Beyond the Trivia-Daniel Boone

One of today's designations is National Boone Day, in honor of American pioneer and frontiersman Daniel Boone. Boone is known for blazing a trail into Kentucky and founding one of the first English-speaking settlements west of the Appalachian mountains. He spent the last twenty years of his life in Missouri, and Boone County and Boonville are named for him. Today's trivia has four statements about Daniel Boone. Which are true? (1.) Daniel Boone was famous in his own time. (2.) He had no children. (3.) He was a slave owner. (4.) He was a shrewd businessman.

Answer:

Daniel Boone was a true pioneer and was intimately involved in the early history of Kentucky. He was also one of the country's first folk heroes. There were many stories about Boone's exploits, some true, many tall tales. And Daniel Boone was a legend in his own time. He was aware of many of those stories about himself. So statement one is true.

Boone wed a North Carolina neighbor and they were married for more than 50 years until her death. Did they have any children? Indeed they did, ten of them. One of Boone's sons, Daniel Morgan Boone, known as Morgan, served on the committee that determined the exact location of a new capital city for Missouri. He also surveyed and laid out the grid for the initial streets of the city of Jefferson (Jefferson City's official name). Morgan and a brother, Nathan, expanded the native American trail from St. Charles County along the Missouri River to a salt spring in central Missouri. Boiling that spring water left deposits of salt, a precious commodity. The Boone Brothers established Boone's Lick to process salt from the spring by boiling away the water. (A lick is a place where animals go to lick salt from the ground.) It was sometimes spelled "Boons lick" and the area is now called the Boonslick , a cultural region along the Missouri River that played an important role in westward expansion. That spelling explains why the city of Boonville is spelled without the "e". Boone's Lick is now a state historic site. The Boone brothers had other businesses in central Missouri and other parts of the state, including the lumber business.

Was Daniel Boone a slave owner? Not later in life, but at one time he had seven slaves who helped him forge a road into what would be Kentucky. The third statement is true.

Finally, was Boone considered a shrewd businessman? Actually, just the opposite. Daniel Boone was a prosperous businessman and a member of the Virginia legislature, but he lost large sums of money as a land speculator, buying and selling claims to tens of thousands of acres. Those debts led to legal action and threats of arrest, and one of the main reasons he moved to Missouri was to flee from Kentucky authorities. At the time, Missouri was Spanish territory and Spain welcomed Boone, providing him a land grant and making him a district judge and military leader. After Spain had ceded its holdings to France and France sold the Louisiana Territory to the United States, Boone lost his land, mainly because those grants were made verbally, not by contract. Boone won back that land after petitioning Congress and sold most of it to pay his old Kentucky debts. Boone lived to the age of 85 after living several years at his son's house in Defiance, in St. Charles County. He died there in 1820. The home is an historic site and is open to the public.