Daniel Boone

 It’s the birth anniversary of the frontiersman Daniel Boone, born on this day in 1734 near Reading, Pennsylvania. When he was young, his family moved to North Carolina, where Daniel loved to hunt in the forest. He educated himself by taking books with him on his hunting trips. He went on long hunting and exploring expeditions, and he crossed the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky.

Even during his lifetime, Boone was a figure of legend. He was captured by Indians, and he lived with them as an adopted son before he escaped. That made a great story back East. Daniel Boone was a man of few words, so his biographers took free rein and invented long, eloquent speeches for him. They also embellished the facts — these biographies have Boone wrestling with bears or swinging away from Indians on vines. They made Boone the first American frontier hero.

In the epic poem Don Juan (1819–24), Lord Byron wrote about Daniel Boone:

Of the great names which in our faces stare,
The General Boon, back-woodsman of Kentucky,
Was happiest amongst mortals any where;
For killing nothing but a bear or buck, he
Enjoyed the lonely vigorous, harmless days
Of his old age in wilds of deepest maze.

Around the same time, James Fenimore Cooper wrote his Leatherstocking Tales, including The Last of the Mohicans (1826), and Cooper used Daniel Boone as a model for his frontier hero, Natty Bumppo.

SOURCE: Writer's Almanac 2008