DANIEL BOONE'S YELLOW STONE HUNT

FACT OR FICTION?

- TED FRANKLIN BELUE

Did America’s first frontier hero reach the Big Sky land of geysers, scalding springs and “putrefied” trees that John Colter saw and Old Gabe and Black Harris yarned about?

Rumors abound of Daniel Boone’s treks to Yellowstone and beyond, even to Idaho and the Pacific. Recent writers hinting of these far-off forays can be vague on details, creating hybrid revelations taken as gospel. Two years past Boone’s death’s bicentennial we will revisit the most credible of these stories, placing them in the setting of his trans-Mississippian realm that by 1820, when he was buried near La Charette, Missouri, was already vanishing.

Twenty-five miles upriver from St. Louis village—a bustling fur hub dominated by two French half-brothers, Auguste and Pierre Chouteau—and west of Alton, Illinois, Boone and seven families, a few of the enslaved and a passel of livestock forded the Father of Waters into Spanish Upper Louisiana. Like Cumberland Gap to the east and South Pass to the west, this shallow oxbow of the Mississippi was destined to become the western portal for the thousands soon to tread in his wake. The year was 1799. Daniel Boone, at 65, was starting over.

He and his wife, Rebecca, hied to 850 acres of fertile bottomland past the village with its beaver bales, hide men and motley coureur de bois and over the Big Muddy from King’s Road—New Spain’s 40-mile hike back to St. Louis— to live with their son Dan Morgan at what is now Matson. Here the paterfamilias acted as syndic—Justice of the Femme Osage District—famously settling disputes under his Judgement Tree, claiming land and blazing Boone’s Trace.