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In The Footsteps Of Daniel Boone
A biography in travel guide form that traces Daniel Boone's life from his childhood in Pennsylvania, through his exploits in Virginia and North Carolina, to his expeditions in Kentucky, Tennessee, and ultimately Missouri.
244 pages, Paperback
First published March 30, 2005
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January 19, 2025
2.5
I hate that it took me over two years to read this.
It’s funny that he said it’s an egregious misrepresentation of Boone to say he wore a coonskin cap because he never did and he loathed them.
He was a market hunter and harvested hides and pelts for profit. He was a guide piloting settlers to available land. He was a master woodsman, expert marksman, Indian fighter, militia leader, surveyor, land speculator, judge, sheriff, coroner, elected legislator, merchant, tavern keeper, prisoner of war, and Spanish syndic.
Daniel was born on October 22 but the calendars changed so that would put the birthday on November 2.
The grandpa of President Abraham Lincoln married Anne Boone, Daniel’s cousin.
I was thrilled at the mention of the Battle of Monongahela inspiring James Fenimore Cooper to do a similar ambush in The Last of the Mohicans and Nathaniel Bumppo was fashioned after Daniel Boone! Omg! Many people have studied the parallels between real accounts and Cooper’s novel. While I read about the provincial militia in the French and Indian War, I thought of The Last of the Mohicans which I recently watched.
I was really interested in the Waddell’s Rangers that Daniel was a part of. They were a militia group that patrolled the frontier in NC.
I noticed very early on that things went out of order and it was hard to keep up. One story related General Braddock’s death, and in the next story he was alive. I had to go back and make sure this was the same man. Then Daniel and Rebecca and their son traveled somewhere, before we even knew he married. He had been 20 in the previous story and then all of a sudden he had a family. I couldn’t believe everything was so disjointed. I can’t stand when biographies bounce around telling a person’s life stories out of order. It shouldn’t have gone in order of places but Daniel’s life. The events should have been chronological; it shouldn’t have gone in order of the states and what happened there. I could not follow the events of this man’s life and was so confused, my head was spinning.
I was so interested in the Great Wagon Road, the principal path that settlers used to move south from crowded Pennsylvania into the Virginia highlands and then into the Carolina Piedmont.
I hated the story of Rebecca having a child in Daniel’s absence that couldn’t be his and said it was his brother’s and she couldn’t resist because he looks so much like Daniel. It was a doubtful story with suspicious proof, but I still hated it. And it said he was okay with it because it’s still in the family. He apparently told a friend whose wife had cheated on him that if they had stayed at home it wouldn’t have happened. Rebecca said of wives staying at home while husbands hunted that they had better have stayed at home and got it themselves. Some versions say that Daniel was okay with it because he’d been married in the Indian way a couple times himself. What the hell does that mean? I hated to think that any of this could be true.
Banastre Tarleton raided the farm of Nicholas Lewis, Meriweather’s uncle. His men stole and probably ate all their ducks except one, and when Nicholas’s wife discovered the loss she had the last one sent to Tarleton with a message that was basically like today’s version of “Hey, you missed one.” He appreciated the irony and sent back her servant but no duck.
I liked the story of Rebecca teaching the militia a lesson at Moore’s Fort. They would stand without their rifles or lie down and not guard the fort. So she and her daughters and other women loaded muskets and rifles and went out and shot at the fort and then came back in. The men were panicked and some ran away or hid in the pond. The men wanted to whip the women and fought among themselves.
The Indians calls the whites “Long Knives.”
Daniel was called back to Clinch Valley to marshal the defenses. This showed the faith local settlers had in his leadership and historians believe that without Daniel’s presence more settlers would have left the frontier.
I was disappointed that Boone wrote that they needed to thwart the Indians and keep the country while they’re in it because if they give way now, they’ll always have to. It was so upsetting that he felt that way towards the Native Americans.
Streams of would-be settlers turned around and left the area near the Cumberland Gap and Henderson’s. the land speculator, success lay in establishing and holding a settlement in Kentucky. He feared Boone and his men were among those leaving and his only hope was in Boone holding fast.
In the summer of 1755 he started courting Rebecca Bryan, who had probably caught his eye at a wedding. He loved to tell the story of the test he put her through in which they sat at a cherry-picking outing and he kept tossing his knife through her apron where it spread out on the ground to determine if she had a temper. She never flinched or got onto him. What man ruins a woman’s nice garment to test her reaction? That is so messed up. But it was cool that events like this were held to give young people an opportunity to court.
On his dad Squire’s headstone “the” was spelled wrong 3 times: they, thay, and tha, and it shows the degree of literacy on the Carolina frontier. Daniel never went to school but was tutored by a girl at age 14, who married his older brother Samuel. “He could read and write though surviving records show the same inclination toward creative spelling.” That was funny.
Salisbury was a market town and during the colonial period it was one of the six largest settlement in NC. It was the intersection of the Trading Path and the Great Wagon Road and was a place of gathering and trade. He sold his deerskins when he was a market hunter in the Yadkin Valley. He would haul produce by wagon and trade for traps, shot, and gunpowder.
Salisbury was a place where frontiersmen and Catawba Indians gathered to trade goods, share news, and swap tall tales. Sometimes they challenged each other’s shooting skills for sport and gain. Daniel was famous as the best shot around. He often had to give a handicap to the others by shooting with one hand. He usually won the contests because he practiced that and other trick shots.
He said despite the Horn in the West, Daniel had no part in the War of the Regulation.
The Cherokee and Shawnees weren’t the only trouble for settlers. Bands of robbers harassed residents and stole their property. Some would ride up to cabins falsely warning of a party of Shawnee warriors approaching. After the inhabitants left, the robbers would plunder the empty homes. Others attacked homes at night with rocks, getting them to flee for their lives and then they would steal valuables.
I had already heard this story at the library program, but it was one of my favorites. How he’d been gone searching for Kentucky for 2 years and when he got back there was a dance held and he saw his wife and extended his hand for a dance and she turned him down, not recognizing him with his beard and long hair. He laughed and said “You’ve danced many a time with me.” She recognized his voice and threw her arms around him.
I liked the mention of the Great Warrior’s Path, also known as Athawominee, or the path of the armed ones. It was created by Buffalo migrating back and forth. So cool.
I liked the story of how Henderson was worried about Daniel and his party of axmen hacking out the Wilderness Road leaving after they were attacked and his one party’s slow progress at joining them that he asked for volunteers to ride ahead and tell Daniel they were coming and urge him not to give up. No one volunteered at first and then Captain William Cocke did and was applauded for his bravery. There was the promise of 10,000 acres of land and Henderson gave him a Queen Anne’s musket, ammunition, tomahawk, Dutch blanket, and jerked beef.
The Shawnee put a bell around their horses’ necks to help locate them when they grazed.
My favorite story was of the rescue of his daughter and her friends. The girls were so smart that they kept falling down to stall so the men could catch up to them and broke twigs so they could be tracked. When their captors put them on a horse they pinched and kicked the horse until it wouldn’t carry them.
It’s so sweet that Betsy, one of the girls captured, married Henderson after they returned to Boonesborough. Fanny married John Holder and Jemima married Flanders Calloway. Both men had been with the rescue party.
I had also learned about the salt boiling expedition. Two men were detailed to hunt for game to feed everyone and Daniel was usually one of them.
Daniel was accosted by Shawnee and his knife was frozen and hands were greasy with fat and so he ran away with his rifle. They caught up to him and show at him and broke the strap on his powder horn and he knew they weren’t going to kill him because they could have already. He leaned his rifle against a tree he hid behind to show he surrendered.
Some white people had “gone Indian.”
I was surprised that Boone had more luck as a storekeeper than a land surveyor. He provisioned Indian prisoners who were brought in for holding. And he negotiated the release of white prisoners captured by the Shawnees and others. He would retrieve captured children and care for them for up to a year before he found their families.
It was a cute story of his son Nathan. Daniel moved with his wife and Nathan to the Missouri Valley and Nathan had to leave the girl he was courting. He asked for his parents’ blessing and he got a marriage license and traveled back upstream to ask her to marry him, not knowing if she would follow him. But she agreed and they were married and traveled back west together to meet his parents.
Boone was taking a nap when his daughter was captured. Betsy’s fiancé Samuel Henderson was shaving. The men grabbed their rifles and ran to the river. Daniel had on pantaloons and was barefoot.
When Black Fish came to the fort with the band of Shawnee, he called Shel-tow-ee, his name for Daniel. He was Daniel’s Indian “father.” He wanted to hold Daniel to the promise to surrender the fort but Daniel had had no intention of that. He said “I’ll die with the rest.” Major William Bailey Smith pretended to be the fort’s commander and went with Daniel to speak to Black Fish.
The men in the fort of Boonsborough didn’t trust the civility from the Shawnees and they wanted to appear to have more numbers than they did. They dressed the women in men’s clothes and had them walk around inside the open gate even though all the armed men were visibly stationed at the wall.
It was also a really good story how it all played out. Black Fish said he’d bring 18 men to the negotiation, to supposedly represent the 18 villages. Daniel was to bring 9. The inequity of the numbers made Daniel suspect treachery. The night before he saw them doing a war dance. Then the morning of, Daniel noticed that the old chiefs had been replaced with young braves. After the meal Black Fish said two Indians would embrace each white man to seal the agreement and “bring their hearts closer together.” When they were all hugged Black Fish told them to go and a Shawnee fired. But Daniel had chosen 9 strong men and had told them to fire on the lumps to hit the two Indians holding each white man.
Though some historians doubt this story, I really liked it: At Bryan’s Station the settlers spotted Indians waiting to attack and they needed water to prepare for a siege. Sending men out would cause an attack so the woman volunteered to go out. They went to the spring and the Indians let them return without attack. The Indians burned all their livestock and fled and Daniel traveled there along with other men and the military and pursued them. Daniel could tell they were trying to disguise their numbers by stepping in each other’s footsteps. And they made their trail easy to follow. He suspected an ambush.
It’s cool that Harrodsburg, Kentucky has their own outdoor historic drama called Daniel Boone, the Man and the Legend.
It’s terrible that he was courtmartialed after his work in the siege and two men tried to get him to lose his militia rank, claiming he was a British supporter. He was cleared of all charges and promoted to major. He was embarrassed about it and the record was destroyed and no longer survives.
I was shocked that Daniel’s and Rebecca’s remains were disinterred in Missouri and lay in state at the State Capitol. People were allowed to handle his skull. They were then moved to Kentucky, the state that had done him so wrongly he never wanted to go back.
Major Arthur Campbell was put in charge of preparing for defense by Lord Dunmore, Virginia’s governor. He asked for volunteers of two men to warn surveyors in Kentucky of Indian attacks. Daniel volunteers and chose a German long hunger for his companion. The man aggravated a buffalo for sport and it ran after him. The man in his accent told Daniel to “Schoot her, gabtain! Schoot her, gabtain!” Daniel fell to the ground laughing instead.
A group of long hunters were hunting in Kentucky and heard this constant noise that wasn’t coming closer. One man went to investigate and found Daniel lying on the ground singing loudly at his camp.
When he was older hunting with limited due to rheumatism and Rebecca was sometimes his hunting companion. She carried his rifle when he couldn’t, and he started trapping beaver more than hunting. When he felt good enough he hunted like the old days.
Daniel was 44 when Black Fish adopted him as his son, and he was about 48. There was a ceremonial washing to remove all of his white blood and he was am equal in the family.
During Daniel’s 4.5 month captivity, one of the men pretended to be an incapable fool and the Shawnee laughed at him and didn’t think he was a risk. He repaid their carelessness by escaping to Boonesborough and giving away the village’s location. Daniel earned his family’s trust but stashed powder and shot from each hunting trip in his shirt. When the men went hunting he stayed behind and rode off on his horse.
It was so cute that when he got back to Boonesborough, and Jemima was the only one who stayed and believed him alive, the cat appeared who hadn’t been seen since Rebecca left and jumped in his lap.
It was so cool that Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne was mentioned because I remember him from Saratoga Secret.
I didn’t know this “In the Footsteps of” series worked like this where it’s literally just a list of everywhere they supposedly visited, sectioned off into the different states. The only order to be found was at the end in the timeline which only listed years and the name of the sites. By that time I had given up on ever being able to piece this man’s life together in chronological order and I couldn’t remember all of the sites and what happened there anyway so it was too late.
Some stories are mere speculation and some stopped and then said for the continuation go to another page. It was bizarre to me to stop a story unfinished just because the rest took place at another setting. The worst was when the conclusion of a story was shared because it happened in one area, before the beginning of the story was given because it happened in another area. For example, he told about Jemima and them being captured by Indians and then pursued by her dad and how the girls all got married soon after. But it wasn’t until later sections that he went back and told what Daniel and some of the men were doing when it happened and how the Indians got them out of the canoe. It was bizarre.
His library program was so engaging and he’s a good speaker, better at that than writing I hate to say. The talk was so exciting and made me want to read the book. I’m so glad I didn’t buy the copy full price there and found it for $1.50 at the library’s bookstore. Not that it’s not worth more than $1.50, but it’s definitely not worth $15. I also found his In the Footsteps of Davy Crockett novel and I dread reading that because I’m not as interested in him as I am Daniel Boone.
I hate that it took me over two years to read this.
It’s funny that he said it’s an egregious misrepresentation of Boone to say he wore a coonskin cap because he never did and he loathed them.
He was a market hunter and harvested hides and pelts for profit. He was a guide piloting settlers to available land. He was a master woodsman, expert marksman, Indian fighter, militia leader, surveyor, land speculator, judge, sheriff, coroner, elected legislator, merchant, tavern keeper, prisoner of war, and Spanish syndic.
Daniel was born on October 22 but the calendars changed so that would put the birthday on November 2.
The grandpa of President Abraham Lincoln married Anne Boone, Daniel’s cousin.
I was thrilled at the mention of the Battle of Monongahela inspiring James Fenimore Cooper to do a similar ambush in The Last of the Mohicans and Nathaniel Bumppo was fashioned after Daniel Boone! Omg! Many people have studied the parallels between real accounts and Cooper’s novel. While I read about the provincial militia in the French and Indian War, I thought of The Last of the Mohicans which I recently watched.
I was really interested in the Waddell’s Rangers that Daniel was a part of. They were a militia group that patrolled the frontier in NC.
I noticed very early on that things went out of order and it was hard to keep up. One story related General Braddock’s death, and in the next story he was alive. I had to go back and make sure this was the same man. Then Daniel and Rebecca and their son traveled somewhere, before we even knew he married. He had been 20 in the previous story and then all of a sudden he had a family. I couldn’t believe everything was so disjointed. I can’t stand when biographies bounce around telling a person’s life stories out of order. It shouldn’t have gone in order of places but Daniel’s life. The events should have been chronological; it shouldn’t have gone in order of the states and what happened there. I could not follow the events of this man’s life and was so confused, my head was spinning.
I was so interested in the Great Wagon Road, the principal path that settlers used to move south from crowded Pennsylvania into the Virginia highlands and then into the Carolina Piedmont.
I hated the story of Rebecca having a child in Daniel’s absence that couldn’t be his and said it was his brother’s and she couldn’t resist because he looks so much like Daniel. It was a doubtful story with suspicious proof, but I still hated it. And it said he was okay with it because it’s still in the family. He apparently told a friend whose wife had cheated on him that if they had stayed at home it wouldn’t have happened. Rebecca said of wives staying at home while husbands hunted that they had better have stayed at home and got it themselves. Some versions say that Daniel was okay with it because he’d been married in the Indian way a couple times himself. What the hell does that mean? I hated to think that any of this could be true.
Banastre Tarleton raided the farm of Nicholas Lewis, Meriweather’s uncle. His men stole and probably ate all their ducks except one, and when Nicholas’s wife discovered the loss she had the last one sent to Tarleton with a message that was basically like today’s version of “Hey, you missed one.” He appreciated the irony and sent back her servant but no duck.
I liked the story of Rebecca teaching the militia a lesson at Moore’s Fort. They would stand without their rifles or lie down and not guard the fort. So she and her daughters and other women loaded muskets and rifles and went out and shot at the fort and then came back in. The men were panicked and some ran away or hid in the pond. The men wanted to whip the women and fought among themselves.
The Indians calls the whites “Long Knives.”
Daniel was called back to Clinch Valley to marshal the defenses. This showed the faith local settlers had in his leadership and historians believe that without Daniel’s presence more settlers would have left the frontier.
I was disappointed that Boone wrote that they needed to thwart the Indians and keep the country while they’re in it because if they give way now, they’ll always have to. It was so upsetting that he felt that way towards the Native Americans.
Streams of would-be settlers turned around and left the area near the Cumberland Gap and Henderson’s. the land speculator, success lay in establishing and holding a settlement in Kentucky. He feared Boone and his men were among those leaving and his only hope was in Boone holding fast.
In the summer of 1755 he started courting Rebecca Bryan, who had probably caught his eye at a wedding. He loved to tell the story of the test he put her through in which they sat at a cherry-picking outing and he kept tossing his knife through her apron where it spread out on the ground to determine if she had a temper. She never flinched or got onto him. What man ruins a woman’s nice garment to test her reaction? That is so messed up. But it was cool that events like this were held to give young people an opportunity to court.
On his dad Squire’s headstone “the” was spelled wrong 3 times: they, thay, and tha, and it shows the degree of literacy on the Carolina frontier. Daniel never went to school but was tutored by a girl at age 14, who married his older brother Samuel. “He could read and write though surviving records show the same inclination toward creative spelling.” That was funny.
Salisbury was a market town and during the colonial period it was one of the six largest settlement in NC. It was the intersection of the Trading Path and the Great Wagon Road and was a place of gathering and trade. He sold his deerskins when he was a market hunter in the Yadkin Valley. He would haul produce by wagon and trade for traps, shot, and gunpowder.
Salisbury was a place where frontiersmen and Catawba Indians gathered to trade goods, share news, and swap tall tales. Sometimes they challenged each other’s shooting skills for sport and gain. Daniel was famous as the best shot around. He often had to give a handicap to the others by shooting with one hand. He usually won the contests because he practiced that and other trick shots.
He said despite the Horn in the West, Daniel had no part in the War of the Regulation.
The Cherokee and Shawnees weren’t the only trouble for settlers. Bands of robbers harassed residents and stole their property. Some would ride up to cabins falsely warning of a party of Shawnee warriors approaching. After the inhabitants left, the robbers would plunder the empty homes. Others attacked homes at night with rocks, getting them to flee for their lives and then they would steal valuables.
I had already heard this story at the library program, but it was one of my favorites. How he’d been gone searching for Kentucky for 2 years and when he got back there was a dance held and he saw his wife and extended his hand for a dance and she turned him down, not recognizing him with his beard and long hair. He laughed and said “You’ve danced many a time with me.” She recognized his voice and threw her arms around him.
I liked the mention of the Great Warrior’s Path, also known as Athawominee, or the path of the armed ones. It was created by Buffalo migrating back and forth. So cool.
I liked the story of how Henderson was worried about Daniel and his party of axmen hacking out the Wilderness Road leaving after they were attacked and his one party’s slow progress at joining them that he asked for volunteers to ride ahead and tell Daniel they were coming and urge him not to give up. No one volunteered at first and then Captain William Cocke did and was applauded for his bravery. There was the promise of 10,000 acres of land and Henderson gave him a Queen Anne’s musket, ammunition, tomahawk, Dutch blanket, and jerked beef.
The Shawnee put a bell around their horses’ necks to help locate them when they grazed.
My favorite story was of the rescue of his daughter and her friends. The girls were so smart that they kept falling down to stall so the men could catch up to them and broke twigs so they could be tracked. When their captors put them on a horse they pinched and kicked the horse until it wouldn’t carry them.
It’s so sweet that Betsy, one of the girls captured, married Henderson after they returned to Boonesborough. Fanny married John Holder and Jemima married Flanders Calloway. Both men had been with the rescue party.
I had also learned about the salt boiling expedition. Two men were detailed to hunt for game to feed everyone and Daniel was usually one of them.
Daniel was accosted by Shawnee and his knife was frozen and hands were greasy with fat and so he ran away with his rifle. They caught up to him and show at him and broke the strap on his powder horn and he knew they weren’t going to kill him because they could have already. He leaned his rifle against a tree he hid behind to show he surrendered.
Some white people had “gone Indian.”
I was surprised that Boone had more luck as a storekeeper than a land surveyor. He provisioned Indian prisoners who were brought in for holding. And he negotiated the release of white prisoners captured by the Shawnees and others. He would retrieve captured children and care for them for up to a year before he found their families.
It was a cute story of his son Nathan. Daniel moved with his wife and Nathan to the Missouri Valley and Nathan had to leave the girl he was courting. He asked for his parents’ blessing and he got a marriage license and traveled back upstream to ask her to marry him, not knowing if she would follow him. But she agreed and they were married and traveled back west together to meet his parents.
Boone was taking a nap when his daughter was captured. Betsy’s fiancé Samuel Henderson was shaving. The men grabbed their rifles and ran to the river. Daniel had on pantaloons and was barefoot.
When Black Fish came to the fort with the band of Shawnee, he called Shel-tow-ee, his name for Daniel. He was Daniel’s Indian “father.” He wanted to hold Daniel to the promise to surrender the fort but Daniel had had no intention of that. He said “I’ll die with the rest.” Major William Bailey Smith pretended to be the fort’s commander and went with Daniel to speak to Black Fish.
The men in the fort of Boonsborough didn’t trust the civility from the Shawnees and they wanted to appear to have more numbers than they did. They dressed the women in men’s clothes and had them walk around inside the open gate even though all the armed men were visibly stationed at the wall.
It was also a really good story how it all played out. Black Fish said he’d bring 18 men to the negotiation, to supposedly represent the 18 villages. Daniel was to bring 9. The inequity of the numbers made Daniel suspect treachery. The night before he saw them doing a war dance. Then the morning of, Daniel noticed that the old chiefs had been replaced with young braves. After the meal Black Fish said two Indians would embrace each white man to seal the agreement and “bring their hearts closer together.” When they were all hugged Black Fish told them to go and a Shawnee fired. But Daniel had chosen 9 strong men and had told them to fire on the lumps to hit the two Indians holding each white man.
Though some historians doubt this story, I really liked it: At Bryan’s Station the settlers spotted Indians waiting to attack and they needed water to prepare for a siege. Sending men out would cause an attack so the woman volunteered to go out. They went to the spring and the Indians let them return without attack. The Indians burned all their livestock and fled and Daniel traveled there along with other men and the military and pursued them. Daniel could tell they were trying to disguise their numbers by stepping in each other’s footsteps. And they made their trail easy to follow. He suspected an ambush.
It’s cool that Harrodsburg, Kentucky has their own outdoor historic drama called Daniel Boone, the Man and the Legend.
It’s terrible that he was courtmartialed after his work in the siege and two men tried to get him to lose his militia rank, claiming he was a British supporter. He was cleared of all charges and promoted to major. He was embarrassed about it and the record was destroyed and no longer survives.
I was shocked that Daniel’s and Rebecca’s remains were disinterred in Missouri and lay in state at the State Capitol. People were allowed to handle his skull. They were then moved to Kentucky, the state that had done him so wrongly he never wanted to go back.
Major Arthur Campbell was put in charge of preparing for defense by Lord Dunmore, Virginia’s governor. He asked for volunteers of two men to warn surveyors in Kentucky of Indian attacks. Daniel volunteers and chose a German long hunger for his companion. The man aggravated a buffalo for sport and it ran after him. The man in his accent told Daniel to “Schoot her, gabtain! Schoot her, gabtain!” Daniel fell to the ground laughing instead.
A group of long hunters were hunting in Kentucky and heard this constant noise that wasn’t coming closer. One man went to investigate and found Daniel lying on the ground singing loudly at his camp.
When he was older hunting with limited due to rheumatism and Rebecca was sometimes his hunting companion. She carried his rifle when he couldn’t, and he started trapping beaver more than hunting. When he felt good enough he hunted like the old days.
Daniel was 44 when Black Fish adopted him as his son, and he was about 48. There was a ceremonial washing to remove all of his white blood and he was am equal in the family.
During Daniel’s 4.5 month captivity, one of the men pretended to be an incapable fool and the Shawnee laughed at him and didn’t think he was a risk. He repaid their carelessness by escaping to Boonesborough and giving away the village’s location. Daniel earned his family’s trust but stashed powder and shot from each hunting trip in his shirt. When the men went hunting he stayed behind and rode off on his horse.
It was so cute that when he got back to Boonesborough, and Jemima was the only one who stayed and believed him alive, the cat appeared who hadn’t been seen since Rebecca left and jumped in his lap.
It was so cool that Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne was mentioned because I remember him from Saratoga Secret.
I didn’t know this “In the Footsteps of” series worked like this where it’s literally just a list of everywhere they supposedly visited, sectioned off into the different states. The only order to be found was at the end in the timeline which only listed years and the name of the sites. By that time I had given up on ever being able to piece this man’s life together in chronological order and I couldn’t remember all of the sites and what happened there anyway so it was too late.
Some stories are mere speculation and some stopped and then said for the continuation go to another page. It was bizarre to me to stop a story unfinished just because the rest took place at another setting. The worst was when the conclusion of a story was shared because it happened in one area, before the beginning of the story was given because it happened in another area. For example, he told about Jemima and them being captured by Indians and then pursued by her dad and how the girls all got married soon after. But it wasn’t until later sections that he went back and told what Daniel and some of the men were doing when it happened and how the Indians got them out of the canoe. It was bizarre.
His library program was so engaging and he’s a good speaker, better at that than writing I hate to say. The talk was so exciting and made me want to read the book. I’m so glad I didn’t buy the copy full price there and found it for $1.50 at the library’s bookstore. Not that it’s not worth more than $1.50, but it’s definitely not worth $15. I also found his In the Footsteps of Davy Crockett novel and I dread reading that because I’m not as interested in him as I am Daniel Boone.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 18, 2025
Good book if you are a Boone or early USA history buff. (I'm reading the Giles novel The Kentuckians simultaneously. ) We plan to use the book's appendices to visit Boone sites near us, since we live in SW Va at one of his home sites. I've sung at a church that was established partly by Squire Boone.
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