Bill O'Reilly's Legends and Lies (4 page)

Unfortunately, as he made this miraculous escape, Boone’s twenty-three-year-old son, Israel, was shot and became one of sixty men killed in the battle. It was the worst defeat the Kentuckians were to suffer in the long war against the Indians—and it came weeks after the Revolution had ended in the East.

After the war, Boone settled in Limestone, Kentucky, a booming town on the Ohio River. He worked there as the deputy surveyor of Lincoln County, a horse trader, and a land speculator—as well as owning a small trading house.

By the time America became an independent nation in 1783, Daniel Boone was one of its most famous citizens. That fame was magnified a year later during the celebration of his fiftieth birthday, with the publication of historian John Filson’s book,
The Discovery, Settlement
,
and Present State of Kentucke
, with an appendix entitled “The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon, One of the First Settlers.” The book, published both in the United States and England, was a great success and guaranteed Boone’s place in history. A year later,
The Adventures of Colonel Boone
was published by itself, further spreading Boone’s fame. The image of Boone exploring the frontier, dressed in deerskin, fighting Indians, stood for all of the men—and women—who settled the West. Although the book supposedly included words that came “out of his own mouth,” the sometimes exaggerated tales caused Boone to admit later, “Many heroic actions and chivalrous adventures are related of me which exist only in the regions of fancy. With me the world has taken great liberties, and yet I have been but a common man.”

This fanciful hand-colored lithograph by Henry Schile (c. 1874),
Daniel Boone Protects His Family,
probably best captures the enduring image of the legendary frontiersman.

Boone’s battles were not yet completely done. The Revolution was over, but the Indians north of the Ohio River had not given up fighting for their land. Battle hardened and desperate, they continued to raid settlements, killing and kidnapping people or stealing their livestock. In 1786, a war party of more than four hundred fifty braves had come into the Cumberland region and announced their intention to kill all the Americans. Mingo, Chickamauga, and Shawnee warriors had raided several settlements and murdered a number of people. In response, Benjamin Logan put together an army of 888 men and rode into the Mad River Valley to find and punish the tribes. Boone served as one of the commanders of the raiding party. Unfortunately, it proved far easier to find innocent Indians than those who had staged the attacks, and Logan’s men burned seven villages and destroyed the food supply of mostly peaceful natives. Among those taken prisoner were the Shawnee chief Moluntha, who believed he had made peace with the Americans. When he was brought to see Colonel Logan, he carried with him an American flag and a copy of the treaty he had signed at Fort Finney declaring he would fight no longer. He had proudly honored that agreement. However, while he was there he was accosted by the now colonel McGary—the same officer who had ignored Boone’s advice about riding into the Indian trap—who demanded to know if he had been present at the Battle of the Blue Licks. Although Moluntha had not fought in that battle, McGary did not believe his claim and clubbed him to death with a tomahawk. In an incredible twist, Logan adopted the chief’s son and raised him to become an honored American soldier.

Boone, too, was greatly chagrined by the vengeance taken on innocent Indians. He brought several Shawnees back with him to Limestone, where he fed and cared for them until a truce could be negotiated and a prisoner exchange arranged. Although he was already in his fifties, quite an old age at that time, he still had one more fight left in him. During a 1787 Indian raid in Kanawha Valley, a settler named John Flinn and his wife were killed, and their
young daughter, Chloe, was kidnapped. Boone happened to be nearby and quickly organized a party to pursue the Indians. Boone’s men caught up with them and killed them, rescuing the child—who was watched over by Boone for the remainder of his years.

Like many other men of action, Daniel Boone was not especially successful when it came to business, and most of his enterprises eventually failed. He made and lost large amounts of money speculating in Kentucke land, buying and selling claims to vast tracts. For a brief time, he was rich and owned seven slaves, which some believed to be the most of any one master in the entire territory of Kentucke. His common decency was his greatest business flaw, as he was too often reluctant to enforce a claim to the detriment of others. He said he just didn’t like the feeling of profiting from another man’s loss. The respect he gained was paid for in the dollars he forfeited. Ironically, in 1798, a court in Mason County issued a warrant for his arrest for his failure to testify in a court case, while later that same year, Kentucke honored him by naming a large region of the state Boone County.

But what pressed on him most was a large debt he spent much of his later life repaying: While sleeping in a Richmond tavern on his way to Williamsburg in 1780, he was robbed of twenty thousand dollars in depreciated scrip and land certificates that had been entrusted to him by settlers to purchase supplies and buy land claims from the Virginia government. Although some of the settlers forgave him, he vowed to pay all of them back completely. It took him more than thirty years to do so, which he finally did by selling off most of the lands he had been awarded in 1815 by President James Monroe. After making the final repayment, it was said he was left with fifty cents.

His wife, Rebecca, died in 1813 after nearly fifty-seven years of marriage. She was buried on a knoll along Tuque Creek in Missouri, in the shade of large apple trees that had been grown from seeds Daniel had brought with him from Kentucke.

In spirit, as well as body, Daniel Boone never really left the wilderness, continuing to hunt and fish well into his older years. There is some evidence that he went hunting up the Missouri all the way to the Yellowstone River in his eighty-first year. He spent the last years of his life living in the large stone house his son Nathan had built on the land originally given to Boone by the Spanish in the town of Booneslick, Missouri, where Kit Carson would grow up years later. In 1820, secure in his status as an American hero, he said simply, “My time has come,” and died. He was two and a half months short of his eighty-sixth birthday.

In all those years after he had left Kentucke, Boone had rarely, if ever, spoken about the court-martial. Certainly any question about his allegiance had been answered decades earlier when he fought for the patriot cause. That the state of Kentucky had chosen to honor him by naming a county after him and President Monroe publicly recognized his service to the new country by awarding him a large tract of land settled any doubts about his loyalty. In
The Adventures of Colonel Boone,
the accusations were dismissed without being directly addressed: “My footsteps have often been marked with blood, and therefore I can truly subscribe to its original name [The Dark and Bloody Ground]. Two darling sons, and a brother, have I lost by savage hands, which have also taken from me forty valuable horses, and abundance of cattle.”

The only portrait of Daniel Boone painted from life, Chester Harding’s oil painting was done in 1820, only a few months before Boone’s death.

Near the end of his life, he was able to look back on the many sacrifices he had made to help settle the nation. He said, “Many dark and sleepless nights have I been a companion for owls, separated from the cheerful society of men, scorched by the summer’s sun, and pinched by the winter’s cold, an instrument ordained to settle the wilderness. But now the scene is changed: peace crowns the sylvan shade.”

DAVID CROCKETT

CAPITOL
HILLBILLY

During David Crockett’s first visit to Washington, D.C., in 1827, the newly elected congressman from Tennessee was stopped by a man who loudly proclaimed his support for President John Quincy Adams. When Crockett responded angrily, “You had better hurrah for hell and praise your own country,” the man demanded to know who was speaking. Crockett stood tall and replied, “I’m that same David Crockett, fresh from the backwoods, half horse, half alligator, a little touched with the snapping turtle; can wade the Mississippi, leap the Ohio, ride upon a streak of lightning and slip without a scratch down a honey locust; can whip my weight in wildcats and, if any gentleman pleases, for a ten dollar bill he may throw in a panther …”