Everyone Needs To Know The Real Story of Daniel Boone

[00:00:00]The Shaunie Warriors were standing in two parallel lines about five feet apart. They were armed with clubs and tomahawks. Daniel Boone's task was [music] very simple. He had to run between the two lines, ducking and dodging as best he could and absorbing whatever blows landed on him. If he fell, the consequences were clear. He would be beaten to death on the spot. If he made it to the end, still standing, the reward was a little less clear. He might be allowed to live or he might not. Boon did not hesitate. He weaved his way through the gauntlet, making it from one end to the other quickly while sustaining relatively minor injuries.

[00:00:35]The Shaunie chief, a man called Blackfish, was impressed. So impressed that he decided to let Daniel Boone live, at least for now. He would take Boon as a prisoner, and in keeping with the custom of many Indian tribes, give him a new name, Shelui, which means big turtle. It was February of 1778. Daniel Boone, the pioneer, trailblazer, and eventual folk hero of the American frontier, had been captured by the Shaune while out collecting salt. In those days, and in that part of the country, still in its infancy, getting salt was not as simple as running to the grocery store. And salt itself was not merely a seasoning to make your food taste better, was a vital survival necessity. Salt was how you preserve meat. And back in Booneboro, the settlement that Boon founded, they were running dangerously low. So Boon set out with a group of 30 men to the Salt Springs about 60 miles away. It was an arduous task which would take several weeks to complete. And it would leave the settlement, one of only a scattered few in the wilderness of Kentucky, vulnerable to attack, but they had no choice. The Shaunie found Boon and his men while they were out near the Salt Spring. Boon's group was badly outnumbered, had no hope of resistance.

[00:01:46]Even worse news was that a number of Shaun-e wanted to execute all the prisoners outright. And there was news somehow even worse than that. This same Shaunie party was on its way to Boonboro, which with Boon and his company captured was almost entirely defenseless. Boon's wife and children and the wives and children of many of the rest of the men were sitting ducks.

[00:02:06]But Daniel Boone was crafty when he needed to be. He convinced Blackfish that if they left the settlement alone for the winter, he would personally accompany the Shaunie back to the settlement in the spring and persuade the residents to surrender peacefully.

[00:02:19]Boon was apparently convincing enough in this ruse that some of his own men thought he had turned traitor, a fact that down the line would lead to a court marshal. For now, Blackfish bought Boon's argument and he was persuaded to let all the men live as prisoners. But first, they or at least Boon would have to run and survive the gauntlet, which he did. Boon remained in captivity for several months, long enough that the people back in Boonboro, to include his wife and children, gave him up for dead.

[00:02:46]But things changed in June of 1778. Boon learned that Blackfish was planning to assemble a war party and descend on Boonboro. He had apparently abandoned his plans for diplomacy. Boon knew that he had to make a move and make it fast, so he made a run for it. He escaped the Shauny village and fled into the wilderness. He would have to make it home in time to warn them of the coming attack. But there was a problem. Home was 160 mi away. 160 mi through the wilderness. A distance that Boon would have to travel mostly on foot after his horse collapsed and died early in the journey. Now, it's hard for our modern minds to appreciate a distance like 160 mi. And these days, we might drive that length in an afternoon. And when you factor in a Starbucks stop and maybe a bathroom break, it should take about 3 hours. But 160 mi on foot through the forest with Indian warriors hot on your trail and an army of natives on their way to murder your entire family is a different matter entirely. And this must all be done with almost no provisions.

[00:03:43]Indeed, we know that Boon carried very little. Whatever supplies he had could not have amounted to much. One account suggests that during the entire journey, he ate only a single meal and a small piece of dried venison. Whether that account is perfectly accurate or not, the broader reality is not in doubt.

[00:03:58]Boon was not undertaking a carefully supplied expedition. He was fleeing for his life and for the lives of everybody in the settlement. He had to get there and he had to get there fast. An extraordinary journey lay before him. It was not his first. It would not be his last. June means summer is officially here. My family schedule is already packed. Uh, [music] spending time with the kids, traveling, celebrating America's 250th. It's a very busy season. [music] And what I don't have time for is sifting through a maze of confusing insurance websites trying to figure out whether I'm actually getting [music] a good deal. That's where Policy Genius comes in. Most people know they need life insurance. They just [music] keep putting it off because it sounds complicated. And that's the wrong call.

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[00:05:22]Daniel Boone was born in Pennsylvania in 1734, more than four decades [music] before the United States would even exist as a country. The frontier of the British colonies lay far to [music] the east of where most Americans live today.

[00:05:34]Beyond it stretched millions of acres of forest, mountains, rivers, and wilderness that Europeans had barely explored. Much of the continent remained a blank space on the map. Now, from an early age, he seemed drawn to it. Boon learned to hunt as a boy and quickly developed a reputation for spending long stretches [music] of time alone in the woods. While most people viewed the wilderness as an obstacle, something [music] to be conquered or endured, Boon was at home there. He could navigate by landmarks that other people barely noticed, track animals through dense [music] forest, survive with remarkably little. These skills were not unique on the frontier. Many men possessed them.

[00:06:10]What was unusual was Boon's appetite for the unknown. Now, most settlers wanted to build a life at the edge of civilization. Boon always seemed more interested in what lay beyond the edge, out in the wild. In 1773, Boon, by now married with eight children, led a party of roughly 50 people into the wilds of the Kentucky territory. He had first heard the stories two decades earlier, tales of a land thick with game, rich and wild and all but untouched by European hands. Now he meant to go out and see [music] it for himself and to bring his family with him to establish what would be one of the first Anglo-American settlements in Kentucky.

[00:06:45]But the frontier rarely let such ambitions pass without exacting a price.

[00:06:49]And as so often happened out there, tragedy struck before they ever [music] arrived. Along the way, a small detachment sent back to retrieve supplies lost its way [music] trying to rejoin Boone's main party. Somewhere in that confusion, the group was ambushed by Indian warriors. Among [music] them was Boone's own son. 16-year-old James was tortured, butchered, and left mutilated and dead alongside five others. Daniel Boone came upon the grizzly scene [music] later that same day. The whole company, traumatized by what they saw and gutted by the loss, resolved to return, turn back. Boon urged them to press on. He still wanted to go, but it was no use. Two years later, in 1775, Boon tried again. He went back into the very wilderness that had swallowed his son's life, a place that had every reason to haunt him and every [music] reason to keep him away.

[00:07:39]This time he led a band of about 30 heavily armed men with axes. And together they hacked and cut their way through the Cumberland Gap, carving open a path to the land west of the Appalachian [music] Mountains. Yet even then, the wilderness was not finished testing him. Only days before reaching their destination, Boon's party was ambushed once more. Two of his men were killed. But this time, they held their ground, fought off the attack, and pressed on. In April of that year, on the banks of the Kentucky River, Daniel Boone raised a small fort, a [music] refuge for his family and several others. He called it Boonsboro. Now, of course, life at a little fortress in the wilderness, ringed by hostile natives, was anything but easy. The fort was under near constant threats. And about a year after it was built, the Boone family suffered yet another brush with tragedy. Boon's 13-year-old daughter, Jamaima, had gone canoeing with two friends within sight of the walls when they were spotted by an Indian raiding party, a mixed band of Shaunie and Cherokee warriors. The girls were pulled from the boat and carried off. Their capttors meant to take them north all the way across the Ohio and deep into Shauny territory. When Daniel Boone learned that his daughter had been taken, he gathered a small group of men and set off after them. Fortunately, the girls had the presence of mind to leave a trail, snapping branches, dropping torn scraps of fabric along the way, a thread for Boone to follow through the trees. 3 days later, the rescue party crept up on the Indians as they ate breakfast over a campfire. The men opened fire, cutting down several of the capttors. [music] The rest scattered into the wilderness. The girls were recovered alive and mostly unharmed. As the story goes, one of the warriors killed that morning was a son of Chief Blackfish, the very same chief who would take Boon himself prisoner 3 years later. So, as Boon tore through the forest in 1778, it was not the first desperate dash he had made to save his family. He completed that journey 160 mi, the bulk of it on foot. In just 5 days, he reached Boonsboro and the family and neighbors who had long since given him up for dead in September.

[00:09:35]Blackfish and the Shaune had not yet arrived. There was still time to ready the fort for battle. And so that's exactly what they set about doing. A few days later, the enemy force appeared.

[00:09:45]Boon counted more than 400 Indians, mostly Shaunie, a scattering of Cherokees and Delawarees, and at least 12 French Canadian militia men fighting on behalf of the British. Against this formidable host, Boon had at the very most 60 men, maybe as few as 40. He had just run for his life across 160 mi of wilderness. Now he'd have to stand and fight for it and for the lives of everybody inside the fort. The siege dragged on for some 10 days. The Shaunie tried every tactic they could deise. At one point, they even attempted to tunnel beneath the walls of the fort. But after a week and a half of fighting, they abandoned the effort and withdrew.

[00:10:20]Boon's men had suffered only five or six casualties. the fort had held and the settlement survived. Having saved Boomsboro, Daniel Boone would go on to claim nearly 100,000 acres of Kentucky land. And yet, before the century was out, by 1798, he would lose every last acre of it. Boon was a brilliant pioneer, but he was no businessman. The fine print of land titles and deeds was simply beyond him or beneath his interest. He was a man who would always rather be out in the woods instead of bent over paperwork at the county clerk's office. Boon, who had fought in one of the final battles of the Revolutionary War, later tried to volunteer for the War of 1812, only to be turned away on the entirely reasonable grounds that he was 78 years old. But Daniel Boone was not a man who took such hints. 5 years later, not long after the death of his wife, at the age of 82, he set out on what would prove to be his last great expedition into the wild. He pushed deep into uncharted territory along the Missouri River. The journey stretched on for 6 months, and it carried with it one final brush with hostile Indians. Boon was forced to lie hidden in the brush for 20 days to elude a band of Osage warriors. He made it home alive, sick, spent, exhausted, but hauling with him a heavy load of valuable furs. In 1820, Daniel Boone's remarkable life came at last to its end.

[00:11:43]He died in Missouri and was buried there beside his wife on the family farm. 25 years later, a delegation from Kentucky with the blessing of Boon's family, exumed his grave, and carried him to be reeri.

[00:11:56]And from that act sprang a mystery that endures to this day. Locals in Missouri have long insisted that the Kentucky delegation dug up the wrong body. More than a century afterward, a forensic analysis suggested they may have been right. That the remains rearied in Kentucky might have belonged to a black man. In all likelihood, one of the family's slaves. The riddle was never solved, which is why even now you can visit the official grave of Daniel Boone in Missouri and his other official grave in Kentucky. Both states maintain with equal conviction that they hold the final resting place of Daniel Boone.

[00:12:27]Perhaps a fitting epilogue for a man who more than anything else in his life could never quite stay in one place for very long.

[00:12:42]Once upon a time, there was a country.

[00:12:45]Not just a country, but a big one, an empire. And in that empire, there was an upper middle class family who had two boys. They were raised by their mother who loved books, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the Bible. Their father admired the country's leaders, were patriotic and happy. Both sons went to universities where [music] they were radicalized. One of the brothers read a book and convinced him to try to shoot the country's leader. He was hanged. The other brother read the same books and decided to lead a movement. First they came for the universities and no one seemed to care. Then they took over the unions and again no one seemed to care.

[00:13:21]Then they created their own media organizations and took over the cities and again most people just ignored it.

[00:13:27]Change, after all, was something they could believe in until it was too late.

[00:13:32]Sound familiar? This is the real history of communism of the Russian Revolution.

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