know,
(26:23):
there's people that are always bringing an artifact. Oh this
is Boone's gone. This is Boone's hatchet. You know, it's
all hardwash. 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 includes well,
it wasn't a full biography, but a guy came down
and interviewed him and included him in this book that
(26:48):
went global and it was about the American frontier. So
was it a combination that the war the eyes of
the world. We're on this boundary between the American colony
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
(27:11):
was included in part of this book. Sky wrote, this
included Boone, and then all of a sudden, everybody's eyes
were on Boone and he was mythologized first. It's kind
of funny because like the first treatments of him were
overblown mythologizing. You know, um, guys like him and Davy
(27:31):
Crockett had the same thing, like very people like like
the lump these guys together with very different people born
far apart um, you know, just very different. But they're
both hunters, and they're both frontiersmen to some extent, but
they both had this thing where they were living with
people telling crazy stories about them that weren't even true.
And it became later historians based on this infatuation with
(27:55):
these guys, these like superhuman individuals, you know, uh, based
on the historians later kind of like a type of
book 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, sub genre of
Boone literature is when people stopped and been like, Okay,
(28:18):
obviously that's all both, but what was this guy like? Like?
What really was he like? And then when you look
at what he really was like, it's more interesting than
the mythologized version. 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,
(28:41):
including Steve Ronnella, as the Bible of Boon biographies, and
it's simply titled Boone. It's written by Cornell University professor
Robert Morgan. I was unsure if Mr Morgan was still
professionally active. But I reached out to him and was
delighted when he was handed back within a few hours,
(29:02):
inviting me to his home in New York. Mr 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 bestselling author who calls himself
a poet that writes some fiction. Poets are a unique lot.
(29:24):
They're often introspective and unusually contemplated. Sometimes you meet someone
with a spirit about them that seems to pervade the
space they fell. Mr Morgan is such a man. They
were applaid shirt and suspenders. His accomplished professional career hasn't
overshadowed as rural roots. I was struck by his stoic
(29:45):
yet joyful demeanor, his humility and confidence, and his exhaustive
familiarity with Boone. It's an honor to introduce you to
Mr Robert Morgan. I I've been fascinated with Boone really
since I read your book, probably ten years ago. And
(30:06):
I would have known Boon just from the typical way
an American kid would have known Boone, you know, just
from from the Disney movies, kind of odd places sometimes
that his his name would come up, but really knew
nothing about him. And then when I read your book,
I was enthralled with who this guy really was. What
(30:31):
was your interest in Boone originally? Well, when I was
growing up, my dad would talk about him. He 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, is a very distant relation. Boone and I
(30:54):
have a common ancestor in Wales and North Wales. But
I think the first thing to know about the Boon
families is they were Quakers, and the Boone family in
way down in in the southwestern England around Exeter, they
were weavers and blacksmiths. So this had a lot of
(31:14):
influence on Boone's character all the way through his life.
And of course they talked pacifism, quietness. The mother from
Wales was a musical person. It's love to sing, and
this also was an influence. So this family taught him
this very pacifistic way of life. And it's odd because
(31:36):
he's associated with Indian fighting and hunting, and of course
that's part of the myth that he killed lots of Indians.
He may have killed only one in his life. The
real Boon 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
(32:00):
and all these things in the movies and the legends,
they do overlap some. I think the legend is has
its roots and Boon, but he's actually a very different person. Uh.
The monument in in Frankfort, Kentucky has him killing panthers
and fighting with the Indians and that sort of thing.
And and but that's not the real Moon. He was
(32:22):
very pacifistic, very calm person, spoke calmly in a very
low voice, and 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
(32:44):
the brotherhood of all men, 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 he could hunt, he could fine animals,
he could trap. He lived out in the woods with
his mother in the summertime. She took care of the cows,
(33:07):
and he wanted it already to live like an Indian
then to spend time in the forest, and there were
Indians around. It's clear that he had a lot of
Native American influence even from an early age. That overlap
of society in the Pennsylvania area. That would have been
pretty common, Like he would have just been out wandering
(33:28):
around and run into Native Americans that he could have befriended.
That would not have been hostile, right his His parents
hosted Indians. Indians become and stay there in their house
from time to time. Pennsylvania and especially that area had
a much better relationship with with indigenous people than most
(33:48):
of the other states. The land was bought from them
for one thing, and I think there's only one battle
with Indians and all the history of that part of Pennsylvania.
Soon 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
(34:12):
world of the forest where 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. At the very beginning,
he was drawn to live like an Indian. Then like
(34:35):
an Indian. It was always there from the very beginning.
This is Stephen Ronella. He became those this guy like
brought home a lot of game and also people that
would begin relationships with Indians that lived in his area.
But when he lived there, as he became older and
became being a man, he became and this is kind
(34:56):
of like where his real fame started to be a
boon became a long hunter. He had always hunted for
the family, okay, meaning he would hunt bears, he would
hunt deer. They like to eat bear meat, they like
to use dear meat, they ate it, but mainly was
like the primary asset. The primary good you got from
deer was leather, and people on the frontier preferred bear
(35:17):
meat over dear meat. I'm sure he had probably always
been involved in some like 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,
otter in order to sell goods. And that's really the
(35:40):
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. His big
famous move was when he moved into the Kentucky territory,
was hunting out looking for good hunting ground. It's important
(36:02):
to remember that these English commoners didn't know how to
hunt when they arrived in the New World and 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
(36:25):
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 Boon 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,
(36:46):
it wouldn't just be hunting that he learned from them.
He adopted select parts of their worldview that he saw
as superior to the European worldview. I want to read
an excerpt for Mr Morgan's book on your European and
Native American world views. Colonists were surprised that Indians showed
(37:08):
so 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
(37:29):
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 a tract of air or sunlight. Indians were rich
by desiring Little William Cronin rights. The English passion for
(37:50):
accumulating wealth struck 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 the English
were in league with evil spirits. All too soon, the
(38:12):
Indians concluded the invaders 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 towards the land and its inhabitants.
(38:35):
Later in Boone's life, we'd see that he never values
accumulation of wealth, and frankly wasn't very good at it.
Back to Mr Morgan describing Boone as a young man,
but this famous quote from the father who was told
by a relative that Daniel Leely wasn't going to school.
(38:56):
He was skipping school, and he hadn't learned to spell.
And the father say, let the others learn to spell.
Daniel is the hunter. He was a will bring us
the meat. So while he was growing up there he
he was a prankster. Also, 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
(39:18):
keep people laughing. He had a dynamic person charismatic personality.
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
(39:43):
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 Adkin Valley
about seventeen fifty or fifty one, because that was even wilder,
and he began to live in the forest, go for
(40:06):
longer hunts, go out trapping, and he became known. And
he would have been a teenager at that time when
he moved to the Yadkin in North Carolina, he would
have been sixteen or seventeen, so just the prime budding
age for a young man and outdoorsman to really start
to so was Oates. He soon became well known as
(40:30):
a marksman and a hunter and the people. Some people
were jealous of him, but he was so skillful as
a tracker, as a hunter even then, even even at
the age of seventeen or eighteen, that his legend began
to grow. This is a good place to give a
(40:59):
high level review of Boone's early life. He was born
on October sevent thirty four, near Reading, Pennsylvania. He was
the 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.
(41:20):
His dad's 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 in
the colonies. It was here that Daniel started to make
a name for himself as a hunter and explorer. I
(41:40):
want to read another short excerpt from Mr Morgan's book.
From the time he was a boy, Boone had a
flair for the dramatic. 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
(42:01):
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
(42:24):
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 kettle herself and do the milking,
strain the milk and put it in the springhouse. To
stay cool, calm and prayerful, she worked at churning butter
(42:46):
from the clavered 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 Olie Hills all
the way to the never Seek Mountain range west of
the Monocacy Valley. They found no sign of Daniel that afternoon,
(43:09):
but starting out. Early the next morning, they traveled further
in 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 along
(43:29):
on the south shoulder of the hill, nine miles from
the pasture. The search party accused him of scaring 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 true or
(43:51):
just one of the legends that grew around Boon 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 lost from
(44:13):
Marion Joseph. The boys 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. For Boone, there
(44:35):
was something 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 Boon that never quite grew up. Back to Mr Morgan,
as he describes a big event in young Daniel's life,
(45:00):
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 John's George Washington's forces that are going to
join the British led by General Braddock, and everybody knows
(45:24):
the story of Braddock's defeat. They moved towards the Fort
Duquesne and uh 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 blacksmith teamster,
meaning he he drove wagons, drove wagons, but around the campfires.
(45:45):
He had met a man called Finlay, and Finlay had
told him about his trip into Kentucky. He had going
down the Ohio River as a peddler, he was a businessman,
going all the way to the falls where was now Louisville.
That he had traded with the Shawnees at the village
of Eski Parka Thiki, which is where Winchester, Kentucky is now,
(46:09):
and he 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 escu Parka Thiki, and Boon
determined them that someday he was going to the Bluegrass.
(46:31):
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 it's really bizarre to think about it
now because we have highway systems and do we have
(46:52):
this modern transportation. It's almost like you have to reel
yourself deeply back into history and a race. How you
con driving a car, get an airplane. I mean, these
people were confined massively by transportation, so Kentucky would have
been like another planet. It was considered unreasonable for several reasons.
The Indians it's dangerous to go there, had to climb
(47:15):
over the mountains Blue Ridge, the Alleghanies to get there,
and the Cumberlands. But they were also forbidden to go
there after the French and Indian War, that that was
to be divided up for the officers and ordinary people
weren't supposed to go. Now, some white explorers had gone there,
and uh Dr Thomas Walker I believe had actually found
(47:38):
what we call Cumberland Gap, and he's the one who
named it. We think John Finley was twenty years older
than Boone and told Dan some marvelous tales of going
into Kentucky. Findley would have been the man in Boone's
life who inadvertently steered him into what many would say
was his calling death Deny. He must have noted that
(48:02):
young Daniel was highly interested in his stories of Kentucky,
because ten years later he'd go visit Boon at his
house and proposed a wild plan, but Finlay showed up
as a traitor and he had a little money. They
planned this trip. They got together with several people in
(48:24):
the spring of seventeen sixty nine and left on first
of May. 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 Finlay. He wasn't able to to
outfit a group to go, and he had other things
on his mind. When he got back from Braddock's defeat
(48:47):
that trip, he was in love with this beautiful girl,
Rebecca Brian and they were married, uh not too long after.
And Boon had a family soon and you know how
to find arm and he had to support them by
by working as a teamster. And and U primarily as
a trapper, hunting deer. In the summertime that he hunted
(49:10):
deer for the hides because the hide was in its
best condition and a hide was worth a Spanish dollar,
so a hide became a buck. Right in wintertime, he
primarily trapped for fur because that's when it was in
its prime, so That's what he was doing most of
the time, right. He also went off on a trip
(49:33):
to Florida, of all things, Yeah, and actually bought him
a bit of of land down there, but Rebecca refused
to go. And so that was in seventeen sixty five
that he went to Florida. He didn't he owned land
near Pensacola. He did. He bought some land and came back,
arrived on Christmas to take his family there, and Rebecca
(49:54):
just put her foot down she would not go. I
have in my notes here Boon was like a typical
timeshare Florida owner who bought his land and never went back.
And during 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
(50:18):
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, in a different mentality.
(50:38):
Who was said that Boone was fiddle footed that 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 I think of people coming from Europe,
mostly poor people who never had to hunt it. Hunting
(51:01):
was for the 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 you
get a gun and you could go anywhere you wanted.
You could, you could explore that. And for the Scotch
(51:21):
Irish it really was 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 and make sure the Indians
are cleared out, and you could grow things, you could hunt,
(51:41):
claim a new life. 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, and you could go further
down the Ohio over into Ohio over into what became Indiana, Illinois,
(52:05):
and beyond that the Mississippi Valley, and beyond that the
Missouri Valley and these mountains. You heard of the snow
Cap and uh, that was really thrilling. People were and
the women, not just the men, the women wanted to
go there too. It was it was a very exciting time.
(52:26):
So we've covered about thirty years of Daniel's life. He
was a backwoods kid, influenced by Quaker and 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
(52:47):
fifty six, he married the beautiful, black haired and black
eyed Rebecca Brian 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 Mr Morgan will
get back to Daniel and John Finlay's first trip into Kentucky.
(53:12):
And it's worth noting for the boon 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. Okay, they they got together.
(53:33):
There's a lot of disagreement about this, but somebody funded
this finlay may have 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 have been
going there on the warriors Path, and if they could
(53:56):
find the warriors Path, they could follow it out of it,
take them through the gap into Kentucky. And this is
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. They would.
I mean there was enough contact, particularly Boone. I mean
(54:16):
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, because I have
actually met African Americans who claimed to be descended from Daniel. Really,
(54:37):
I have what what is your what is your personal feeling?
Do you think that's true? I think it's quite possible. 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? I
think there are many facets character and many compartments in
(55:02):
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 he understood other people. He
had a mind like Shakespeare. I mean, who could get
into the mind very different people and to be sympathetic
(55:23):
with them. I don't know that he had a Cherokee wife,
but I think it's possible. And uh, 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 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
(55:44):
be you you thought you were better, or you know,
you were not one of them. So I just say
it's possible. Well, I guess the way he fit in
so well with the Native Americans, and we'll talk more
about him being kidnapped by the shine and that, but
the fact that he was able to blend in so well,
I can see how that would make sense. That he
(56:05):
might have just because to be able to fit in
so well, it may have been a necessity, so he
would have known about this gap. They went north from
the Atkin 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,
(56:25):
so they followed it to the southwest over Powell's River
and Powell's Mountain, 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. It's like it's threatening,
these high cliffs, just mile after mile after mile and
(56:49):
keep going and then suddenly you see this gap between them,
like a gun side, and there it is. They found
it what Dr. 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
(57:11):
you reached the Knob Country. And the famous paintings are
a boon on top of the hill seeing into the
blue grass Kentucky, and this is called the Pizga Vision.
Moses on Pizga he could look into the Promised Land.
But Boone could go into the promised land. Moses couldn't
(57:32):
go right right. So you have this amazing idol of
the boon in his group here for the deer, buffalo
and elk beaver. Boone is now into Kentucky and what
happened there will shape the rest of his life and
(57:52):
America's 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. Mr Morgan had something
to say about this to this day. We put this
quote in in a frame in our house, and we
did it when we were about thirty years old, so
(58:14):
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. It's the age when Walt Whitman
(58:35):
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.
(58:56):
This this window of time 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
(59:19):
Cumberland Gap in Kentucky and all these things things he's
famous for. Yeah, we've done in that time. Yeah, Well
it's uh. I got the idea from the study of
the Romantic poets words Worth in Coleridge lived much longer,
but almost everything that we associate with them has done
in that in the ten years and more. Equipment is
(59:40):
the perfect example that Whitman wrote all of these great poems,
it's about in that period, it's a little bit more
about eleven years, and devoted the rest of his life
to writing prose. Basically write some poems. Uh, but I
was also thinking of physicists and mathematicians, and yeah that
they do their great work relatively early. Mathematics actions even earlier,
(01:00:00):
but physicist and other scientists use it a little bit later. Novelist. Also,
novelists usually get going about the age of thirty and
at the age of forty early forties, like none most
of the great work a few exceptions, but on this
(01:00:21):
first episode we've 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 eighties six years old. In the remaining fifty one
(01:00:44):
years of his life are more wild than the first.
The man had a drive and a deep love of
life that 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 and
(01:01:05):
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 will explore the rest of Boone's life,
including the heroic rescue of his daughter from Indians and
the lore of an illegitimate daughter, the death of his son,
(01:01:29):
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 Boon was,
and it's my hope that you might explore Boone yourself. Ultimately,
(01:01:49):
I hope that his character, both positive and negative, will
make us more relevant today and continuing to define American
identity in I Oh 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,
(01:02:13):
because we're still here and we deserve a lasting place
at the American table because it's in our d n A. Folks,
I cannot thank you enough for listening to the Beargrease podcast.
(01:02:34):
We're pouring out everything we've got into these and thank
you for the iTunes reviews, and I asked 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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