John Filson, in his 1784 portrait of “The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon” appended to The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke, declared that “curiosity is natural to the soul of man.” With these words Filson sparked the beginning of the legend of Daniel Boone, the explorer and frontiersman who more than any other American was responsible for the penetration and settlement of Kentucky. Filson, a schoolmaster who wanted to bring fame to Kentucky and fortune to himself, purported to record Boone’s own story, though in the process Filson added his own words and ideas, to create an image of the “natural man,” Daniel Boone, which continues even today. Boone is a good example of fact and folklore coming together to garble the historical reality of one person’s life.

Indeed, historians and biographers of the American frontier often have to use anecdote and traditions to recount lives. Carl Sandburg did this in his monumental biography of Abraham Lincoln. With such sources, a historian can often assume based on a critical perspective that stories might originate with the person under study, hence stories of Boone might have originated with Boone himself, or his family, and that they contain a kernel of truth. The documentary evidence for Boone’s life is sporadic, so that Boone and his children’s stories are perhaps autobiographical, hence valid evidence to reconstruct his life.

Filson uses such folklore though he is at times carried away with it, presenting episodes in the life of Boone as actual occurrences rather than somewhat remote distorted possibilities. Tradition has it that Saucy Jack, a Catawba Indian, lost to Boone in a shooting competition. Saucy Jack’s pride was hurt, and his anger, being nourished by drink, spilled over into threats on Boone’s life. Squire Boone, Daniel’s father, decided to deal with Saucy Jack before something happened to Daniel. Saucy Jack fled to avoid the wrath of Squire Boone. Daniel recounted this story to Filson, and Filson used it in his book. But whether the story was fact or fiction seems to get lost in the narrative: it might just be a story. But then again, it might be a good story that tells of the character of Squire Boone.

Such stories build the character of a man resistant to authority who sought the wilderness as a release from civilization. He admired the ways of the indigenous inhabitants and was more comfortable in the wilderness than with his roles in white society as father, husband, soldier, landowner, and business person. Later, when Boone was living his final years along the Missouri River, and after he died, historians more content with images than reality created a romantic, frontier hero.

John Filson had Daniel Boone say in 1784 that “it requires but little philosophy to make a man happy.” In this simple statement we see the origins of the fascination Americans have had with Daniel Boone. From the security of civilization, it is exciting indeed to imagine oneself pushing the limits of the frontier into the wilderness. Boon did precisely this, but without the romantic courage and suffering that has made its mark on American novels and films about the frontier. Armchair explorers cannot help but assume that such a man would stand taller and appear with more bravery than his contemporaries and descendants.

Filson’s Boone tells us that the explorer is but a normal person made heroic by events, a person who explores not to push forward the boundaries of civilization, who in fact dislikes what civilization represents. Rather this is a man who explores to make a living, because of wanderlust, because he loves solitude, because he fears some of the responsibilities of civilized living, and chiefly because, in Boone’s words, of his “love of Nature.”

Besides Boone, there were countless explorers and hunters who went into the wilderness as the forerunners of civilization. Some are well known. Some are unknown, and are remembered only by a name or passage in a book. One example is a hunter and frontiersman of the Arkansas Territory in the early 1800s, around the time of Boone, whose name was Lee, otherwise little known except that he was a hunter and guide for the natural Thomas Nuttall when Nuttall journeyed up the Arkansas River in 1819. I have told the story of Lee in my book, The Land Between the Rivers: Thomas Nuttall’s Ascent of the Arkansas, published by University of Michigan Press in 2004. If interested, you can purchase the book here: The Land between the Rivers: Thomas Nuttall’s Ascent of the Arkansas, 1819: Lawson, Russell M.: 9780472114115: Amazon.com: Books