"Shrouded in legends and folklore that have multiplied ceaselessly over the past two centuries, the D. Boone who killed a `bar' now stalks across the stage of American history and mythology as one of our singularly gigantic figures," historian Steven A. Channing wrote in his "Kentucky: A Bicentennial History."
In his new biography of Daniel Boone - the first full-scale biography of the frontiersman in over 50 years and the finest evaluation of his life we have had to date - historian John Mack Faragher examines both the life and the legend and makes a great deal of sense out of both.Recognizing that "if Boone's biography required absolute cor-rob-oration on all points, it would be thin indeed," and aware as well that "the facts (of Boone's life) come inextricably entwined with the legend," Faragher treats life and legend in a most successful effort to illuminate the impact of each on American life, culture, folklore and mythology.
As Faragher observes in his introduction, "The materials for Boone's biography not only document the life of an American frontier hero but reveal the thoughts and feelings of the diverse peoples of the frontier. I have tried to indicate those points at which the evidence is suspect as fact, but I have nevertheless tried to take it seriously as lore.
"The things people choose to say about Boone provide clues to their own concerns. Backcountry Americans celebrated Boone as one of their own. He was a hero, but a hero of a new, democratic type, a man who did not tower above the people but rather exemplified their longings and, yes, their limitations."
Faragher has examined a wide range of evidence, including the accounts of Boone's contemporaries, the several important semi-autobiographical narratives of his adventures, the letters and accounts written in the pioneer's own hand - "in which his distinctive voice comes through loud and clear" - and the voluminous body of reminiscence and recollection gathered by 19th-century historians and antiquarians.
He makes sense out of this mass of sometimes inconsistent and con-tradictory material and writes about Boone's life, times and legend clearly and crisply, conveying a vivid image of Boone and of his era. Faragher is a professor of history at Mount Holyoke College and the author of "Women and Men on the Overland Trail," which was awarded the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, and of "Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie." His grounding in frontier and western history serves him particularly well in this account of Boone and the exploration, conquest and settlement of the trans-Appalachian regions of the first American West.
Within Boone's own lifetime, folklore and legend had begun to overtake the real man. The period since Boone's death in 1820 at the age of 85 has seen the Boone of history altogether overtaken by the Boone of myth.
Steven Channing suggested that "while the ghostly shade of ole Daniel has probably chuckled over the absurd inflations of his contributions and winced over the ridiculous distortions of his life and times in television shows and earlier fiction, the Boone legend itself simply is beyond revision. Like images of Kentucky and the West, Daniel Boone as idea has long since become part of an almost sacred and certainly meaningful American folklore."
Faragher's biography is most welcome as both a corrective to the mythology and as an explanation for it. The Daniel Boone of myth and legend is here - the prototypical pioneer of civilization, the archetypal "natural man" of the wilderness - but the boy and the man, the son, husband and father, the hunter, scout and leader, the farmer, surveyor and land speculator, are here in equal measure.
As Boone became a living legend he often resented the false stories that were increasingly being told and written about him. He complained, for example, of his reputation as an Indian fighter. "I never killed but three" Indians, Boone declared. He added that "I am very sorry to say that I ever killed any, for they have always been kinder to me than the whites."
Near the end of his life a disillusioned Boone admitted that "I have lived to learn that your boasted civilization is nothing more than improved ways to overreach your neighbor," and he complained to a visitor that "nothing embitters my old age (so much as) the circulation of absurd stories that I retire as civilization advances. . . . Many heroic actions and chivalrous adventures are related of me," Boone maintained, "yet I have been but a common man."
Michael A. Lofaro wrote in his book "The Life and Adventures of Daniel Boone" that "Boone has not been well served by most biographers." Boone has been very well served by Faragher, who has crafted an exemplary biography of the man who is perhaps the greatest mythological figure in the history of the exploration and settlement of the American West.