Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (An Owl Book)

I read a lot of American history, especially of the colonial and early federal periods and especially in the American South. I've come to know many of the people whose lives shaped and were shaped by this time and geography. But I'd never in an entire lifetime as a reader read a biography of Daniel Boone, so much a man of that time and place. He'd seemed a cartoonish figure to me, someone best defined in line drawings and gufaw anecdotes. The man in the coonskin hat.As a matter of fact, Boone detested coonskin hats, never deigned to wear one. He was a real hunter. He wore a beaverskin hat. Nor did he spring full-blown from the N.C. mountains, as I'd somehow imagined. He was born in the Oley valley of Pennsylvania, the child of Quakers, and throughout his life returned there to visit his and his wife's kin, the Bryans. And like so many whose ambitions led them through Pennsylvania and south into the great valley of Virginia, he was forever driven by the lure of land, the great passion that consumed Virginians and left them in debt.But unlike most, Boone did not seek land to cultivate. His was not the dream of the would-be planters, the town and courthouse builders. He was one of the speculators, the men who saw in the American frontier the chance to make money. For Boone, that meant enough money to make possible a settlement for his teeming extended family, on the farthest frontier. For he financed his life with hunting and trapping. He was a long hunter. Like the Forest Finns who'd taught earlier generations how to build log houses and clear land, he spent every winter of his adult life until the very last, when age precluded it, hunting and trapping on the edges of the emerging civilized regions of America. He paid his creditors not with tobacco, but with beaver pelts or, if the Chinese market was high for it, ginsing.This occupation brought him into routine and often deadly conflict with members of native American Indian tribes, particularly the Shawnee, who hunted the same wilderness his extraordinary skills threatened. Over the years he lost two sons, a grandson, a beloved son-in-law in that conflict. More than any other American on the frontier, the native tribes respected him, for the skills he developed were the skills they respected and on which their lives depended.One critic writes, "This is not a new biography of Daniel Boone, but a biography of a Boone we have never fully known or appreciated before...One finished Faragher's biography convinced that one has met and talked with Boone himself." And not just with Boone, but with Rebecca, his wife, and his sons and daughters and parents as well.In this book more than any other I've read, I saw the struggle between Europeans like Boone and Native Indian tribespeople with compassion for both sides of the battle. It was a battle not for villages or settlements, but for hunting grounds on which the lives of both depended. That was Boone's understanding. He was never an Indian-hater. In the final months of his life two Shawnee from the group that had abducted him and adopted him and from which he had escaped made the trek to Missouri to visit him. They talked long into the nights.I've read few books in which the writer anchored the reader so firmly and vividly in the physical geography as Farangher does.A fine, fine book! I will re-read it.

There is the old saying about making a living and making a life. I think it belongs most to Churchill. In the case of Daniel Boone, it was the Indians that threatened his life; it was the white settlers on his heels that threatened his living. The Shawnees are everywhere in the 1770s timeline, kidnapping Boone's daughters but neither raping nor killing them. The historic controversy about Boone's capture is included and suggests all of the cultural leanings in evidence about Boone's preference for the hunt over the dollar and a brotherly spirit that lost him prominence among land speculators.The bottom line, as a revisionist of revisionists must conclude, is that without a life you can't make a living. If Boone had a case of Stockholm Syndrome, he was confusing the terrors of ambush and common incidents of innocents murdered on their farm with peace of mind and the thrill of pioneering. As the June Carter song documents, "It's a hot day in '73 and this is my wife and kid with me / Daniel Boone lost his boy the other day / young Jim Boone's dead now 20 miles away". As much as I have countered the likes of Pat Buchanan in the past about Indian culture and victimization, anybody needing an account of how the west was won, not lost, simply needs to count heads in an honest Boone biography, notwithstanding of course so many Shawnees who not only allowed Boone to live but shook his hand in adoration. 100 hundred years later, admiring whites would dream of shaking the hand of Sitting Bull, a leader of men resigned to combat the intruders.John Mack Faragher does not end the account with Boone's death for good reason. The Boone legacy has been argued between Kentucky, the land Boone swore off, and Missouri. It has been depicted through the novels of James Fenimore Cooper. It has been confused with Davy Crockett. Lord Byron is credited with recognizing in Boone a fundamentally good character, a Romantic, not just a rough legend. Today's Boone is of course not in the academic canon. As Faragher points out, Boone might appreciate how little his character is now kicked around, meaning even recognizable, by fakes and flag posters. As for the perspective of a Naturalist, there may be as much to gain by the study of the Appalachian flora and game, the mechanisms of a salt lick or a bear kill, as any Anthropologist can find.

I learned a lot from this book. Most of what I thought I knew about Daniel Boone apparently was from the myths of movies & TV shows. I had no idea he was born in PA, lived in NC a long time before & after KY then ended up in MO. I thought he was 100% Kentuckian. He sure did move & travel around a lot, which many did back then. They did more moving & traveling than I would want to do in a car much less on a horse or in a wagon & having to build a new house each time! I always had a positive image of him & was surprised to learn there are negative ones. This book jumps around a bit, tho. He talks about someone dying or being killed on one chapter then in the next, it is before that happened. I would rather had a continuous time flow but that really is my only complaint.

very happy.

Was advertised as a hardcover in good condition, the book received was a paperback in very poor condition.

Bought for a friend and he loved it

Se lit comme un roman.