Daniel Boone (2 November [O.S. 22 October] 1734 – September 26, 1820) was an American pioneer and frontiersman whose adventures made him one of the first folk heroes of the United States. He became famous for his exploration and settlement of Kentucky, which was then beyond the western borders of the Thirteen Colonies. In 1775, under commission from Judge Richard Henderson's Transylvania Company, Boone blazed the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap and into Kentucky in the face of resistance from nearby Indian tribes. He founded Boonesborough, one of the first English-speaking settlements west of the Appalachian Mountains. By the end of the 18th century, more than 200,000 people had entered Kentucky by following the route marked by Boone.
He served as a militia officer during the Revolutionary War (1775–1783), which in Kentucky was fought primarily between American settlers and British-allied Indians. In 1778, Boone was captured by the Shawnee and was, according to legend, adopted by the Shawnee Chief and given the name "Sheltowee", or Big Turtle. After months of living with the Shawnee, Boone escaped. He was elected to the first of his three terms in the Virginia General Assembly during the war and fought in the Battle of Blue Licks in 1782, one of the last battles of the American Revolution. He worked as a surveyor and merchant after the war, but went deep into debt as a Kentucky land speculator. He resettled in Missouri in 1799, where he spent most of the last two decades of his life, frustrated with legal problems resulting from his land claims.
Boone remains a legendary, if imperfectly remembered, figure in American history. He was celebrated in his own lifetime, especially after an account of his adventures was published in 1784, making him famous in America and Europe. After his death, he became the subject of many heroic tall tales and works of fiction. His adventures—real and mythical—helped create the archetypal frontier hero of American folklore. In American popular culture, Boone is remembered as one of the foremost early frontiersmen, even though mythology often overshadows the historical details of his life.
Boone was born on October 22, 1734 ("New Style" November 2), the sixth of eleven children in a family of Quakers. His father, Squire Boone, immigrated to colonial Pennsylvania from the small town of Bradninch in the county of Devon, England, sometime around 1712. Squire, a weaver and blacksmith, married Sarah Morgan, whose family were Quakers from Wales. In 1731, the Boones built a one-room log cabin in the Oley Valley in what is now Berks County, Pennsylvania, near present-day Reading, where Daniel was born.
Boone spent his early years on the Pennsylvania frontier, often interacting with Native Americans. Boone learned to hunt from local settlers and Native Americans; by the age of fifteen, he had a reputation as one of the region's best hunters. Many stories about Boone emphasize his hunting skills. In one tale, the young Boone was hunting in the woods with some other boys when the howl of a panther scattered all but Boone. He calmly cocked his rifle and shot the panther through the heart just as it leaped at him. The story may be a folktale, one of many that became part of Boone's popular image.
In Boone's youth, his family became a source of controversy in the local Quaker community. In 1742, Boone's parents were compelled to publicly apologize after their eldest child Sarah married a "worldling", or non-Quaker, while she was visibly pregnant. When Boone's oldest brother Israel also married a "worldling" in 1747, Squire Boone stood by his son and was therefore expelled from the Quakers, although his wife continued to attend monthly meetings with her children. Perhaps as a result of this controversy, in 1750 Squire sold his land and moved the family to North Carolina. Daniel Boone did not attend church again, although he always considered himself a Christian and had all of his children baptized. The Boones eventually settled on the Yadkin River, in what is now Davie County, North Carolina, about two miles (3 km) west of Mocksville.
Boone received little formal education, since he preferred to spend his time hunting, apparently with his parents' blessing. According to a family tradition, when a schoolteacher expressed concern over Boone's education, Boone's father said, "Let the girls do the spelling and Dan will do the shooting." Boone was tutored by family members, though his spelling remained unorthodox. Historian John Mack Faragher cautions that the folk image of Boone as semiliterate is misleading, arguing that Boone "acquired a level of literacy that was the equal of most men of his times." Boone regularly took reading material with him on his hunting expeditions—the Bible and Gulliver's Travels were favorites. He was often the only literate person in groups of frontiersmen, and would sometimes entertain his hunting companions by reading to them around the campfire.
The French and Indian War (1754–1763) broke out between the French and the British, along with their respective Indian allies, and Boone joined a North Carolina Provincial company as a teamster and blacksmith. In 1755, his unit accompanied General Edward Braddock's attempt to drive the French out of the Ohio Country, which ended in disaster at the Battle of the Monongahela. Boone, in the rear with the wagons, took no part in the battle, and fled with the retreating soldiers. He returned home after the defeat, and married Rebecca Bryan, a neighbor in the Yadkin Valley, on August 14, 1756. The couple initially lived in a cabin on his father's farm, and eventually had ten children, in addition to raising eight children of deceased relatives.
In 1759, conflict erupted in North Carolina between British colonists and the Cherokees, their former allies in the French and Indian War. When Cherokee warriors raided the Yadkin Valley in retaliation for the murders of dozens of Cherokee by Virginians and South Carolinians, the Boones and many other families took refuge in fortified communities like Bethabara. Boone saw action as a member of the North Carolina militia during the Anglo-Cherokee War. In April 1759, Boone served under Lt Morgan Bryan in a scouting company after their neighbor Daniel Hoosey and others were killed in a raid.
Boone supported his growing family in these years as a market hunter and trapper, collecting pelts for the fur trade. Almost every autumn, despite the unrest on the frontier, he would go on "long hunts", extended expeditions into the wilderness lasting weeks or months. Boone went alone or with a small group of men, accumulating hundreds of deer skins in the autumn, and trapping beaver and otter over the winter. When the long hunters returned in the spring, they sold their take to commercial fur traders. On their journeys, frontiersmen often carved messages on trees or wrote their names on cave walls, and Boone's name or initials have been found in many places. A tree in Washington County, Tennessee reads "D. Boon Cilled a. Bar on tree in the year 1760". A similar carving is preserved in the museum of the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Kentucky which reads "D. Boon Kilt a Bar, 1803." The inscriptions may be genuine, or part of a long tradition of phony Boone relics.
According to a popular story, Boone returned home after a long absence to find that Rebecca had given birth to a daughter. Rebecca confessed that she had thought that Daniel was dead, and that his brother had fathered the child. Boone did not blame Rebecca, and raised the girl as his own child. Boone's early biographers knew the story but did not publish it. Modern biographers regard the tale as possibly folklore, since the identity of the brother and the daughter vary in different versions of the tale.
In the mid-1760s, Boone began to look for a new place to settle. The population was growing in the Yadkin Valley, which reduced the amount of game available for hunting. He had difficulty making ends meet, and was often taken to court for nonpayment of debts. He sold what land he owned to pay off creditors. After his father's death in 1765, Boone traveled with a group of men to Florida, which had become British territory after the end of the war, to look into the possibility of settling there. According to a family story, he purchased land in Pensacola, but Rebecca refused to move so far away from friends and family. The Boones instead moved to a more remote area of the Yadkin Valley, and he began to hunt westward into the Blue Ridge Mountains.