Book Review/Boone: A biography
Book Review
Boone: A biography
By Robert Morgam
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
$29.95 Hardcover
By BILL DUNCAN
The News-Review
If you think of the American icon Daniel Boone as a frontiersman wearing a coonskin cap and cradling a long bore rifle, then your sense of history has been influenced by Walt Disney and the actor Fess Parker’s portrayal of Daniel Boone on the 1950s and 60s. Disney’s version of Daniel Boone itself was based on legends and myths about this very real American hero, but most of it was not based on fact.
Now comes a definitive biography of Daniel Boone published this month from the pen of master story teller and best selling author, Robert Morgan, who has spent the past five years researching and reading every written word about this legendary hero. The result is a true, flesh-and-blood man, but perhaps a much different one than the portrait in most American minds.
First of all, Morgan reveals, Boone never wore a coon skin cap. He was a Quaker and detested war and the attempt by the white man to slaughter the Indians. Of yes, he was very much involved in the American Revolution and the war with Indians over territory.
Boone was deeply influenced by Indian customs and beliefs and had a rapport with Indians unheard of by his contemporaries. At one time, he was taken prisoner by the Shawnees. Their chief, Blackfish, adopted him as a son and gave him the name "Sheltowes," translated "Big Turtle," the honored son of the war chief. Eventually, Boone escaped his captors and returned to his wife, Rebbeca and their children.
In his research, Morgan found a statement from Boone’s son, Nathan, in which he recalls his father once said he remembered killing only one Indian during the battle of Blue Licks in 1782. Morgan discovered that Boone won favor with the Indians by trading with them and was labeled a "white Indian," by the settlers who distrusted him because of his friendship with the Indians.
He was the subject of many folk tales about frontier life and Morgan found those tales influenced the writings of Wordsworth, Bartam, Byron and Whitman. But Morgan quickly puts those traditional tales as "fakelore," leading to much of the misconception of the real Daniel Boone, the explorer, settler and perhaps one of the first environmentalists. Morgan wrote that Boone cherished the land and longed to conserve the wilderness.
Interestingly, this non-fiction biography is being published simultaenouly with the release of the paperback reprint of Morgan’s novel, "Brave Enemies," about the Revoluntionary War in the Southern states. It was his research in writing that novel that intrigued him about Boone and led him to write Boone’s biography. It is interesting to read the two books in tandem and discover the nuances in both accounts. Morgan said in his introduction to "Boone," that writing a scene culminating at the Battle of the Cowpens in South Carolina in 1781, led him back to Boone.
Morgan grew up in North Carolina and recalls as a boy finding arrowheads and pieces of pottery in the alluvial soil by the river. "I always felt an intimate contact with the past, with the Indians, with the frontier. The Indians seemed to haunt the ground beneath my feet."
Like novelist-turned-historian Shelby Foote, Morgan writes with a novelist’s understanding of scene, putting the reader squarely into the wilderness alongside Boone and perhaps for the first time introducing the reader to the flesh and blood Daniel Boone, an American hero, pioneer, dreamer and visionary.
(Bill Duncan is editor of The Senior Times. He also writes a weekly column on the Opinion Page of The News-Review every Thursday.)