Nowadays one of the most overlooked American pioneers is Daniel Boone. Probably because he isn’t really taught in history classes. When I was a kid there was a television show, Daniel Boone, starring Fess Parker and he was my hero.

If anyone in history needs his biography brought forth, it is Daniel Boone, if it wasn't for the TV show I wouldn't have known about him and wouldn't have studied him on my own.

Boone was born on November 2, 1734 to  Squire and Sarah Boone in Oley Township, Pennsylvania. Boone’s parents were Quakers.

Boone spent most  his youth hanging with some members of the Lenape (Delaware) tribe. He received his first rifle when he was twelve years old. He honed his shooting skills during this time.

When Boone was 16, his father sold his land in Pennsylvania and moved the family to the Yadkin Valley in North Carolina. Here Boone spent the majority of his time roaming the woods hunting, fishing, and trapping.

Concerns by a school teacher were expressed that Boone wasn’t attending formal school. Just because Boone didn’t go to school didn't mean he wasn't being educated. He still received tutoring at home and became as literate as any man of the time.

The French and Indian War broke out in 1754 between the French and British, and their respective Indian allies. Boone answered the call to serve in the North Carolina Militia. His unit was assigned to serve in the command of General Edward Braddock in 1755.
 
 Boone was acting as a wagon driver in the Battle of the Monongahela, which ended in a British defeat and Braddock’s death. Boone himself narrowly escaped death when the supply wagons were attacked by Indians.

Boone returned home from the war on August 14, 1756. He married Rebecca Bryan, a Yadkin River Valley neighbor. The couple had 10 children, his youngest son, Nathan Boone, had the distinction of being the first colonist known to be born in Kentucky.

Boone supported his family by hunting deer, bear, elk  and buffalo and by trapping beaver and otter. He would be gone for long stretches of time known as “long hunts”.

One of these long hunts lasted two years. When he came home Rebecca greeted him with a new six month old baby girl named Jemima. Boone was told the girl had been fathered by his brother Ned. Rebecca said he had been gone so long she was sure he was dead. Boone accepted this explanation and raised the girl as if she were his own.

That hunt had become two years long because Boone had been captured by the Shawnees. The Shawnees confiscated all his furs and told him to leave Kentucky and never come back. He was told if he ever returned the “Bees and yellow jackets will sting you.”

This didn’t dampen his eagerness to get to Kentucky. In 1773, Boone packed up his family and about 50 immigrants headed off to be the first settlers in Kentucky.
 
Boone's oldest son, James, and a small group of men and boys had left the main party to retrieve supplies and were attacked by a combined band of Delawares, Shawnees, and Cherokees. James and another boy were tortured and killed. Due to the gruesome killings Boone's party abandoned this expedition and returned to the Yadkin Valley.

Two years later, Boone and a group of settlers blazed a trail through the Cumberland Gap known as the Wilderness Road and would establish the settlement of Boonesborough.

A year later the Revolutionary War was beginning. The British secured the Shawnee as allies to push the settlers out of Kentucky.

1777 was known as the year of the Bloody Sevens. The Shawnees were wreaking havoc all over the frontier. Chief Blackfish attacked Boonesborough in April. Unable to take the fort outright, the Shawnees laid siege to it. While the settlers huddled inside the fort, the Shawnees destroyed crops and killed farm animals.

In January the settlers were running short of salt, which was needed to preserve meat. Boone led a group of thirty men to a salt lick to collect salt by boiling it. While out hunting, Boone was captured by Chief Blackfish.
 
Blackfish saw the capture of Boone as a great prize, the other 30 at the salt lick not so much. Boone convinced Blackfish he could get them surrender and they’d be more valuable alive than dead, Chief Blackfish agreed.

After the men had been captured Blackfish wanted to proceed on to Boonesborough and take it. Boone convinced Blackfish to hold off attacking the fort until spring, which Blackfish also agreed to this.
 
Boone and his men were taken to the Shawnee town of Chillicothe where they were made to run the gauntlet. Boone and several others were adopted into the Shawnee tribe, the rest were taken to Detroit and sold to the British.

Boone was adopted into the family of Chief Blackfish and given the Shawnee name of Sheltowee, or “Big Turtle. In June found out that Chiev Blackfish was getting ready to make another run at Boonesborough, so he made a break for it.
 
Boone led the Shawnee on a merry chase for the next five days and 160 miles, but he arrived back in Boonesborough with enough time to warn the settlers the Shawnee were on the way.

After a 10 day siege, the settlers were victorious. When Boone arrived he found that Rebecca had packed the kids up and headed for the safety of Carolina.

The reunion with his family would have to wait because two men, Captain Benjamin Logan and Colonel Richard Callaway, brought charges against Boone for surrendering the men at the salt lick. Both men had nephews who were still captives surrendered by Boone.

Boone was court martialed and found not guilty, in fact he was promoted to militia colonel after the trial.
 
Throughout the rest of the Revolutionary War Boone served under General George Rogers Clark until he was voted to the Virginia state legislature, while the war with the British ended in 1781, the Shawnees continued fighting on until 1782. In the Battle of Blue Licks Boone’s son Israel was killed.

Boone served two terms in the Virginia Legislature. By 1778, Boone had big debt problems due to land speculation. By 1789 he was broke and landless.
Frustrated with the legal hassles that went with land speculation, in 1788, Boone moved to Virginia where he operated a trading post and occasionally worked as a surveyor's assistant.

Boone had a contract to supply the militia with equipment and supplies, but due to his money woes he couldn’t buy goods on credit and he ended up losing the contract. He shut the store and went back to what he was good at, hunting and trapping.

He moved back to Kentucky in 1795, but that was short-lived due to his financial problems, he lost all his Kentucky land holdings.

In 1799, Boone moved his family to what is now St. Charles County, Missouri, which was then part of Spanish Louisiana. The Spanish governor appointed Boone "syndic," judge and jury, and military leader of the district.
It was said  Boone's time as syndic that he rendered fair judgments, rather than strictly observing  the letter of the law.
 
Boone served as syndic and commandant until 1804, when Missouri became part of the United States following the Louisiana Purchase.

Once again fortune turned against Boone because his land grants from the Spanish government had been verbal agreements, he once again lost his land claims. In 1809, he petitioned Congress to restore his Spanish land claims, which happened in 1814. Boone sold most of this land to repay old Kentucky debts.

When the War of 1812 came to Missouri, Boone's sons Daniel Morgan Boone and Nathan Boone took part, but by that time Boone was too old to serve.

Daniel Boone died on  September 26, 1820, at his son, Nathan Boone's, home on Femme Osage Creek, just shy of his 86th birthday. His last words were, "I'm going now. My time has come."

He was buried next to Rebecca, who had preceded him in death in 1813.

Daniel Boone has emerged as a legend in American history, although his status as an early American folk hero and a subject of fiction have tended to muddy the actual details of his life.

Boone’s larger than life legend began due to being included in land speculator John Filson's "The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boon", part of his 1784 book The Discovery, Settlement and present State of Kentucke.

As Filson did, Timothy Flint interviewed Boone, and his Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone, The First Settler of Kentucky in 1833 became one of the best-selling biographies of the 19th century.

Flint took several literary freedoms with Boone's adventures, turning the man into a larger than life legend. Flint wrote that Boone had fought hand-to-paw with a bear, escaped from Indians by swinging on vines like you would expect Tarzan to do.

Flint shaped the popular conception of Boone, these tall tales were recycled and written in countless dime novels and books aimed at young boys.

Boone's adventures, real and mythical, became the standard by which every hero of the American West, in 19th-century novels and 20th-century films, was held.

Boone was the main character in James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales which was published in 1823, bore very striking similarities to Boone.

Included in  The Last of the Mohicans, Cooper's second Leatherstocking novel, there was a fictionalized version of Boone's rescue of his daughter, Jemima, from the Indians.

In the 20th century, Boone was featured in numerous comic strips, radio programs, and films, such as the 1936 film Daniel Boone, with George O'Brien starring in the title role.
 
Boone was the subject of a TV series which ran on NBC from 1964 to 1970which starred Fess Parker. In the  show's theme song, Boone was described as a "big man" in a "coonskin cap", and the "rippin'est, roarin'est, fightin'est man the frontier ever knew!"

 This in no way described the real Boone, who wasn’t a big man and didn’t wear a coonskin cap, he wore a similar hat to the Quaker Oats man.

Boone was portrayed this way because Parker, the tall actor who played him, had played Davy Crockett on an earlier TV series. To portray Boone the same way as Crockett, another American frontiersman with a very different personality, is a great example of “When you have to choose between history and legend, print the legend.”