Bear Grease - Ep. 18: Daniel Boone - American Woodsman (Part 3)

Episode Date: September 8, 2021

This is part three and our final episode in our series on Daniel Boone. On this episode, we'll go in depth about his life from when he was 35 years old to his death at age 86. We’ll again interview acclaimed writers Steve Rinella and Robert Morgan about Boone’s impact on American identity and culture. We’ll explore the highlights of Boone’s life including the rescue of his daughter, rumors of his wife’s unfaithfulness, his stint as a Virginia legislature, and the controversy around where Boone is buried. Then we'll explore Boone’s identification as a woodsman and his impact on American’s view and utilization of wilderness with Dr. Daniel Rupp. Lastly, Clay makes an appeal that the American woodsman deserves a lasting place at the table of American identity.Connect with Clay and MeatEaterClay on InstagramMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop Bear Grease Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Built to perform, built to last. Check out. First Light's new field. Worldware gear at firstlight.com. Daniel Boone in his actions and his life, real or mythical, embodied what the American people wanted to see happen in the wilderness. They wanted to see man in the wilderness thriving and dominating and conquering. Because that's a good story. Because that's a good story.

And so whether it happened or not, we wrote it deep down because we wanted to read it. On this third and final episode of the Daniel Boone series on the Bear Grease podcast, we're going to cover Boone's life from 35 years of age to the grave, or at least where we think his grave is. We'll explore Boone's adoption as a Shawnee, the heroic rescue of his daughter, rumors of his wife's unfaithfulness, him killing 155 bears in one season, his financial failures, and his character. We're in search of who Boone was. his significance in American culture, and perhaps you'll find his fingerprints on your life. Heroes are conduits of value systems and will evaluate the one deposited by the old backwoodsman. The trail has been steep and thick, but we're about to ascend to the hilltop and see Boone's Grand Vista.

You're not going to want to miss this one. So Boone's story is really the story of this country. Good and bad. My name is Clay Newcomb, and this is the Bear Grease podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant. Search for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the story of Americans who live their lives close to the land. Presented by FHF Gear, American-made, purpose-built, hunting and fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the places we explore. On part one of our series on Daniel Boone, we highlighted the foundations of his early life from birth to when he was 35 years old and traversed the Cumberland Gap.

We explored the cultural mechanisms in which national heroes and their identity are created through archetypes. On part two, we camped out in the dad gum Cumberland Gap and Kentucky. The Gap must have been blushing by the time we were done. Dan's passage through it was key in his life, legend in the young life of America. Part three, the final in our series, may be my favorite of them all. We're going to take a big swing at the rest of De Boone's life all the way to the grave. There's no way we can do justice to all the stories, the nuance,

but we're in search of understanding this woodsman's significance and what it means to American identity today. On this third episode, I grow weary of telling you all the cool things about Steve Ronella. He's played a very significant role in defining the modern American hunter through his books, podcast, and the academic rigor he's brought into the space of the American hunter. Here's Steve. Steve Ronella. Talk to me about the significance of Kentucky to Boone, number one, but also to the American.

American frontier. When we talk about going into Kentucky, when these guys would discuss it, they were more particularly talking about a region of Kentucky. If you came down through the Cumberland Gap and entered Kentucky, they were traveling quite a ways beyond that because they were going out to the hills, to the grass, the grasslands. If you want to get an idea what this might look like, there are people, there are records from Boone and other frontiersmen about massive herds of Buffalo out on the grasslands. lands of Kentucky. There are descriptions of it as where there aren't trees around, okay, herds of elk,

estimations of maybe a thousand buffalo in a group, deer to the point where long hunters could go there and shoot literally hundreds of deer. And it was fertile soil. You could plant it. So they needed certain things that they could get off the land in order to pack up your family on pack horses or a small wagon and go way out and establish like a new frontier settlement. And that had all of that game, grasslands, water, tillable soil, and just space. Where that every family going, every member of every family going is picturing that they're going to get all the land they need and that their kids will have all the land they need.

that's the promise that Kentucky held out to the frontiersmen who were going there. It was a way to make a shift from being long hunters who lived off the spoils, the sort of immediate spoils of the field to become landowners, to become like business people, right? That was your place to go and get, they wouldn't use this term. at all. But it was your place to go get the American dream, which that was before the American dream existed. When I say that they wouldn't have used that term is at that time, they wouldn't really have, they wouldn't really have thought of themselves as Americans.

It's interesting that there was a confused, even at the time of the Revolutionary War, among Boone and other long hunters and frontiers when he was with, there was a bit of confusion about what side of that you ought to fall on initially. They live so far removed from like the, the rule of the crown, they weren't struggling from like that level of oppression there. They didn't immediately jump on to like this patriotic notion of being Americans. The idea that Boone was a dedicated American patriot is a myth and will learn that he did fight for our country on the Western Front of the American Revolution, but the real Boone

wasn't sporting eagles and American flag tattoos. America wasn't even a country until he was in his 40s, and he spent the last years of his life outside of the United States and the Missouri territory owned by the Spanish. This is the place where we'll get onto the same page about Boone's exploits in Kentucky. His first attempt to settle in Kentucky was in 1773, two years after he returned home from his first long hunt there, but the mission was abandoned when his son James and several others were killed by Indians. Two years after that, in 1775, he was abandoned. Dan, along with 30 other men, cut a trail through the Cumberland Gap and trimmed out the longer wilderness road, and he brought a bunch of folks with him, including Rebecca and the kids.

They make it into Kentucky and build a fort called Boonesboro. This is where we'll pick up with two very important events, the rescue of Jemima and the siege of Boonsboro by the Channies. We'll start with Jemima's story, but first you need to understand the controversy around her conception. Here's Steve and I talking about Boone's quote favorite daughter.

To think of how significant the Cumberland Gap was to travel through it, when he goes through, he's gone two years. It's not like you're bopping in and out. Like, it's a commitment. He goes there and he's gone two years. We're just imagine something like that from a business perspective. You just like walk away from your life for two years

and come back and then later try to sort out your affairs. I mean, you dismiss a lot. When historians line it all up, They can't even make sense of the birth, you know, the birth dates of his children. There's one. Where they're like, well, I'm it. But how could that be? He'd been gone a year.

But then raised the kid as his own, but just didn't make any sense when he matched up to date. That was his daughter, Jemima, he had been gone two years. And he came back. And there's lots of versions of this story. The most recent book I read on Boone told this story as if it were 100% true. Robert Morgan tells the story as if, there's quite a bit of speculation inside of it. But Boone came back from a two-year jaunt,

and his wife had a newborn child in her hand. She was nursing a newborn child. He's been gone for two years, do the math. And it was found out that the father of the child was his brother. And this is where Boone gets, becomes even more famous, because he said, well, at least we kept it in the family. And he raised the kid. And that is for certain.

I mean, he raised the kid as his own. Jamima was one of his daughters that later... Went to an incredible bit of heroism to save her life. Yeah. Now that we know the drama around Jamima, I couldn't tell Boone's story without including her kidnapping and Boone's rescue mission. We watch a lot of fake movies making stuff like this seem normal.

But this is real and epitomizes why we're still talking about D. Boone. What a dadgum stud. This is the account as told by Nathan Boone, Boone's youngest son who was interviewed by Lyman Draper. Draper stayed with Nathan and Olive Boone in October and November of 1851. Draper's interview with Nathan is our best resource about Boone's life. If you hadn't figured it out already, I love Lyman Draper. He's kind of the nerdy hero of our connection to Boone's life. Hashtag Draper.

Here's Nathan talking about his father and sister. The girls went pleasuring in a canoe on Sunday. One of the Callaway girls wanted to go to a certain point to get some young cane, and my sister, Jemima Boone, was steering the canoe. As the canoe touched the shore, Indians leaped out and seized the girls, and the Callaway girls fought with their paddles. Jemima used to say she then had a sore foot from a cane stab, and had got the other girls to go to the river with her that she might,

hold her foot in the water to quiet the pain. After capture, the Indians hurried the girls away. A few miles off, the Indians had left an old white horse. While the Indians hurried the girls, they delayed as much as possible. The Indians then cut off the girls' dresses and petticoats to the knees to speed their progress and gave them moccasins and leggings. Hanging mall, a Cherokee, was of the group. Jamimaboon knew him, probably having met him when living on the Watuga. He asked if All were daughters of Daniel Boone. She said yes, feeling they would be treated more kindly. Hanging Mall then said laughing,

We have done pretty well for old Boone this time. When they reached the horse, they put Jemima on at first because of her sore foot and occasionally put all three girls on together. The horse was cross and would bite. The girls did everything they could to make a trail by dropping bits of cloth until the Indians put a stop to it. When first captured, their screams were heard. Father was lying down on the bed at his house and jumped up and seized his gun and started off without his moccasins.

The only person I definitely recall being in the pursuing party was Flanders Calloway. Colonel Richard Calloway started with the pursuers and they soon found the Indian Trail. Calloway was for following directly on the trail, but father objected. I suppose Colonel Calloway then returned to Boonesboro. The reason my father objected to following the trail was that if the Indian was that if the Indians had a back watch, the pursuers would be discovered. This would give the Indians time enough to tomahawk the girls. He reasoned that a better way would be to fall in ahead and strike and watch their war paths.

The first night someone had returned for supplies. I think there were two or three, and very likely Colonel Calloway had returned as soon as the Indian Trail was discovered and their direction determined. Father's advice was followed. The party bore off to one side of their route, and on the day the girls were recently, taken, they again found the Indian Trail. This they followed a short distance where they found a dead buffalo. The Indians had killed and skinned part of the hump and cut out a piece and pushed on. They only took part as the whole hump would often weigh 200 pounds. When father saw that the buffalo had just been

killed and the blood was yet trickling down, he was certain the Indians would stop to cook when they reached the first water. Later they found a small snake the Indians had killed, which was writhing in death. Then they discovered the Indian party had separated. The white men also split into two groups to search for the Indians both up and down the stream. Father, with the right-hand party, had gone about two or 300 yards, and when descending a hill into a glen, they saw the Indians camp at a small branch. Immediately, my father and some others shot at them and then rushed the camp. The girls were sitting in the grass on the ground in a small open glade and a few steps from the fire and were apparently guarded by one of the Indians in a reclining posture. The fire was kindled and three

other Indians were gathering wood and preparing for cooking while another Indian was posted some distance in the rear. This fellow, seen from the smoke that the fire was kindled, left his gun standing and ran down to light his pipe and had reached the fire when Boone and his party fired, or so my sister always said. At the crack of the guns, the girls jumped up, Jemima shouted, that's daddy, and started towards their rescuers. Father yelled to them to throw themselves flat upon the ground in case the Indians might shoot back or in case they might accidentally get harmed by the shots of the whites. The girls obeyed. The men did not know how many Indians were there or if more than they saw might not be nearby. One of the Indians at the fire was shot and fell into the fire. He must have risen and run off

mortally wounded as nothing particularly was said about it. This Indian who was shot at the fire was probably the one shot by John Floyd. Father then pointed out the bush where the Indians stood that he shot and there found the Indians rifle. The girls had been expecting to be rescued until that day, but had finally given up hope and were very downhearted. The Indians gave them jerked meat, but Jamima said she never felt like eating a morsel. But her foot mended during the captivity travel. When attacked, the Indians made no attempt to injure the girls. I think Flanders Callaway was with the party to the left, and he was a little later than Boone's party

in discovering the Indians camp. One of this group fired a long shot. Jamima Boone was born October 4th, 1762, and was in her 13th year when captured. It was not long after that that she married young to Flanders Callaway. I'm sure you remember Robert Morgan, the author of the great Boone biography titled Boone. This is the most complex

event of his life. February of 1778, he was captured by the Shawnees, led by chief blackfish, Katawamanga. And because this large group of Indians appeared, he had to surrender his men who were boiling salt at the blue lex. Here is Nathan Boone's version of the capture. It's so long, I've condensed it with my commentary splicing through the story. So stay with me. Here's Nathan Boone. I think it was Saturday when my father was taken and Sunday when he surrendered up the others. He said he went on horseback to kill meat for the company. In any event, he had killed a buffalo and loaded his horse with meat. It started snowing quite hard before he killed the buffalo, so he started for the licks, which he had left that morning.

He had proceeded some distance when he discovered a small party of Indians on his trail. The snow was now something like an inch or so deep, and he could easily be followed. Father at once attempted to untie and throw off the load of meat, but failed because the fresh buffalo strings were frozen. The strings had been cut from the buffalo that made up this heavy load, perhaps three or 400 pounds and lashed around the horse's belly by the tugs. Then he attempted to draw his knife from the scabbard to cut the tugs, but he found his knife, which had been thrust into the sheath when all bloody had frozen. Father's greasy hands and greasy knife handle prevented him from getting the knife. out. End of quote. De Shanis then captured Boone.

Nathan went on to describe something very interesting about his father. My father, Colonel Daniel Boone, used to say that in his early Indian troubles and difficulties in Kentucky, if he dreamed of his father and he was angry, it would forebode evil. But if he appeared pleasant, he had nothing to fear. Each time when captured, robbed, or defeated, he thus dreamed unlawed. unfavorably about his father. End of quote. Now we'll hear Nathan talk about when Boone was captured and brought back to their chief Blackfish.

Using Pompey as an interpreter, Blackfish asked my father about his men who were at the P-Mimo Lick. This was the general name in Shawnee for Salt Springs referring to the lower blue licks. Father asked how they knew his men were there and they said their spies had seen them. Father admitted that these men were his, and Blackfish informed him they were going to kill them. My father then proposed if they would not mistreat them nor make them run the gauntlet. He would surrender them up as prisoners of war. End of quote. Now Boone leads the Shawnees to his men that are working at a salt lick.

Here's Boone. I suppose it was on the north side of the river. The saltmakers were lying on their blankets apparently stunning themselves with the snow then half a leg deep. My father called out to the men that they were surrounded by a large body of Indians. He explained that he had stipulated for their surrender and had secured the promise of good treatment for them. He said that it was impossible for them to get away and beg them not to attempt to defend themselves as they would all be massacred. They at once yielded to his advice and as my father and the Indians with him began to descend the hill, the others began

to come in from every direction. End of quote. Boone and his men would be captured and they would stay with Ashani for four months. Some of the men would escape at different times. It was at this time that Boone was adopted as the son of Blackfish and thus Ashani. Boone would spend the entire four months there and adapted very well to indigenous life. This would come back to haunt Boone later. This is Nathan talking about how Blackfish treated his father. Both Blackfish and his squall treated father very kindly, and he seemed to think much of them.

They had two daughters, both small, named Poma Pisi and Pima Psi. The former was four or five years old, ill-tempered, and hateful. The youngest was a mere child, perhaps a year old, with a kind temper. And Boone used to nurse it frequently. He used the silver trinkets as currency and would buy maple sugar to give to the children who would smile and call it molas. An example of Blackfish's kindness and an Indian's idea of taste was that blackfish would suck a lump of sugar while in his mouth, take it out, and give it to Boone, who he always addressed as my son. Blackfish at that time was perhaps 50 years old, but perhaps not quite that old. Blackfish gave my father the name Shel Tawi, which means the big turtle.

End of quote. To make this story short and simple, Boone makes a daring escape. from his Shawnee captors after four months of favorable captivity while they were distracted by a flock of turkeys. Boone makes a beeline back to Boone'sboro to warn the settlers and his family of the coming attack by the Shawnee. They prepare the fort and within a short time period are attacked after a set-up peace talk from Blackfish. We can do a whole series on this one event. Spoiler alert, the Shawnees are held off and the fort is saved. but there were consequences for Boone.

Because of Boone and those people, including women of really excellent shots, several women who are tremendous with a rifle, they're able to hold them off and Kentucky is not lost. So the western side of the United States is not lost. It's a very important event. If they had lost Boonesboro, all of Kentucky would have been taken. There's no doubt of it. So Boone, in some ways,

the hero of the American Revolution. That's when he's court martial that Richard Henderson and Benjamin Logan accuse him of treason because he had surrendered the men at the Blue Licks and gone to live with the Indians.

So they give this deposition accusing him. Meanwhile, the Virginia militia has arrived with several officers, including a major, and there the judges at this court marshal.

And Boone, gets up and defends himself and he was really good at this one of the reasons the Indians admired him so much was he could talk the big talk that he could talk like a chief and he eloquently defends and explains this elaborate ruse yeah and then the officers declare him innocent and promote him to major on the spot wow so he wins that one but he would never talk about it it's a really humiliating of being up in his life. After the revolution is when Boone's influence and fame began to spread. I want to turn the ship and begin to search for traces of Boone's influence

in American literature, identity, and worldview. Kentucky became the 15th state in 1792. Within this time frame of like 30 years, Kentucky went from a complete wilderness. to an American state. That's incredible to think about. I never thought about how compressed it was to statehood. Yeah. So we see this thing in Boone's life that part of the reason, you know, he was famous

for a statement that he needed more elbow room. Once when someone asked, why are you moving? He said, well, I need more elbow room. So he was constantly in pursuit of this edge of the frontier, you know, driven by commerce, potentially because he was a long hunter and he needed to harvest game to make a living. But also, we've got to believe that that was also driven by this wanderlust for something new over the next edge that just is part of human nature. He was also, he did love to hunt. I mean, the guy just loved to hunt. He loved solitude. But like this idea that humans go to the wilderness

to find solitude and to commune with God, all kind of goes back to Boone. He was the one that was made famous for contemplation. He was the one that really influenced Thoreau and some of the great American writers that talked about these things. In the final chapter of Mr. Morgan's book, he makes a strong appeal that Boone had significant influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and many others. Mr. Morgan says from his book, quote, Thoreau begins his essay walking by saying, I wish to speak a word for nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with the freedom and culture merely civil.

The Spirit of Boone hovers over every page of the essay, published in 1862 after Thoreau's death. With exuberance and often tongue and cheek, Thoreau's essay is a celebration of freedom and adventure. Quote, I believe there is a magnetism in nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us a right. End of quote.

Thoreau also said, The west of which I speak is but another name for the wild. And what I have been preparing to say is that in wildness is the preservation of the world. That's the end of Mr. Morgan's excerpt. If you listen to the bare grease render,

you know who Dr. Dan Rup is. I consider him my speed dial anthropologist. I want to ask him about the peculiar way Americans view nature as compared to other parts of the world. And we think much of it came from these romantic writers, but originally Boone. Dr. D. Roup lived abroad for 12 years and has some insight. The other country that I was in for quite some time, 12 some odd years was China. And so China up until about 30 or even in a lot of areas less than that years ago was, agrarian so people who are very closely tied to the land and so their view of the

wilderness and the woods and the wild I found in my personal experience very different from my view as an American of that so we lived in a large city three to five hours from the Himalayas depending on how you drove and so regularly I would load up my kids to get out of town and and go to the wild I found that as I did that my Chinese friends thought about and interacted with the the wilderness in a much different way. For the most part, the Himalayan Plateau is a barren wilderness. There's almost nothing of practical value there if you're trying to eat. And so the question would regularly be, why would you go there? It just didn't really make sense to them.

So why did you want to go there? I wanted to go there for adventure and fun. And I wanted to get away from, there's this kind of compelling, I want to get out and be by myself or just us as a family. had no place in their mind to like, why would you go there for fun? They really, I don't want to say, you know, all 1.5 billion Chinese people have no place for that. But the vast majority of my friends and people that I talked with, that was just as odd to them as so many things about their culture was odd to me. Yeah. It started to make more sense for me when there's a gentleman named Faisiao Tong who wrote a book called From the Soil, And it is the seminal work on agrarian peoples.

And so America, from its onset, we were industrial. Chinese people for millennia have been tied to the land, hence the name of his book, from the soil. And so they see themselves as connected to the soil as part of the soil. You farm the same land that your ancestors are buried in. It's not something that's separate from them. Okay. That's far away from them that you go to for adventure. you go there if it can make food for you. If it can't, it has no use for you.

Nowadays, even, I think this would be fair, you can look up and read articles on the vocation and the people group of Sherpas. Their desire and mindset and model of, we're going to climb these mountains is practically, it provides them with a tremendous amount of income. You weren't climbing those mountains before Westerners came with money, and the Westerners were in search of adventure and conquest. I would be shocked if the first person on the top of Mount Everest was a white Western man. But certainly the idea of we want to plant our flag at the top of a mountain, that came from the west. But the way that they thought about it and the way that they approached it would have been very different. So this idea of even the phrase like a rugged individualist and you're going to go off and quote unquote find yourself for an agrarian interdependent. And when I say those two words, you just describe two-thirds of the globe.

Wow. You know, so for that kind of person, you only find yourself connected to the ground and connected to the people around you. Whereas you and I, we quote unquote, come alive when we go out. And we're disconnected. So, you know, a primary difference between millennia of Chinese people, in this case, thanks to Facial Tong's book and my own experience. And then Daniel Boone is our friends in China are coming from millennia of farming. Daniel Boone is of, you know, like so many people that came to America, came for very different reasons, but tend to be wanting to leave behind and escape and get away from different things

that are going on in Europe. And even this kind of fundamental idea of, if I can just break away from the establishment, then I can start something new. and almost a necessity of doing that. And that would have been a mind frame deep inside of all these early colonialists. Without a doubt. And so we as Western individualists tend to view the wilderness as a place where we can establish ourselves or conquer or have risk or adventure.

These are all experiential terms that are entirely abstract. We are not going to the wilderness for tangible. concrete reasons. That idea was built and developed in the frontier stage of America. Talk to me about where they came from, though. So Daniel Boone's father and mother would have come over on that boat, but they were Quakers. Talk to me about kind of the Judeo-Christian worldview and wilderness. So when you look at the Judeo-Christian worldview, there is a big story that it's founded on. That big story starts in the Garden of Eden. And so there's this cultivated area of land. It's home, it's made, it's established. Outside of that, Adam is made. And then he's placed inside of

the Garden, Eden. Everything else is wilderness. It's wild. And then when they fall, they are banished. They're punished into the wilderness. They are exiled into the wilderness. And there's a British sociologist named J.A. Walter, who wrote several decades ago. And he actually, the title of one of his works was, a long way from home. And the central premise of his work was that Grace basically the grand story of the Judeo-Christian worldview is that we've been banished to the wilderness from our home and that we are trying to find ourselves and find a home. And so that just adds to this idea that the wilderness was not a place you wanted to go. It's a place of punishment.

Definitely. And then along comes Boone. And he conquers the wilderness in effect. We're giving Boone a ton of credit too. And that's why this whole, what I want to see is, it does start with Boone, but it was so many other people, too. Of course. But it was here that that worldview kind of became finalized and established. If anything, Daniel Boone in his actions and his life, real or mythical, embodied what the American people wanted to see happen in the wilderness.

They wanted to see man in the wilderness thriving and dominating. and conquering. Because that's a good story. Because that's a good story. And so whether it happened or not, we wrote it deep down because we wanted to read it. Boone taught America to love wilderness and cherish solitude. And that value system may seem really normal to you, especially if you have a rural or hunting background. But this is peculiar and fundamental to America. Boone's life was full of irony, And that's part of why his story reflects the American story. I asked Steve if he thought Boone had any regrets. The tragic part of his life, and this is the question I want to ask you, Steve, is wherever he went, people followed.

So he went to Kentucky, which was this wilderness Eden. And within 30 years, it was an American state. And, you know, 300,000 people, you know, over the course of a longer period of time than 30 years. came through the Cumberland Gap and I mean just settled the whole place. Oh yeah. How aware of that would he have been? How would he have dealt with that?

And then the ultimate question for us hunters and they're even in outdoor media, do you ever feel like that? Like, because the very nature of what we do demand solitude, but we're like recruiting people. Yeah. It'd be an interesting thing to push Boone on

if you could talk to him now was, I would say to him, how conflicted were you? Let's say you now come out and find a great new hunting spot. And then over time, that great new hunting spot fills up with people. It still shines for them. They love it. They think it's the greatest thing in the world.

You saw it before and you lament its passing. But let's say that you didn't really do anything to usher that in. You just participated and stood by and watched this happen. It's reasonable for a person in that situation to feel a great sense of loss. It's not that clean with Boone, though. He was complicit. It seems as though he mourned it. He did not like to see.

They complained about game vanishing. But Boone was also speculating. He was in the land speculation business. He was invested in settlement. I think that he knew what he had to do, was always poor, wanted money, wanted to find a way out of debt, wanted to get his family in a good position. And I think that he probably had to sit there and think, and you know what, man, not only did it never work, right?

I never got rich off Kentucky. Not only that, but I ruined what it was about it that I loved. If he was conflicted meaning did he ever think I shouldn't do any of these activities that might lead to the exploitation of Kentucky, he just don't see any evidence of it. Did he lament it? Sure, man. We work really hard to raise our kids up and make them independent and eventually get them out the door so that they go on and have productive, happy lives.

but what does every parent tell you when they move away? How sad it was. But would you ever go and do something to thwart their development in order to hang on to it? So there's like that in order to hang on to and make it be that they were relying on you and had to stay home? Of course not. You can live in two places at one time. Yeah. They got to get up and grow and get out of the house and make their way.

And my God, it's sad watching them go. You know, it's like it's every part of our lives is all. It was inevitable, though. I mean, like, because if Boone had just said, you know what, I value solitude and wilderness, I am bringing anybody back here. I mean, five years later, first of all, we'd be talking about somebody else right now. Well, he could have been extremely impactful in that because he could have, if he really felt that way, he would have aligned himself with, he would have moved in. And at one point he did, but he would have moved in with the Indians. and explain to them the risk and explain to them how to head it off.

And then... So sure. There would have been a pathway to that. Yeah. He could have been a traitor. He would have been a traitor to his people, but would have been very effective. He's like, they're going to come through there. They're going to come through that gap right there, boys.

And we're going to be waiting for him. Well, but what would that have done, though? That would have delayed this thing 20 years. Do you know what I mean? There's no stopping it. I'm just saying, I'm just saying, what's important is he didn't do that. He didn't do that. and you can't find any real evidence that he ever pumped the brakes.

Yeah, man, he had to have been conflicted. And the reason you know that he probably was conflicted is because he kept seeking out in other places what he was instrumental in trashing in the last place. Yeah. He didn't like for him what guys like him created hunted out agricultural lands, not where he wanted to stay. always moved into being where he wanted to be, which him, the simple fact of him being there made it that he didn't want to be there. Yeah.

There's almost like, you know, you know people like that in life. Mm-hmm. You know, I'm like that in some aspects of life, right? I see, and everybody does, I see like boonish, at least my understanding of, uh, why, like,

what's the wrong with things just being more simple? Like, what is it in a person that just leads you to kind of to complexify everything around you? Or what prevents you from ever saying, this is enough? Like, this right here, this right here is just perfect. Instead, you'd be like, this right here is just perfect. If only we could build a workshop right over there. Human nature, man. And one boat, sweet.

Imagine if you had two boats. Imagine if this boat was 18 foot. rather than 16. Why? You'll never understand it. It's funny. That's one of the things that makes Boone so valuable, man.

It might be better for us that we can't sit here and ask him all these questions. Because he's, there's enough there where you can really pin, you can really look and feel and smell what's there.

Like he's there, right? He's tangible. But there's enough mystery about what he thought about the whole thing that he is like a very handy way

to contemplate yourself, ourselves, you know. Yeah. More than, if you sat him down right now and he, and he was alive, you know, whether they dug him out of Missouri or Kentucky, depending on what version you believe in, where he's resting now,

he might be like, man, I read all the books. I read Robert Morgan. Dude, that dude missed it by a million miles. Like me, like, are you kidding me? Yeah. Isn't what I felt about that stuff? Yeah. Last spring, Clay Newcomb and I collaborated with Jason Phelps at Phelps game calls

and building each of our own favorite turkey diaphragms called prime cuts. Now, I'm going to tell you, I love mine because it's easy to use. I'm not going to go, I'm not going to win a turkey calling contest. It's just not going to happen. But when I run this call, I get the sounds that gobblers are looking for. I have a great turkey hunting track record. If you go listen to real turkeys out in the woods, they're not going to win calling contests, right? That's who I listen to.

I can make those sounds on my cut. I also hunt with Phelps's cut, and I hunt with Clay's cut because they're all three great cuts. Check out Prime Cuts at Phelpsgamecalls.com. I think you'll be glad you did, and you'll find out that the Steve Ronella cut is an easy-to-use cut for beginning callers who just want to start making good turkey noises and getting action.

In effort to understand Boone's personal identity, I want to explore him using the term Woodsman to describe himself. And we'll learn an interesting fact we've yet to discuss. Boone as a politician. It's clear that Boone's personal identity of himself was as a woodsman. And there was a letter that he wrote to a governor later in his life. And part of the preface of the letter says, I am no statesman.

I am a woodsman. So it's clear that that's, if there was one word that he would describe himself, described himself as it, he said, I am a woodsman. If he were only here so we could ask him exactly what he meant by that, that phrase and what he embodied in what we see is something that's very much alive today in a lot of rural American culture. It's something that we deeply value. Like in my family, Mr. Morgan, my dad would have raised me up with that very phrase on his lips.

You need to be a woodsman. What do you think Daniel Boone meant when he said that? Well, somebody who could live on the land and the forest and could support himself. He could feel game. He knew the herbs. He'd learned that from Indians. It's a major way Indians influenced American civilization was to teach them the medicinal plant. But you really said the important word there.

He was a woodsman. He knew he wasn't somebody. Actually, was a statesman. He had done pretty well in the legislature. Yeah, he served three terms in the Virginia legislature. He did and did some important things about getting ferries built on the Kentucky River and laws about game, wanton killing of game. Really?

Daniel Boone did that when he was in the Virginia legislature. One of the things he pled, yes. He was very much aware that, you know, the game was disappearing. And there should be rules about how much you could kill and where you could kill it. But his life is full of paradoxes, as all our lives are, really. But Wisman was the word he preferred. And the first title of my biography was Woodman. Oh, the Woodman.

I've thought about this a lot. Boone was this legislator in Virginia. But I think sometimes it's in the place that we don't fit where we find our real identity, you know, where that identity probably of being a woodsman really became distinct to him. Tell me if you think this is right. It's almost like he thought maybe he could fit in inside of that world and went there and did okay, but it was like, this is not where I'm supposed to be. Well, think of the image of Daniel Boone in the legislature.

He's wearing, well, he's there with Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, wearing silk and brocade and wigs. He's with one of the great philosophers of the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson. And he's wearing buckskin and leggings. Did he wear that to the, ah-ha? We have eyewitnesses. Now these leggings, not just leggings, but they have this really elaborate beadwork on them. He'd have to have gotten them from Indians. I think he did that sort of thing out of his sense of duty, that they elected him.

He was expected to do it. And he was the kind of person that took these responsibilities seriously. But I think he did what he thought he was expected to do. He wasn't ashamed of being there in buckskin and Indian leggings. Now, the interesting thing is to think of him and Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson knew him and wrote to him asking. to get in touch with George Rogers Clark. Clark was supposed to find mammoth bones and things like that and bring them back to Jefferson. And after Boone, Jefferson is the most responsible for

opening the West. Hummus Jefferson was obsessed with the wilderness to the West. He says in his essays on Virginia that Ohio River is the most beautiful river in the world. He had never seen it, that he knew from the word of Boone and other people. So that's really interesting. You juxtaposed Jefferson, who was famous around the world. It's this philosopher, scientist, statesman, and Daniel Boone. And they obviously have a lot in common. They shared this obsession with the interior and the beauties of nature, the importance of nature.

I want to tell a story that stood out to me. I feel like each one of these stories give us a window into Boone's life. At age 65, Daniel was still going strong. I want to read an excerpt from Morgan's book about Boone's market hunting for Black Bear with Rebecca in Kentucky. These are Mr. Morgan's words from his book, Boone. J.P. Hale said that Boone was not remembered sufficiently, quote, for his qualities and experience as a counselor, commander, and legislator, in which fields notwithstanding his rare modesty and lack of self-asserting, he was appreciated

and put forward by his contemporaries. Hale went on to write in his short biography of Boone that the old frontiersman hardly seemed aware of the heroic deeds he had done, quote, but seemed to be driven on irresistibly by that deep-seated instinct for adventure which nature had implanted in him and whose only gratification could be found among the wilds of the frontier. One thing that may have brought Boone back to Kentucky was the bear hunting on the Leviso Fork of the Big Sandy. Each winter, Daniel and Rebecca, and one of their sons returned there to kill bears, collect bear skins, smoke bear bacon, and render bear flesh into oil. A man named William Champ later said that he encountered Boone and his wife and two daughters

and their husbands on the Big Sandy, living in half-faced camps where they, quote, ate their meals from a common rough tray, very much like the sap tray, placed on a bench instead of a table, each using as needed a butcher knife to cut meat and using forks made of cane with tines or prongs and having only bread to eat with meat. Bears were so abundant that Boone killed 155 in one season, and he killed one monster bear that weighed between 500 and 600 pounds. A bear skin was worth about $2, but the meat of each animal was worth more than twice that. Boone's arthritis was so bad at times that Rebecca had to carry his rifle for him, but he killed record numbers of bears all the same.

And since she was known as an excellent shot, Rebecca very likely killed her share of Bruins also. One of the creeks where they camped was named Greasy Creek because they rendered bear fat there, enough to fill several barrels. Bear grease could be sold for a dollar a gallon. One bear might yield 20 gallons of oil. Boone bragged that he had once killed 11 bears before breakfast. With his commercial hunting conducted on such a scale, it's hard to imagine how Boone thought the game populations could be sustained.

The last buffalo in the bluegrass had been killed around 1790. This is still one of the paradoxes of Boone's life and its character, because he had been a professional hunter most of his life, the paradox was probably not as clear to Boone as it is to us in hindsight. End of quote. If you've read much about the frontiersmen, you've probably had questions about their physical toughness and wondered if they were superhuman.

Here's what Steve thinks. The things that Boone did physically, like the physical acts of being in the frontier for two years, years and crossing rivers and the cold and the physical acts, you have got to believe that Boone was kind of a physical phenom. Do you, dude, I, I, I, I, I, I, explain that. I wonder about it all the time. How tough was it?

We like to now say, like, oh, now we need all these advanced fabrics to keep warm, you know, and we have synthetic insulation and Bickliders. Okay, like that's what we need now. I have a feeling, though, that they were probably about as comfortable out in the woods as we are.

The thresholds were different. It was like, they got cold, man. Yeah. Bad. They were uncomfortable at times. They got bit up by bugs to a point where it would kind of drive you mad. They suffered.

They just didn't know any different. Like, it, I, I don't think that they just walked around out there whistling all happy because they were just so tough that they were always comfortable. It's not fun getting bit up by bugs. It's not fun being cold. I think that they just were oftentimes really uncomfortable. Maybe it's so uncomfortable that if you went there now without growing up with that set of experiences,

you wouldn't be able to handle it. And you'd tap out. And there's something to be said about the threshold, a strong threshold. But they weren't magicians. I mean, I think there's a gradient of, yeah, there are people that are super tough and people that are super weak inside of this window of human capability. I would imagine somebody like Boone would have been on the higher scale. Exceptually.

Exceptually. But he wasn't superhuman. Would he run an ultramarathon? Probably not. We can't talk about Boone without touching on one of the biggest challenges in his life. The later part of his life after the golden years of the 1770s were, riddled with financial issues and lawsuits most about land. Here are Mr. Morgan's thoughts on Boone's character. Mr. Morgan, this is a quote from your book. In almost every case, Frontiersmen were

remembered and honored more for character and dependability than marksmanship and scouting ability. In the dangerous world of the West, integrity counted above all else. I think we kind of have this idea that somebody like Boone was solely known for his for for the things that he did go through the Cumberland Gap and Kentucky and his long long hunting and all these external feats which is very true but what what made him a legend and remembered and honored as you've said here was character and I think that's something that would not be intuitive but it's true well the fashion among historians and biographers is to debunk legends. You know, find out what the real story is, and we have an awful lot of that in our time.

And it's good, I mean, to try to, you know, find the weaknesses of people. But when I examined the boon in great detail, I went to all the sources I could find, I found he really lived up to the image we have of him. It's true he was in debt and he lost everything, but in every case, I mean, his character was very consistent. And that's, I think, important in our time, but it was certainly important in a dangerous world, like Kentucky and the wilderness. You had to count on people. If they said, I'm going to meet you at such a place, I mean, they had to be there. And that's what he valued among his friends, his friend Stuart, who was killed by Indians.

I guess he admired him so much because he was dependable. Also true of Michael Stoner, the German who could hardly speak English, but Stoner, you know, you could absolutely depend on him. Boone's legend grew partly because people admired him. They trusted him. Isn't that what we wanted a friend today as well, though? Absolutely. I mean, it's just really no different. An example of this is that Boone was robbed of a lot of money and certificates for land in eastern Virginia.

He had gone there to register this land for people, and they'd given him money and a lot of certificates. And apparently in this inn, he was drugged, and during the night, all the stuff was robbed. So he had to go back to Virginia and say, I lost your money and lost your certificates. But the Hart brothers, who knew him, said, you know, they absolutely trusted him. And they had seen Boone in the worst situations. And he always, you know, was somebody dependable. So they did not even ask for their money back or try to force him. People who knew him best, absolutely trusted him.

The people who went after him later were people who had lost land because of these surveys. So he was known among a certain number of people as untrustworthy because they had lost land even if it was surveyed by other people. Right. He was associated with it. And the people who really got Boone were lawyers like Henry Clay. It was a young lawyer and made his fortune going to court and suing people, including Boone, over these land deals. and Boone was a frontiersman. He hated paperwork.

He was very casual about registering things. Figured somebody else could do that. He was a man of the woods. He called himself a woodsman. And he was. His reputation for being dishonest came from people who were mad because they had lost money in land deals and wanted to blame him. I think it summed up his life so well at the end of his life. He didn't owe money to anyone.

Is that true? He went all the way back to Kentucky to pay people who claimed he owed them money. He may not have owed them anything, but they claimed it, and he didn't want to be known as somebody who died still owing money.

So he took the little money he got from selling his land. He was given a piece of land in Missouri and took that money back. That's one story. His children said he never went back to Kentucky. So did he send the money by mail or something, we don't know.

He would loan people money and give them land on a handshake and never see them again. He would sell it to them without anything. He would down payment. He couldn't understand. You don't accumulate wealth. You share what you have. And that's one of the things that got him into so much trouble that he would buy land and then sell it to somebody else. He still had to pay for it.

Yeah. And got nothing from the person he had sold. The ways of the backwoods didn't work very good in civilization, did they? He was out of place. He was out of place. Late in Boone's life, he lived as a common man in Missouri. Chester Harding, a young painter from Massachusetts, was the last known visitor of Boone. And he captured the only real imagery that we have of Boone just before his death.

So no other images exist except for this one that Chester Harding did. Here's an excerpt for Mr. Morgan's book about the latter part of Daniel's life. Like almost all men and women who have the opportunity, Boone enjoyed his grandchildren. He could tell them stories and rhymes, wise sayings, and anecdotes from his childhood, and his long, adventurous life. And his curiosity never left him. He questioned visitors and family members about current events and news of the day, of the frontier advancing further west.

Sometimes he took a bear skin or deer skin out under a tree and he would lie on it, whistling or singing to himself. The Reverend James E. Welch described his person as he saw him in 1818. He was rather low of stature, broad shoulders, high cheekbones, very mild countenance, fair complexion, soft and quiet in his manner, but little to say and less spoken to. Amiable and kind in his feelings, very fond of. quiet retirement of cool self-possession and indomitable perseverance. Among Boone's last noted visitors was a young painter from Massachusetts named Chester Harding. Harding came to Cherat to paint Boone's portrait at the very end of his life. Finding the old hunter roasting venison on a ramrod in a small cabin behind Jemima's house,

the painter asked if he could do a portrait. Boone was hard of hearing and may not have understood the record. He had little experience with portrait painters, but Jemima understood the importance of the opportunity and persuaded her father to overcome his timidity or modesty and sit. The result was the only portrait from life that exists. Though he was old and frail in the harding painting, the powerful presence of Boone comes through in the portrait. No longer the muscular big turtle of his prime, Boone still shows his character and will. It is the picture of a man who means to do what he sets out to do. We are all in Harding's debt for the last-minute likeness of Boone.

According to the family, Boone was surprised to see himself captured so convincingly on canvas. Harding's portrait was later revised by others to make Boone look younger and healthier. Harding captured the dignity and strength of the elusive Boone. As he sketched, the young painter questioned Boone about his career, which now stretched into its ninth decade. Had he ever been lost in his wandering? Harding asked. No, Boone said.

I can't say I was ever lost, but I was bewildered once for three days. Today there are many versions of Boone's portrait by Harding, but originally there was only one. Here are the words of Chester Harding about his trip to meet Boone. Quote, In June of this year, I made a trip of 100 miles

for the purpose of painting the portrait of old Colonel Daniel Boone. I had much trouble in finding him. He was living some miles from the main road in one of the cabins of an old block house which was built for the protection of the settlers against the incursion of Indians. I found that the nearer I got to his dwelling, the less was known of him.

Within two miles of his house, I ask a man where Colonel Boone lived. He said he did not know any such man. Why, yes, you do, his wife said. It's that white-headed old man who lives at the bottom near the river. A good illustration of the proverb that a prophet is not without honor save his own country. End of quote. I'm absolutely amazed at that story.

Two miles from where Boone lived. People didn't even know who he was. And what I like about Boone, though, is Boone, He didn't buy into the Boone myth. Yeah. You know, somebody came in his older age, there's an account of someone reading a story to him about him. And Boone said, basically said, they should wait until somebody's dead to write stuff like that. Yeah.

Like, he, he didn't buy into the hype. And he, he died a common man. And it's just so bizarre that that guy like him. Yeah, he didn't do like a Buffalo Bill Code. Wild West show thing. Yeah. The theatrical performances. That's what I liked about the guy.

I mean, he was... Crocket would get up and, you know, again, man, we'd like we stick them together, but Crockett would get up and play himself in front of audiences. It's interesting to hear the story of the latter years of Boone's life. He's living in Missouri after leaving

Kentucky and vowing never to come back. He had a bad taste in his mouth about Kentucky. What's Wild is the level of detail we know about Boone's. 's death. It's kind of bizarre. Boone had an infatuation with his coffin. Once while Boone was away, he became ill, and they thought he was going to die. Nathan got word of it and had a common pine coffin built for his father. Much to everyone's surprise, Boone lived and was upset when he saw the coffin that had been chosen for him. Boone proceeded to build a beautiful walnut coffin that he

kept in his house for some time before he decided to upgrade coffins again. He allowed a friend to be buried in the walnut coffin, and he had a beautiful, ornate cherry coffin made. He kept it under his bed, polished it often, took naps in it, and loved to show it to visitors, and he would even scare his grandchildren with him inside of it. Mr. Morgan had something to say about the way death used to be handled. In the 19th century, people talked about a beautiful death. It was the last accomplishment. It was a kind of art.

It was something, Emily Dickinson, when somebody dies, she would always write and say, tell me about their death. What kind of death was it? Now, people then died at home. They didn't die in a hospice. They're off in a hospital somewhere. And, you know, they could tell they were dying. people would gather around when Boone...

They wouldn't have had medicine to try to extend their life by long periods of time. Death would have been usually forecasted with some accuracy, I guess. You could see, right, that somebody was near death. Yeah. Usually, Boone refused drugs, laudanum. He refused alcohol. He wanted to be alert. His family gathered.

I think his daughter-in-law, Ollie, was very good at singing. You had her sing. People would gather around. They would talk about things that had happened, forgive each other, that sort of thing. Yeah, it was a real kind of ceremony. I really enjoyed researching that and getting some sense of what death meant in the 19th century.

Isn't that like a really potentially important piece of the human experience that we now basically don't experience? We try to hide it. We try to ignore it. Yeah, without modern medicine, and, you know, people sort of died in a natural way. It was just a fact, you know. It was a milestone.

It was part of life. It was like a birth and a death. Like they both would have been these bookends to life. It was done at home. I like to think about how the human experience in the last hundred years is so bizarre, as compared to the eons that humans have been on the earth. And just in this period of time, people died in hospitals and have people have been able to use by economic means, basically

farm out the arrangements of their family members' death. Right. We can prolong life when it's almost not life. No, that idea of dying naturally when he was still alert, Stonewall Jackson died that way. Remember, he refused any laudanum or alcohol. He wanted to be aware of every year. thing. He knew he was dying, but that was, I think, pretty common. But Boone's death was particularly

beautiful because everybody was there. They all gathered around him and Boone said, you know, don't worry, I've had a long life, I've had a good life. They offered him. He said he wanted a bowl of warm milk, I think. That was the last thing. He had eaten too many sweet potatoes the night before and his grandchildren had plied him with cookies and candy. But he certainly was aware of what was happening and did not seem, I wouldn't say blissful, but it doesn't seem worried particularly. This is Nathan Boone's account of his father's death. Finally, I took him back in a carriage and my two little sons, Howard and John, six and four years of age, came along. We reached my house at midday, and he was cheerful and in good spirits.

He told his grandchildren he thought he would soon be well enough to go with them and gather. some of the hazel nuts he had seen nearby along the road. During the afternoon, he enjoyed the innocent prattle of his grandchildren, and to please them, he would eat some cakes, nuts, and even drink buttermilk they affectionately presented to him. In this way, it was afterward thought he loaded his stomach with articles too rich and gross. My father rested pretty well that night. The next morning, he went out upon the porch, looked around the farm, and he said if he felt as well the next day as he did then he would ride horseback around the farm he was brought in and laid down on the bed and slept before he awakened it was discovered that a fever was coming upon him and he began to

complain of an acute burning sensation such as he never before felt in his breast which continually grew worse when he was advised to take medicine he declined as he thought it would do no good He said it was his last sickness, but he said calmly he was not afraid to die. He recognized all his relatives who came to see him during his last sickness and talked until within a few minutes of his last breath. Some ten minutes before he breathed his last, his daughter, Miss Callaway, arrived. He recognized her and died placidly, only exhibiting a scowl with his last breath. Towards the last, when asked if he suffered pain, he would say, he did in his breast and between his shoulders. He died on the morning of September 26, 1820,

about sunrise, the 14th day after his arrival here. Moon died at Nathan's home in Femmy Osage Creek, Missouri just west of St. Louis. He was buried with Rebecca, who had passed away seven years prior near Marthesville, Missouri. However, there is some drama. In 1845, Boone's body was exhumed and moved to Frankfurt, Kentucky. However, in the 1980s, his grave was dug up, and forensic anthropologist believed that the skull that was in the grave was that of an African American, creating lore that they dug up the wrong body. To this day, both cemeteries claim to have Daniel Boone's grave. He was certainly acclaimed as a great explorer and leader, but that was the place where, you know, Boone passed into legend.

It was only stories and memories after that, and the legend has continued to grow. Instead of fading away. I mean, most people die, and, you know, even if the people who knew them, forget them, mostly do. Boone was necessary to American culture. Why does some people become more and more famous, and most people do not? Boone gives us an image of something we would like to be,

somebody who has no fear, who can blend in with nature, who sees nature as good, and the Indians is good, and takes the country western. Of course, this brings up the issue which Boone himself became aware of later in his life, that he has taken people into the wilderness. He has established civilization in a way, but he's also helped destroy the indigenous culture and the game and the wilderness.

What he's done is divided. You can look at it in these different ways, and he realized that. He said as much that he has taken, helped take the Indians hunting ground. So he's very divided about his career. doesn't see it as just a great success, but partly a failure that the very thing he loved so much has been destroyed or partly destroyed. So we have to think about that, that Daniel Boone is America.

He's us, and he's done these different things, but he's not all good by any means. The Westward expansion has some real drawbacks. Nobody would want to give up California, or very few. but, you know, it was taken from the Spaniards and from the Indians. So Boone's story is really the story of this country. Good and bad. Elizabeth Corbin, a relative by marriage of Boone, wrote about the old backwoodsman. Quote, he had a soft, almost effeminate voice and extremely mild and pleasant manners. In fact, most, if not all of the old hunters, who spent,

spent most of their time in the deep solitude of the unbroken woods spoken soft, low tones. I do not among my acquaintances recall an exception. As we consider Boone's influence on American ideals, it reminds me of Teddy Roosevelt's famous line about speaking softly but carrying a big stick. Boone undoubtedly carried a big one. In the final moments of Nathan Boone's interview with Draper, he said, quote, My father Daniel Boone was five feet eight inches high. He had broad shoulders and a chest that tapered down. His usual weight was around 175 pounds. But at one period, he exceeded 200 pounds and in his closing years

weighed only 155 pounds. His hair was moderately black, eyes blue, and he had fair. skin. He never used tobacco in any form and was temperate in everything. As we come to a close in our Boone series, I'm thrilled for the insight we've gained and learned about American identity and ourselves, but I'm slightly grieved. I've been immersed into Boone's life in the last several months and I don't want to leave. But maybe that's the point. The values of our heroes can stay with us. So much of what I value, particularly in nature, wildness, solitude, and hunting can be traced back to Boone. He defined for us what a woodsman and a backwoodsman was, and I now cherish those phrases more than ever, and I want to carry them with dignity and responsibility in modern times.

At a larger scale, I think Boone was defined by the quest for more. The modern American version of that is an unsatiable quest for more stuff, more cars, more money, more land, more prestige. But I think we have the right to amend this, to redeem it. Quest and pursuit are good things. I think we should all be on a quest and undeterred by obstacles and trials, but we've just got to make sure that we're questing after and pursuing the right things. things that have more value than external wealth, which will ultimately rust, rot, and cannot be taken with us after we leave this place. Our country is in a quandary to define a modern American identity. My only input is this.

The American backwoodsman has earned the right to sit at the table and put his fingerprint on these ideals. He's earned the right to exist in modern times. Our conservation ethic has been honed by 200 years of experience, both good and bad, and indisputably, we are leading the way and saving wildlife and the wild places that we love. This is deeply an American ideal that honors the Native American land ethic and the revamped modern ethic of the woodsman. Let the woodsmen, the hunters and fishermen, be stewards and protectors the wild that we have left as civilization and concrete spread like wildfire across the landscape. We will protect them because we value them, and we value them because of the words and lives of our fathers, one of which was Boone. That song was played by Nick shoulders. First Lights fieldwear collection is made for the work that happens long before opening day and continues when the season ends.

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