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Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (An Owl Book) Paperback – Illustrated, November 15, 1993
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Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History for 1993
In the first and most reliable biography of Daniel Boone in more than fifty years, award-winning historian Faragher brilliantly portrays America’s famous frontier hero. Drawing from popular narrative, the public record, scraps of documentation from Boone’s own hand, and a treasure of reminiscence gathered by nineteenth-century antiquarians, Faragher uses the methods of new social history to create a portrait of the man and the times he helped shape. Blending themes from a much vitalized Western and frontier history with the words and ideas of ordinary people, Faragher has produced a book that will stand as the definitive life of Daniel Boone for decades to come, and one that illuminates the frontier world of Boone like no other.
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Product details
- ASIN : 0805030077
- Publisher : Holt Paperbacks; Illustrated edition (November 15, 1993)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 464 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780805030075
- ISBN-13 : 978-0805030075
- Item Weight : 1.1 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.19 x 0.82 x 9.17 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #341,875 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #686 in U.S. Revolution & Founding History
- #1,651 in Traveler & Explorer Biographies
- #5,044 in U.S. State & Local History
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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.
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.