DANIEL BOONE… THE MISSOURIAN?

Daniel Boone is most often associated with Kentucky, and rightly so. Beginning in the late 1760s the famed frontiersman led parties of hunters and settlers through the Cumberland Gap into the beautiful country beyond, and there with fellow emigrants he constructed Fort Boonesborough, which would play a crucial role in the American Revolution. Yet he also developed deep ties to Missouri—6 feet deep after his 1820 death, for Boone began his eternal rest in Missouri soil. Unhappy Kentuckians vowed to avenge the slight.

The man who would become one of the legendary figures of the American frontier was born on Nov. 2, 1734, the sixth of 11 children raised by Quaker parents in what today is Berks County, Pa. After a falling-out with the local community of Quakers, father Squire Boone moved his family south to the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina. There Daniel cultivated an enduring love of the wilderness, spending long days exploring the relatively unspoiled forests and mountains of the Piedmont region. He was an indifferent student who never learned to write more than a crude sentence or two, often rife with misspellings. Instead, Boone honed his skills as a woodsman, marksman and hunter—abilities that would serve him well in his venturesome adulthood in the East and the West.

Never one to stay put long, Boone made ever longer and more ambitious journeys into the wilds of western North Carolina in the 1750s and ’60s. “It was on the 1st of May in the year 1769,” he later told biographer John Filson, “that I resigned my domestic happiness for a time and left my family and peaceable habitation on the Yadkin River in North Carolina to wander through the wilderness of America in quest of the country of Kentucky.” Accompanied by five other “long hunters,” Boone crossed over the Cumberland Gap to explore along the south fork of the Kentucky River. Impressed by the abundant game and fertile soil, Boone resolved to return. He did so four years later with wife Rebecca, their eight young children and some 50 others, aiming to establish a settlement. The resident American Indians had different ideas and killed several of the party, including the Boones’ eldest son, James, so the expedition turned back. But in 1775 the Boones and other settlers