The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Blood and Treasure: Daniel Boone and the Fight for America’s First Frontier by Bob Drury, Tom Clavin

Episode Date: April 5, 2022

Blood and Treasure: Daniel Boone and the Fight for America's First Frontier by Bob Drury, Tom Clavin The explosive true saga of the legendary figure Daniel Boone and the bloody struggle for America's frontier by two bestselling authors at the height of their writing power—Bob Drury and Tom Clavin. It is the mid-eighteenth century, and in the thirteen colonies founded by Great Britain, anxious colonists desperate to conquer and settle North America’s “First Frontier” beyond the Appalachian Mountains commence a series of bloody battles. These violent conflicts are waged against the Native American tribes whose lands they covet, the French, and the mother country itself in an American Revolution destined to reverberate around the world. This is the setting of Blood and Treasure, and the guide to this epic narrative is America’s first and arguably greatest pathfinder, Daniel Boone—not the coonskin cap-wearing caricature of popular culture but the flesh-and-blood frontiersman and Revolutionary War hero whose explorations into the forested frontier beyond the great mountains would become the stuff of legend. Now, thanks to painstaking research by two award-winning authors, the story of the brutal birth of the United States is told through the eyes of both the ordinary and larger-than-life men and women who witnessed it. This fast-paced and fiery narrative, fueled by contemporary diaries and journals, newspaper reports, and eyewitness accounts, is a stirring chronicle of the conflict over America’s “First Frontier” that places the reader at the center of this remarkable epoch and its gripping tales of courage and sacrifice.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Cause you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss and now here's your host chris voss wait is that me oh i thought i was an announcer guy this week hey guys thanks for tuning in we certainly appreciate you welcome welcome my friends and all to the chris voss show family podcast it's actually the Chris Voss Show family podcast.

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Go to our LinkedIn newsletter. It's always fun to see that thing is growing like a monster. And our big 131,000 group on LinkedIn. Today, we have an amazing author on the show. And of course, I don't know why. Just every day, we have one of two amazing authors on the show, which is pretty amazing. If I can use the word amazing any more times this morning, I'm going to get banned. Anyway, guys, on the the show with us tom clavin is on the show with us he's the author of a new book blood and treasure daniel boone and the fight for america's first frontier and you can order that baby up and all the other books go see all of tom's other books out there on the marketplace there well yeah bob jury and i have done the the blood and

treasure which just came out in paper oh okay that the that's that's the seventh book that bob jury and i have done together and in between phil keith has been it was a good friend of mine for years and he and i did a book in 2019 called all blood Runs Red about the African-American aviator fighter pilot Eugene Bullard. And the book was very well received. And it was just supposed to be a one-off for Paul and I. We got a hold of the story. We worked on it together. It wasn't like I didn't have other things to do. But it was so well received that the publisher said, could you guys do one more? So it was a little delicate because I had my own solo books. I was actively involved with Bob Drury projects very happily, but we had the story we really wanted to tell. And Phil, having

been a, was a retired Navy captain, the idea of doing a story that was about two Navy ships, a Confederate Navy ship and a Union Navy ship, meeting in a battle in the Atlantic. It was irresistible. So that's how we sort of squeezed in one more before I had to go back and my other responsibilities. So it can get a little confusing because I'm usually associated with Bob Drury, but at the same time, it's my second book with Phil Keith. And both collaborations have been very happy ones. I mean, the unhappy part about the one with Phil Keith is that we had turned in the manuscript,

the final manuscript, and a few weeks later, Phil passed away. So that was kind of a sad aspect of that collaboration. Oh, wow. We were, Bob Drury and I really liked the way the book turned out. It turned out it was a different book from when we first started the book. And we thought that it might find an audience, it might find a good audience, but we were, nobody was more surprised when we were. After the book was on sale for only a week, our editor called us up and said, you guys made the New York Times list.

Awesome. And, you know, that's very pleasing when you look at it, and you certainly know this from all the authors who you interview, how many books get published every week, 52 weeks a year, that are vying for attention, that are vying for readers' dollars, consumer dollars. And to have our book make that list, which was totally amazing, and it stuck around for a couple of weeks. Okay, we're grateful for everything. And then people continued to find it during the year, and then March 15, they put out the trade paperback edition, as you mentioned, and after only five days on sale, yesterday it made its debut on the paperback New York Times nonfiction list

at number 15, and next Sunday it'll be number 11. Wow. So we continue to be stunned that this story that mostly takes place in the 1700s is finding a pretty sizable contemporary audience. That's pretty awesome. It says here, too, the author's finest work to date from the Wall Street Journal.

So there you go, rave reviews. It has gotten great reviews, and we're particularly grateful for the Wall Street Journal review, which was done by a fellow named Peter Cousins if you haven't had peter on your show he's he's a wonderful writer and researcher and he's a specialist i shouldn't say specialist he's just especially knowledgeable about american indian affairs and events in history and he did a book a few years ago called the earth is weeping that got all kinds of awards. It's an absolutely terrific book. And so to have somebody of his caliber write,

not only in a venue as well known as the Wall Street Journal, but to say it's his finest work yet, we were so pleased and grateful. Of course, we did realize that there's only downhill to go from here. That's kind of an interesting way of looking at it. We were talking about the pre-show, and you have an extraordinary many books. Do you want to tell me roughly the amount you're up to? Well, I claim the number 18. Not only do I like the number 18, it's a lucky number.

I'm not vouching for its accuracy. But I think 18 is a good number because it's quite a few books that people might say, Oh, okay, he's done some good books. But it's not too many books, I don't think. Because you get to the certain point where people think, well, they refer to you as prolific. And a lot of times people don't mean that in a negative way, but sometimes it can be construed as prolific means, well, he works steadily, he comes out with books regularly. They can't be very good if there's not long

intervals between books where I'm supposed to agonize and have writer's block and suffer for my art. Thankfully, I don't suffer. I enjoy what I do. It's the only thing I know how to do, so I just keep doing it. Art sometimes makes for the best suffrage, or vice versa. Best suffrage

makes for the best art. Ask any musician, I suppose, or artist. So, I mean, this is why I'm quoting two different books. You've got, you know, paperback coming out and then you've got the new hardcover coming out. And so we have a lot of, we actually have a lot of authors that return about every six months. They're pretty prolific at using your work. And they put out great books. And, I mean, we've had some authors on three or four times now, and they just schedule every six months to nine months.

And, you know, hey, you're back again. Some authors are just like that. You know, they work steadily. But I also wonder, a little bit of this is from personal experience, but, you know, you had two years of a pandemic where, obviously, that disrupted the lives and occupations of a lot of people, and it was certainly not for the better. But when it comes to authors, I'm already socially distant, and I work alone in my home office. I don't go out much.

And so the pandemic gave me cover. Oh, yeah. For the two years of the pandemic, I might have been viewed by some generous people as a normal person. But now the pandemic is ending and people are going out again and being social again. My cover has been blown. And I'm back to being the outlier. Well, I mean, hey, when you do what you do you do your best and i don't know the the longer i live the more i like my the more i get to know people and the

longer i live the more i like dogs yeah so you know it's there's kind of a weird world going on out there still that covid's still running around and then yes you know world war three and a few other things so you know and if you've seen some of the people in this country uh i don't know i don't know some of these some there's some weird people i saw some interviews at a rally the other day and it was quite extraordinary the interviews that were going on i'm like are these people for real like did they make this up something as they go i'm like well what are they on because i don't know maybe i should be on what they're on anyway i don't know what any of that means.

Well, let's get to this book. So the title, let's start with the title, Blood and Treasure. And this is a historical thing about Daniel Boone. What made you land on that title? Well, I was especially glad for the way you asked that question. And it's the reason why. Bob Drury and I had done a several years ago called the heart of everything that is where the central character was the sioux indian leader red cloud it took place mostly the 1850s to 1870s it was about what

was called red clouds war the only war that a native american leader won against the u.s government and i know some people are going to say what about sitting bullet and and little big one well that was a battle i'm talking about an entire war where the u.S. government. And I know some people are going to say, well, what about Sitting Bull and Little Bighorn? Well, that was a battle. I'm talking about an entire war where the U.S. government sued for peace. And it was mostly the last 20 years of the Indian tribes on the plains,

freedom that they had before they were basically forced onto reservations. You know, by 1870, they all had to be on reservations or faced arrest or worse. So to our surprise, the book was very successful. And then we had some other books in between. But I always wanted to come back to the story and say, okay, here's – that was sort of like the end of the Indian Wars.

I'd like to go back earlier in time. How did it get started? How did we first, like, crawl across the mountains and enter what became known as the West and what became the frontier for us? I mean, we had the 13 colonies, but we had the frontier on the other side of the Adirondacks and the Allegheny Mountains. How did that happen? And especially from the point of view of many of the Indian tribes who are encountering, you know, European people for the very first time. And so we started to work on that story. And our main character initially was going to be the Shawnee Indian leader,

Tecumseh. And then we talked about Peter Cousins before. We found out Peter Cousins was working on a book about Tecumseh and his brother. We said, okay, well, we can't do that, you know, because he's got it. He has staked out that territory. We can't compete with him. And so we were

casting about for another character and, you know, we started thinking about Daniel Boone, and we thought, well, wait a minute. Will Daniel Boone work? Because everybody knows who Daniel Boone is. So we sort of asked a couple of questions of people we knew. What do you know about Daniel Boone? Oh, yeah, he died at the Alamo. Or what about Daniel Boone? Oh So we sort of asked a couple of questions of people we knew. What do you know about Daniel Boone? Oh yeah, he died at the Alamo. Or what about

Daniel Boone? Oh, he wore coonskin caps. Or his best friend was Mingo, this Indian that was played by Ed Ames of the singing group. You know, all this kind of stuff. Daniel Boone is a character, an American figure who is instant name recognition and most people

really don't know who Daniel Boone really was and how important he was to American history. So that's why Daniel Boone was sort of like a late addition to the story. We were already researching the events that transpired on the American frontier in the 1760s and 1770s and 1780s, but then we found Daniel Boone, he was everywhere in the story. He grew up on the Western frontier. He knew Indians when he was growing up. He learned from them. He admired them. He respected them. He traveled. He hunted with them. He was also part of the French-Indian

War. He played a pivotal role in the American Revolution. There's all these aspects and the exciting action figure that he was. And he never wore a coon skin cap. And no, he did not die at the Alamo. That was Davy Crockett. So we started to find in Daniel Boone this wonderful character that you think you know and you don't. It's interesting the power of Disney to be able to lay down a character. It's all Fess Parker's fault.

It's all Fess Parker's fault. He did the Disney movie back in the 50s some people of a certain age may have may recall seeing it that was a davy crockett movie that was quite successful and then they did a disney produced tele weekly television show daniel boone and was fess parker also played daniel boone so that's especially those of a certain age, there's a lot of mixing up between the two. They're all the same person, you know, Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone. Yeah, that explains a lot because I grew up seeing those movies, and I was like, I want to be like Daniel Boone.

I grew up, I couldn't skip that. And then I remember watching The Alamo, and then, of course, we've had some authors who've done the historical research for the alamo and that's a whole that's a whole other thing now in fact i think it's one of my most hated videos on on it really riled up the texans to find out that the story of that whole thing is different so let's talk more about what what what what picture what story is told in here what can we tease out about the book that will entice readers to pick it up well you know the if i was going to pick daniel boone has had very little representation other than the fest parker disney stuff early many many many many

years ago i had very little representation on screen i mean mean, there's been no Daniel Boone limited series. The closest, really, that Daniel, the portrayal of Daniel Boone on screen would have been by Daniel Day-Lewis in the film The Last of the Mohegans. Oh, yeah. Which came out about 20, 25 years ago. And because that was really, that was Daniel Boone.

It wasn't called Daniel Boone in the movie. But there's one adventure in the Daniel Boone story that's in our book, which is one of his most remarkable adventures. In 1776, his daughter and two of her friends, they were all about 14, 15 years old, were kidnapped by Indians. And usually when you're kidnapped, when you have white children kidnapped by Indians, they're not found again.

I'm not saying necessarily that they're killed, but they're adopted into the tribes at that time and going into the 1800s. They had a really severe population problem. Partly it was because of warring with each other, and part of it was because they had no immunity to diseases they picked up from the white man, especially smallpox. Oh, wow. smallpox. So they would adopt kidnapped adolescents and teenagers into their tribe so that they could replenish the numbers of them. And Daniel Boone's daughter would have ended up bearing as many children as possible. But

Boone set off and it took him days, but he tracked these Indians down. And his daughter would tear off little pieces of her dress and leave them stuck to bushes and stuff as she was being hauled along. And her father was following this trail she was leaving. And eventually he found them and rescued his daughter

and these two other girls. And that became a story that years later, James Fenimore Cooper used in The Last of the Mohicans. Oh, wow. So that's just one of the exciting stories in the book. I don't want people to think blood and treasure, okay. It's kind of a historical thing in which we're just talking about a lot of statistics about Indian tribes and expeditions and stuff.

There's a lot of action in the book. And I think people would be very pleasantly surprised if they like action to find out what an action figure Daniel Boone was. He was everywhere on the frontier, it seemed. Yeah, it's pretty wild. So, I mean, did you get a chance to interview him? No, sorry. I'm the comedian around here. We died just before we started working on the book.

If we had been five years earlier, or maybe two centuries, either way. Was a lot of this stuff well-documented? Was it easy to find, or did you have to do a lot of digging? I imagine that takes some work. You know, it was one of the things that was a great surprise to us. I mean, some of the things surprising about this book, but one is this. Daniel Boone, thankfully, while he was still alive, and he had a long life. I mean, he was in his 86th year when he died,

at a time when the average lifespan of an American male was probably 45, maybe 50. He lived to be almost 86. And towards the end of his life, he was kind of a living legend. And there were a couple of people who came to interview him. he liked to tell some stories in his old age surrounded by his grandchildren but there was not long after he died a man came along named lyman draper and lyman draper decided he was going to dedicate himself to writing this massive authoritative definitive biography of daniel boone and so he spent years and probably put about 50 000 miles on horseback traveling all over the country all over kentucky missouri

tennessee place like that anybody who was still alive that knew daniel boone including a couple of his surviving children he interviewed them collected thousands of pages of documents and then he sat down to write his biography and he got about a third of the way through it and developed writer's block. The poor man, I know we can laugh now because he's long dead. But the poor man... He had it coming or something. Wow, okay.

I think what probably happened is he accumulated so much information. And it was so daunting. It was this mountain that he just couldn't climb. Unfortunately for Lyman Draper, he did not get to write his magnum opus of Daniel Boone. Fortunately for the rest, he became, of all things,

the executive director of the Wisconsin Historical Society, to which he donated all his papers, thousands and thousands of documents about Daniel Boone. So surprisingly, the biggest repository of information about Daniel Boone is not in Kentucky, not in Tennessee, not on the East Coast at all, but it is in Madison, Wisconsin. Oh, wow. And it is, again, thousands of pages of documents of people who knew Boone, interviews with his children, surviving children.

And so, to be able to tap into that was very, very fortunate for us. Of course, it's available to anybody who wants to do it, but I think there's been not that many people who've come along in the recent decades who've wanted to do it. So what are some other things that we're missing here that you guys talk about? What were some stories that maybe stuck out that you think people are going to like hearing about? I think one of the remarkable things about Daniel Boone is his relationship with Native Americans. You know, he came of age at a time when it was routine for people to refer to them pretty commonly as savages. And, you know, there were a lot of people at the time who didn't, even somebody as enlightened, so to speak, as Thomas Jefferson, believed the only solution to the Indian problem was to exterminate them.

And Boone respected and admired Indians. He formed lifelong friendships with them. When he was out, his favorite place to be was out in the wilderness where he lived and dressed like an Indian on these long hunts that he went on. He was quoted as saying that sometimes I'm not sure where I am, but I've never been lost. I love that. His comfortable element was being out in this vast forest land. When he went to the Cumberland Gap, he was like, there was no one else around. He went to the Cumberland Gap and founded Kentucky, basically.

As far as the white man version of founding Kentucky, there were plenty of people already living there. They just weren't white people. So I think his long hunts, his family relationships we found fascinating. His wife, he and his wife Rebecca were married for 56 years.

And there's a great story that also involves his daughter, Jemima, which is also a characteristic of what the kind of man Daniel Boone was. He would go on these long hunts. Like I said, it would last for six months, eight months, a year, sometimes a year and a half. And on one of these long hunts, he was gone

for something like 16, 15, 16 months. And word had filtered back to where his wife and his younger children were living, which I think was in Western North Carolina, that he had died. And so when he finally did make his way back and showed up in the town where his wife was living, the frontier town, you know, he walks into his cabin and there's his wife with a baby. Oh. And so, you know, the baby's like a couple of months old.

He does the math. He's been away for about 16 months. He wasn't a couple months old he does the math he's been away for about 16 months he wasn't a well-educated man but he could do basic arithmetic and uh he's like hi hon what's up and she she's astonished that he's alive i thought you were dead and so well what happened and so he said well she said well you know i thought you were dead and i got you know i i turned to comfort for your brother, Ned. Oh! His younger brother, Ned, who looked very much like Daniel.

They were almost twins. They only separated for a couple of years. And Ned was going to take care of me and your children, because it was to be a widow on a bed with children would be a tough place. So this is Ned's baby. Way to go, Ned. Boone pondered this for a bit, and then he said,

well, at least you kept it in the family. And he and Rebecca immediately got back together. They loved each other dearly, and they had more children after that. And interestingly, Jemima became very close. Daniel Boone raised her as his daughter. And Jemima, again, she's the one he rescued from the Indians.

And at the very end of his life, it was with Jemima and her husband and children that Daniel Boone lived. Wow. That's a hell of a story. Yeah. You know, that happened to me and my wife. But I had just gone to the store for a couple hours. I came home and there was a guy here. So I don't know what that means.

Life on the frontier. I'm just joking. That's what she said. Life on the frontier. I'm just joking. That's what she said. Life on the frontier. I thought you were dead, she said. I thought you were dead. I was at Walmart. No, I'm just kidding.

So there you go. Well, this sounds like a very interesting book, exciting book, and people are just excited to read it. So very good. Give us your.com so people can find you on the interwebs and get to know you better. Well, really well hidden. It's TomClavin.com.

That's a very complicated T-O-M-C-L-A-V-I-N.com. And, you know, again, I want to mention to people that it's really an adventure story. There is a lot of research that went into it. And because we wanted to get the story right, you know, I think we'd be doing a great disservice to Daniel Boone. Some of the other amazing characters in there, like the frontiersmen, like Simon Kenton and Daniel Morgan, who became a Revolutionary War hero. Some of the Indian leaders, the Cornstalk. There's even a story in the book, which is, again, true, that at one point Daniel Boone himself was kidnapped by the Shawnee. And he was adopted into the tribe.

His father became Blackfish, was the name the Shawnee. He was adopted into the tribe. His father became Blackfish, was the name of his father. He lived as Blackfish's son for quite a while as an adopted Shawnee tribesman. When he eventually came back, the only reason why he left, I shouldn't say the only reason, but an important

reason why he left is because he found out that the Shawnee were about to attack this fort. He escaped and it took him a couple of two, three weeks of running through the woods, you know, zillions of miles through the woods to get to the fort just in time to warn them that they were about to be attacked by this overwhelming Shawnee force. So it's really kind of an adventure story, and Daniel Boone's an action figure. But at the same time, you could have the comfort of knowing

that a lot of research went into it. It's not just, oh, we didn't know how this happened. We just made something up. Everything is based on factual information. That's pretty amazing. Did he ever leave the house after the wife thing? Because I'd be afraid to leave the house. Like you're gone for another, I don't know, a month or something.

And all of a sudden you come back and she's like, I married your other brother. He did have several brothers, so there was that possibility that happened. But, you know, he had to. I mean, it was like he said, you know, honey, I'm not going to go out in the woods anymore. I'm going to get a job. It was hilarious. It was called making a living. There you go.

There you go. There you go. I know some husbands who do leave and fake their death for obvious reasons. But, yeah, it sounds like that. It's starting to sound like that. What was that, Disney movie, Seven Brothers and Seven Wives? Anyway, we do the jokes around here. Anyway, thanks for coming on the show. We really appreciate it, Tom.

It's been really insightful. It's been wonderful to have you. And we love to talk about all your books as you pump them out. So please come back for more. To my audience, thanks for tuning in. Go order the book up. You can get it now just out on paperback. Blood and Treasure, Daniel Boone and the Fight for America's First Frontier.

And you can order that baby up and all the other books. Go see all of Tom's other books out there on the marketplace there. Thanks for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, Fortuna's Chris Voss. Go to youtube.com, Fortuna's Chris Voss. Horror groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and all those wonderful places. Thank you very much for tuning in. And be sure to be good to each other.

Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time.