The Forgotten Founding Father

DANIEL BOONE AND THE BIRTH OF THE FRONTIER MOVEMENT

- PAUL ANDREW HUTTON

Early in the spring of 1774, a solitary figure rides westward over Kane’s Gap into Powell’s Valley, far beyond the fragile line of frontier settlements to the east. Daniel Boone, his hair plaited and clubbed up in Indian fashion, garbed in black-dyed deerskin, has come in search of the rude grave of his eldest son. James Boone and six companions had been slaughtered by Delaware, Shawnee and Cherokee Indians in October 1773 while hurrying forward with pack animals to rejoin Boone’s party of Kentucky-bound emigrants. James had called pitifully for his family in his death agony as a Cherokee called Big Jim delighted in torturing him. The massacre had momentarily ended Boone’s dream of a settlement in Kentucky.

The life of his eldest son is to be but one of a tragic string of blood payments that Daniel Boone will make to open the American West. In time he will come to be heralded as an American Moses leading his people to their Western promised land. His personal travail will be embraced by writers, artists, poets and filmmakers across the generations to create an epic that becomes the grand creation myth for the founding of a pioneer nation. Unlike the aristocratic Founding Fathers to the east, however, Boone remains the hero of the common people.

The Call of the Wild

Born in Berk’s County, Pennsylvania, on November 2, 1734, Daniel was the sixth of Squire and Sarah Boone’s 11 children. His Quaker grandfather had come to Penn’s colony in 1713 in search of religious freedom. But Squire Boone, angered when chastised by the Exeter Meeting of Friends for allowing two of his children to marry outside the church, left the faith and the colony, taking his family to North Carolina and settling his brood on the Yadkin River. Young Daniel, profoundly affected by his father’s religious troubles, always professed to be a Christian but never again belonged to any sect or church.