Boone: A Biography (65 page)

Like almost all men and women who have the opportunity, Boone
enjoyed his grandchildren. He could tell them stories and rhymes, wise sayings, and anecdotes from his own childhood and his long adventurous life. And his curiosity never left him. He questioned visitors and family members about current events and news of the day, of the frontier advancing ever farther west.

Sometimes he took a bearskin or deerskin out under a tree and would lie on it whistling or singing to himself. It is an image that reminds us of Caspar Mansker’s story of finding Boone alone in the wilderness of Kentucky lying on his back and singing, and of his singing when locked in the coal house in Charlottesville in 1781. Boone never lost his relish for solitude and forest, for singing and keeping company with his favorite friend, himself. And he liked to be
seen
enjoying his solitude. His eyes were not good enough to hunt and his legs too feeble to carry him into the forest, but it still pleased him to be among trees, in the freedom of the open air. The Reverend James E. Welch described his person as he saw him in 1818. “
He was rather low of stature
, broad shoulders, high cheek bones, very mild countenance, fair complexion, soft and quiet in his manner, but little to say unless spoken to, amiable and kind in his feelings, very fond of quiet retirement, of cool self-possession, and indomitable perseverance.”

Among Boone’s last noted visitors was a young painter from Massachusetts named Chester Harding. Harding came to Charette to paint Boone’s portrait at the very end of his life. Finding the old hunter roasting venison on a ramrod in a small cabin behind Jemima’s house, the painter asked if he could do a portrait. Boone was hard of hearing and may not have understood the request. He had little experience with portrait painters. But Jemima understood the importance of the opportunity and persuaded her father to overcome his timidity or modesty and sit. The result was the only portrait from life that exists.

Though he was old and frail in the Harding painting, the powerful presence of Boone comes through in the portrait. No longer the muscular “Big Turtle” of his prime, Boone still shows his character and will. It is the picture of a man who means to do what he sets out to
do. We are all in Harding’s debt for his last-minute likeness of Boone. According to the family, Boone was surprised to see himself captured so convincingly on canvas. Harding’s portrait was later revised by others to make Boone look younger and healthier. Harding captured the dignity and strength of the elusive Boone. As he sketched, the young painter questioned Boone about his career, which now stretched into its ninth decade. Had he ever been lost in his wandering? Harding asked.
“No,” Boone said, “I can’t say I was ever lost
, but I was
bewildered
once for three days.”

In August of 1820 Boone grew weaker and became subject to a fever that waxed and waned but always seemed to return. “
He began to complain of an acute burning
sensation, such as he never before felt . . . which continually grew worse.” He was treated again by his granddaughter’s husband Dr. John Jones, but nothing seemed able to dispel the fever for good. Possibly it was an infection of the heart tissue. Before, he had always been able to throw off his afflictions, but this time the fever lingered. He seemed to sense that this infection was something different and asked to be taken to Nathan’s house for one last visit.

Dr. Jones warned that he was much too sick to travel, but after a number of delays Nathan came for him in a carriage and drove him to the stone house. They arrived at the new house on September 21, 1820, and Olive fixed a special dinner for her father-in-law, including his favorite dish, sweet potatoes. Tradition says he overindulged and also ate cookies and candy the doting children pressed on him. The excess sweets made him worse. Neighbors and relatives gathered to greet the old man, guessing that it would be his last visit.

The next day, Boone said he still felt stuffed and would take only a bowl of milk. His fever returned, and he decided to lie down in a bed fixed for him in the front room of the house. In the days that followed, Boone stayed in bed and it was clear that things had taken a new turn. Even when sick before, he had gotten up and stirred about. Jemima and
her family arrived on September 25 and Dr. Jones offered Boone medicine, probably laudanum. Boone said that this was his last sickness and refused anything. He wanted to keep his mind clear. He had always been lucid and alert, and he wanted to end his life with his perceptions as acute as possible.

In the nineteenth century people talked about a “beautiful death.” It was as though one’s death was a work of art, something to be crafted, an achievement. Deaths were described and critiqued, commented on, compared to others’, admired. A beautiful death was one’s final accomplishment. In modern times most people, except for those who are killed in accidents or by sudden heart attacks, die in hospitals or hospices, often far from family and home. Usually the old have been isolated for years in nursing homes and hospitals, in an air-conditioned and sterilized world of care by professionals. Death is hidden away in its own proper sphere. Too often, the last place modern people see is an equipped room in a large institution of care and dying.

Before the age of retirement homes and hospitals and nursing homes, the old died at home. If they were lucky to have a large caring family, children and grandchildren, friends and cousins, gathered around in a death vigil. In a world without modern medicine, the old felt death coming on, recognized it. People gathered in the bedroom and said their farewells, and the one dying had his or her final say. There were kisses and hugs and sharing of memories. Quarrels and grudges were resolved, grievances aired, forgiveness offered and received. Final requests were made. There were prayers and hymn singing, visits by the minister as well as the local doctor. The subject might describe the sensations of dying, the gathering of stillness and ease, the feeling of weightlessness and coolness. Sometimes the dying heard music or saw a pleasing light that might take the shape of an angel. Sometimes family members saw a dove or other bird light at a window, or heard the scrape of wood being planed, as if a coffin were being made.

If the dying person was very lucky, he just closed his eyes and stopped
breathing, as the soothing rest closed in or opened out into an infinite stillness. But for some there was a long death struggle as lungs tried to keep breathing and heart failed and struggled to restart, kicking in again and again, always getting weaker. Breath rasped in the throat and got shorter, until instead of breath there was only a rattle of air.

On his last day, Boone, who knew he was dying, said, “I am about worn out.” The acute burning around his heart was worse than he had felt before. He asked for his coffin to be brought down from the attic, and he touched the polished wood with his cane to reassure himself of its strength. He described the kind of funeral he wanted and reminded them to bury him beside Rebecca on the hill overlooking the bottomlands to the river. A servant shaved the old man and Jemima cut his hair to suit him. Granddaughter Delinda even brushed his teeth. Boone asked his daughter-in-law Olive to sing some of his favorite songs. He expressed pleasure in his long life and health, his attempts to do good and not harm others, his faith in the mercy of God.

As morning approached, Boone asked for a bowl of warm milk, which he drank with relish. Then all the family members, including the slaves, filed in to say a final good-bye and receive his farewell. He told each one not to be sad, for he had lived a long and fruitful life. As Nathan and Jemima held a hand on either side, he said, “
I am going; don’t grieve for me
, my time has come.” He died just after the sun had risen, September 26, 1820.

Boone’s body was carried in his fine coffin to Jemima’s house and a large crowd assembled for the funeral there two days later. James Craig preached the funeral in the barn, which was the only building large enough to hold the number who had gathered. In the sermon Nathan’s son-in-law saluted Boone for his explorations and development of the West, and for his defense of the settlements. It is not mentioned whether or not any Shawnees attended the funeral. Boone’s nephew Daniel Bryan later told Draper, “
Daniel Boone died
. . . in the state of Missouri not owning as Much land as would make his grave.”

The crowd then followed the coffin and an American flag to the hilltop a mile away where Boone was placed in the earth beside Rebecca. The long hunt and pilgrimage to the west that had started almost eighty-six years earlier in Pennsylvania were over. Now there were only memories, stories, and legends.

1820–1856

The story of Daniel Boone is a story of rivers. He had crossed the Schuylkill and the Susquehanna and the Potomac, the Shenandoah and the Yadkin. He had crossed the Holston and the Watauga, the Clinch and Powell’s River. Beyond the Cumberland Gap he had crossed the Cumberland and the Kentucky and the Big Sandy, the Licking and the Ohio, the Kanawha and the Scioto, the Miami and the Little Miami. He had crossed the Mississippi and followed the Missouri, the Gasconade, the Grand, and the Yellowstone. When Boone crossed that final river, the Styx or the Jordan, his larger life as mythic figure, legend and icon of the West, was just beginning. Even Boone could not have imagined the scale and speed with which his story would grow and spread and influence the culture and imagination of the developing nation. Within a few decades of his death his image and his character would be portrayed and transformed in a hundred different ways and under different names to become a quintessence of America’s ideal of itself, its origins and aspirations, its destiny. He would inspire thinkers and artists and writers from Thomas Cole to James Fenimore Cooper, to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and Lord Byron, and through them and others he would inspire a nation to some of its finest achievements, and to some of its worst. The young nation needed
a hero and a symbol, and along with George Washington and perhaps Franklin, no man fit the bill as well as Daniel Boone. According to Richard Slotkin, “
[I]t was the figure of Daniel Boone
, the solitary, Indian-like hunter of the deep woods, that became the most significant, most emotionally compelling myth-hero of the early republic. The other myth-figures are reflections or variations of this basic type.”

The young republic needed Boone, the icon of curiosity, courage, character, and wonder. Cultures find in a few individuals the symbols of their ideals. Thanks to Filson and then many other biographers, Boone’s story was repeated and embellished, magnified and extended to illustrate everything from temperance to Manifest Destiny. A cousin of Rebecca’s, Daniel Bryan, published an epic in verse in 1816 called
The Mountain Muse
. Portraying Boone as a heroic, almost saintly woodsman, the poem ran to 250 pages and contained far more fiction than history. When the poem was read to him, Boone is supposed to have declared it “
too highly colored
and exaggerated” and to have observed that such projects should be delayed until the subject “was put in the ground.”

It is well known that Cooper used Boone and the legend of Boone as the model for Leatherstocking, Hawkeye of
The Last of the Mohicans
, Natty Bumppo in
Deerslayer
, and the hero in three other novels of the frontier. Cooper was the first internationally popular American fiction writer, and he spread the image of the frontier hero to millions of readers. Called Pathfinder, in
Pathfinder
, the noble scout figures as Leatherstocking or Natty Bumppo in the mythic story of
The Pioneers
and as the Trapper in
Prairie
, the personification of strength, courage, responsibility, in a violent and threatening wilderness. As Annette Kolodny says, “
The figure who most enduringly embodies
the myth of America’s westward expansion is Daniel Boone, passed down to us in later incarnations as Cooper’s Leatherstocking, Faulkner’s Boon Hogganbeck, and A. B. Guthrie’s Boon in
The Big Sky
.”

Lord Byron added to Boone’s reputation by portraying him as
General Boone in
Don Juan
in 1822, two years after the frontiersman’s death. Byron’s Boone is an ancient woodsman, still active in his ninetieth year, a hunter, but a man of peace who kills no humans. Byron’s poem contributed to the image of Boone as the noble patriarch of the natural world, untainted by the bloody cruelty of civilization and its wars. His portrait extended the Romantic vision of Boone as ideal hero living in harmony with the wilderness and simple virtues, who “
Enjoyed the lonely vigorous, harmless days
/ Of his old age in wilds of deepest maze.”

Though almost all Boone biographers have belittled Byron’s rendering of Boone as poetic fantasy, the poet captured something of an essential feature of Boone’s personality, the qualities that made him thrill to the solitude in the Kentucky wilds of 1770, the love of reaching out ever farther toward the opening in the forest that ended at the horizon, and Byron recognized Boone’s love of peace.

The pleasure and exuberance Boone experienced in the wilderness would later find their place in the paintings of the Hudson River school, in such artists as Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, and Frederick Church and in the work of George Caleb Bingham. Boone’s relish of the wilderness and the West would inform and help define the culture and consciousness of the new republic, even as his pioneering had helped destroy that wilderness.

An organization for boys
, called the Sons of Daniel Boone, founded in 1905 by Dan Beard, was the precursor to the Boy Scouts of America. By then Boone had long been established as an iconic figure presiding over America’s ideal of itself. He occupies “a kind of no-man’s land between the wilderness that is and the settlement that will be, neither a builder nor farmer, but a hunter, a Nimrod providentially equipped to explore the vast cipher of the continent and mark a trail for others.” To the environmentally sensitive, Boone is a reminder of missed opportunities, of a paradise lost, a primary symbol of our conflicted desires, confused destiny, our ideals and ambitions inspiring and undercutting each other.