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Biography & Autobiography. Nonfiction. HTML: In the first and most reliable biography of Daniel Boone in more than fifty years, award-winning historian Faragher brilliantly portrays Americaâ??s famous frontier hero while illuminating the American hero-making process itself. Drawing from popular narrative, the public record, scraps of documentation from Booneâ??s own hand, and a treasure trove of reminiscences gathered by nineteenth-century antiquarians, Faragher uses the methods of new social history to create a portrait of the man and the times he helped shape. Blending themes from a much vitalized Western and frontier history with the words and ideas of ordinary people, Faragher has produced a book that will stand as the definitive life of Daniel Boone for decades to come, and one that illuminates the frontier world of Boone like no other… (more)
User reviews
Boone is perhaps a legend only because he lived long enough to become one. But his life was so full of strange-but-true happenings it reads almost like a comic book. Taken captive by natives, later adopted as a blood brother, later killing those same blood brothers, and losing his fortune along with most other pioneer settlers along the way, just to mention a few chapters. He was a survivor who would lie, change sides, appear to change sides, and do whatever it took to survive the next day. But he certainly wasn't a coward.
One aspect of frontier life that was pretty fascinating was the foolhardy choices that were made out of pride in order not to appear cowardly. This got a lot of Kentuckians unnecessarily killed. Another was the fact that the land-grab was so quick and intense, that overlapping boundaries and disputes over surveys wound up in courts for over a century. A lot of people lost money this way. At the end of his life, Boone and other pioneers lamented that lawyers now carved up everything that had been theirs.
While there is some dispute, the historical facts seem fairly clear that when Boone left Kentucky for modern-day Missouri he never looked back. He hated the politics in Kentucky that had spurned him and probably would have never given permission for his bones to be re-interred in Kentucky, much less in Frankfort.
My only real Boone memory growing up was a family trip to Boonesborough where we watched a dramatized reenactment of a battle between Boone's company and a band of Shawnee led by Chief Blackfish. I was pretty scared of Blackfish when I was 5. What I don't remember learning then was that Blackfish was essentially Boone's adopted brother at one point in his captivity. Natives believed that by adopting a captive, their body would be inhabited by the soul of a deceased relative. Boone had apparently grown close to his Shawnee family in captivity, but how close remains in dispute as he led an escape and later had to kill some of them in battle.
I give this book 4 stars out of 5. If you want to know everything there is to know about Daniel Boone, buy this book.
Daniel Boone's story is steeped in legend and this helps separate the real man from the legend, to the point its boring at points. He's just a regular dude.