The Matt Walsh Show - Everyone Needs To Know The Real Story of Daniel Boone

Episode Date: July 17, 2026

Daniel Boone was one of the greatest frontiersmen to ever live. This is his real story. - - - Today's Sponsor: Policygenius - Head to https://policygenius.com/WALSH to compare life insurance quotes from top companies and see how much you could save. - - - DailyWire+: 🎆 🇺🇸 Our America 250 SALE is still available! Get 3-Months of DailyWire+ for just $17.76 📜 Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: https://dwplus.watch/RealHistorySubscribe 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. 📜 Real History with Matt Walsh is available ad-free, exclusively on DailyWire+ https://dwplus.watch/RealHistory 👕 Get your Matt Walsh flannel here: https://dwplus.shop/MattWalshMerch - - - Socials:  YouTube — https://youtube.com/@mattwalsh Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/mattwalshblog Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/mattwalshblog TikTok — https://www.tiktok.com/@mattwalsh_ X — https://twitter.com/mattwalshblog - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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and absorbing whatever blows landed on him. If he fell, the consequences were clear. He would be beaten to death on the spot. If he made it to the end still standing, the reward was a little less clear. He might be allowed to live or he might not. Boone did not hesitate. He weaved his way through the gauntlet,

making it from one end to the other quickly, while sustaining relatively minor injuries, the Shawnee Chief, a man called Blackfish, was impressed, so impressed that he decided to let Daniel Boone live, at least for now. He would take Boone as a prisoner, and in keeping with the custom of many Indian tribes, give him a new name,

Sheltoewee, which means Big Turtle. It was February of 1778. Daniel Boone, the pioneer trailblazer and eventual folk hero of the American frontier, had been captured by the Shawnee while out collecting salt. In those days and in that part of the country, still in its infancy, getting salt was not as simple as running to the grocery store, and salt itself was not merely a seasoning to make your food taste better. It was a vital survival necessity. Salt was how you preserve meat. And back in

Boonesboro, the settlement that Boone founded, they were running dangerously low. So Boone set out with a group of 30 men to the salt springs about 60 miles away. It was an arduous task, which would take several weeks to complete. And it would leave the settlement. settlement, one of only a scattered few in the wilderness of Kentucky, vulnerable to attack, but they had no choice. The Shawnee found Boone and his men while they were out near the Salt Spring. Boone's group was badly outnumbered, had no hope of resistance. Even worse news was that a number of Shawnee wanted to execute all the prisoners outright,

and there was news somehow even worse than that. This same Shawnee party was on its way to Boonesboro, which, with Boone and his company captured, was almost entirely defenseless. Boone's wife and children and the wives and children of many of the rest of the men were sitting ducks. But Daniel Boone was crafty when he needed to be. He convinced Blackfish that if they left the settlement alone for the winter, he would personally accompany the Shawnee back to the settlement in the spring and persuade the residents to surrender peacefully. Boone was apparently convincing enough in this ruse that some of his own men thought he had

turned traitor, a fact that down the line would lead to a court-martial. For now, Blackfish bought Boone's argument, and he was presented. persuaded to let all the men live as prisoners, but first they, or at least Boone, would have to run and survive the gauntlet, which he did. Boone remained in captivity for several months, long enough that the people back in Boonesboro, to include his wife and children, gave him up for dead. But things changed in June of 1778. Boone learned that Blackfish was planning to assemble a war party and descend on Boonesboro. He had apparently abandoned his plans for diplomacy. Boone knew that he had to make a move and make it fast.

So he made a run for it. He escaped the Shawnee Village and fled into the wilderness. He would have to make it home in time to warn them of the coming attack, but there was a problem. Home was 160 miles away. 160 miles through the wilderness, a distance that Boone would have to travel mostly on foot after his horse collapsed and died early in the journey.

Now, it's hard for our modern minds to appreciate a distance like 160 miles. These days, we might drive that length in an afternoon. When you factor in a Starbucks stop and maybe a bathroom break, it should take about three hours. But 160 miles on foot through the forest with Indian warriors hot on your trail and an army of natives on their way to murder your entire family is a different matter entirely. And this must all be done with almost no provisions. Indeed, we know that Boone carried very little. Whatever supplies he had could not have amounted to much. One account suggests that during the entire journey, he ate only a single meal and a small piece of dried venison.

Whether that account is perfectly accurate or not, the broader reality is not in doubt. Boone was not undertaking a carefully supplied expedition. He was fleeing for his life and for the lives of everybody in the settlement. He had to get there, and he had to get there fast. An extraordinary journey lay before him. It was not his first. It would not be his last. June means summer is officially here.

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States would even exist as a country. The frontier of the British colonies lay far to the east of where most Americans live today. Beyond it stretched millions of acres of forest, mountains, rivers, and wilderness that Europeans had barely explored. Much of the continent remained a blank space on the map. Now, from an early age, he seemed drawn to it. Boone learned to hunt as a boy and quickly developed a reputation for spending long stretches of time alone in the woods. While most people viewed the wilderness as an obstacle, something to be conquered or endured. Boone was at home there. He could navigate by landmarks that other people barely noticed, track animals through dense forest, survive with remarkably little. These skills were not unique on the frontier.

Many men possessed them. What was unusual was Boone's appetite for the unknown. Most settlers wanted to build a life at the edge of civilization. Boone always seemed more interested in what lay beyond the edge, out in the wild. In 1773, Boone, by now married with eight children led a party of roughly 50 people into the wilds of the Kentucky Territory. He had first heard the stories two decades earlier, tales of a land thick with game, rich and wild and all but untouched by European hands. Now he meant to go out and see it for himself and to bring his family with him to establish what would be one of the first Anglo-American settlements in Kentucky. But the frontier rarely let such ambitions pass without exacting a price.

and as so often happened out there, tragedy struck before they ever arrived. Along the way, a small detachment sent back to retrieve supplies, lost its way trying to rejoin Boone's main party. Somewhere in that confusion, the group was ambushed by Indian warriors. Among them was Boone's own son. 16-year-old James was tortured, butchered, and left mutilated and dead alongside five others. Daniel Boone came upon the grisly scene later that same day. The whole company traumatized by the war.

by what they saw and gutted by the loss, resolved to return, turn back. Boone urged them to press on, he still wanted to go, but it was no use. Two years later, in 1775, Boone tried again. He went back into the very wilderness that had swallowed his son's life, a place that had every reason to haunt him

and every reason to keep him away. This time he led a band of about 30 heavily armed men with axes, and together they hacked and cut their way through the Cumberland Gap, carving open a path to the land west of the Appalachian Mountains. Yet even then the wilderness was not finished testing him. Only days before reaching their destination, Boone's party was ambushed once more. Two of his men were killed. But this time they held their ground, fought off the attack, and pressed on.

In April of that year on the banks of the Kentucky River, Daniel Boone, raised a small fort, a refuge for his family and several others. He called it Boonesboro. Now of course life in a little fortress in the wilderness, ringed by hostile natives, was anything but easy. The fort was was under near constant threat. And about a year after it was built, the Boone family suffered yet another brush with tragedy. Boone's 13-year-old daughter, Jamiama, had gone canoeing with two friends within sight of the walls

when they were spotted by an Indian raiding party, a mixed band of Shawnee and Cherokee warriors. The girls were pulled from the boat and carried off. Their captors meant to take them north all the way across the Ohio and deep into Shawnee territory. When Daniel Boone learned that his daughter had been taken, he gathered a small group of men and set off after them. Fortunately, the girls had the presence of mine to leave a trail, snapping branches,

dropping torn scraps of fabric along the way, a thread for Boone to follow through the trees. Three days later, the rescue party crept up on the Indians as they ate breakfast over a campfire. The men opened fire, cutting down several of the captors. The rest scattered into the wilderness. The girls were recovered alive and mostly unharmed. As a story goes, one of the warriors killed that morning was a son of Chief Blackfish, the very same chief who would take Boone himself prisoner three years later. So as Boone tore through the forest in 1778,

it was not the first desperate dash he had made to save his family. He completed that journey 160 miles, the bulk of it on foot, in just five days. He reached Boone's Borough and the family and neighbors who had long since given him up for dead in September. Blackfish and the Shawnee had not yet arrived. There was still time to ready the fort for battle. And so that's exactly what they said. about doing. A few days later, the enemy force appeared. Boone counted more than 400 Indians,

mostly Shawnee, a scattering of Cherokees and Delaware's, at least 12 French-Canadian militiamen fighting on behalf of the British. Against this formidable host, Boone had, at the very most, 60 men, maybe as few as 40. He'd just run for his life across 160 miles of wilderness. Now he'd have to stand and fight for it, and for the lives of everybody inside the fort. The siege dragged on for some 10 days. The Shawnee tried every tactic they could devise. At one point, they even attempted to tunnel beneath the walls of the fort. But after a week and a half of fighting, they abandoned the effort and withdrew.

Boone's men had suffered only five or six casualties. The fort had held, and the settlement survived. Having saved Boomsboro, Daniel Boone would go on to claim nearly 100,000 acres of Kentucky land. And yet, before the century, it was out by 1798, he would lose every last acre of it. Boone was a brilliant pioneer, but he was no businessman. The fine print of land titles and deeds was simply beyond him or beneath his interest. He was a man who would always rather be out in the woods instead of bent over paperwork at the county clerk's office. Boone, who had fought in one of the final battles of the Revolutionary War,

later tried to volunteer for the war of 1812, only to be turned away on the entirely reasonable grounds that he was 78 years old. But Daniel Boone was not a man who took such hints. Five years later, not long after the death of his wife, at the age of 82, he set out on what proved to be his last great expedition into the wild. He pushed deep into uncharted territory along the Missouri River. The journey stretched on for six months, and it carried with it. One final brush with hostile Indians, Boone was forced to lie hidden in the brush for 20 days to elude a band of Osage Warriors.

He made it home alive, sick, spent, exhausted, but hauling with him, him a heavy load of valuable furs. In 1820, Daniel Boone's remarkable life came at last to its end. He died in Missouri and was buried there beside his wife on the family farm. 25 years later, a delegation from Kentucky with the blessing of Boone's family exhumed his grave and carried him to be reburied in Frankfurt. And from that act sprang a mystery that endorsed to this day locals in Missouri have long insisted that the Kentucky delegation dug up the wrong body. More than a century afterward, a first of the first century afterward, a forensic analysis suggested they may have been right that the remains re-buried in Kentucky

might have belonged to a black man in all likelihood one of the family's slaves. The riddle was never solved, which is why even now you can visit the official grave of Daniel Boone in Missouri and his other official grave in Kentucky. Both states maintain with equal conviction that they hold the final resting place of Daniel Boone. Perhaps a fitting epilogue for a man who, or than anything else in his life, could never quite stay in one place for very long. Once upon a time, there was a country. Not just a country, but a big one, an empire.

And in that empire, there was an upper middle class family where two boys were raised by their mother, loved books, Uncle Tom's cabin in the Bible. Their father admired the country's leaders. They were patriotic and happy. Both sons went to universities where they were radicalized. One of the brothers read a book and convinced him to try to shoot the country's leader.

He was hanged. The other brother, read the same books, they decided to lead a movement. First they came for the universities and no one seemed to care. Then they took over the unions and again, no one seemed to care. Then they created their own media organizations and took over the cities. And again, most people just ignored it. Change after all was something they could believe in until it was too late. Sound familiar?

This is the real history of communism, the Russian Revolution.