The Tragedy of Daniel Boone

Pathfinding and hunting his way through the paradise the Indians had built.

Daniel Boone is (or used to be) one of the most iconic / archetypal figures in US history and popular consciousness. His remains have been fought over, his life mythologized and serialized, and his legacy cherished as heroic and exemplary. It all began with his trusty rifle, with which he was the surest shot. He was a pathfinder, never lost in the vast wilderness he explored and helped settle. And he was a steadfast leader of men, rescuer of damsels in distress, and killer of Indians. What's not to admire? His definitive biography, by John Faragher, paints a more ambivalent picture, however.

Boone loved the woods- loved hunting, loved nature, and loved solitude. Given those talents and tendencies, he naturally strayed from the borderlands of North Carolina into the mountains, becoming a full time hunter and trapper. In a couple of early forays into what we now know as Kentucky, he hunted on a commercial basis, wasting the animals to pile up hundreds of pelts, which his employees / colleagues processed in camp. 

The biography emphasizes that what Boone found in Kentucky was a paradise- lush and full of game. The region, believe it or not, was full of not just deer and beaver, but bear and buffalo. It is the kind of eden that had been encountered by Europeans many times over in the "New World". Fisheries of unimaginable richness, skies full of birds, forests as far as the eye could see. Kentucky was not an uninhabited eden, however- it was the cherished hunting ground of native Cherokee and Shawnee, among others, who saw exactly what Boone saw, but responded to it differently. Not with plunder and destruction, but with care and stewardship.

Boone blindly shot away, and then followed his cultural programming further by leading his family and many others across the mountains to found Boonesborough, building a fort and defending it against numerous Indian attacks. The biography notes that Boone's parents had ten children, and he had ten children, and his children had similar sized families. One can imagine where that kind of reproduction leads, to desperate expansion and heedless use of resources. While acknowledged as the pioneer of Kentucky settlement, Boone was no businessman, and all his grasping for land in the speculative rush that developed in his wake came to naught. He was sloppy in his paperwork and was outlawyered and out-cheated at every turn. One may see the personality type of his adversary in the current senior senator from Kentucky, Mitch McConnell. Boone was all too honest and simple, having been raised a Quaker.

Portrayal of the siege of a stockade, not unlike that of Boonesborough, as Native Americans try to drive off the cloud of locusts denuding their land.

The game had been hunted out, the people had become unfriendly and dense underfoot, and Boone's property and business schemes had all fallen apart. In despair over what he had wrought in Kentucky, Boone pulled up stakes and moved out to the next frontier, near St. Louis. An extremely late hunting trip has him heading through what is now Yellowstone park, reliving for the last time the kind of eden that Native Americans had nurtured with their respect for the value and cycles of nature, and even more, with their light footprint as small populations.

European culture and immigrants have accomplished wonderful things in America. But decimating its natural wonders, resources, and native peoples is not one of them. Daniel Boone was caught up in the economics of inexorable population growth and the need to make a "business model" out of hunting and trapping. Well, what comes of that is not pretty, and not at all sustainable of what had brought him into the woods to start with.

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