Boone: A Biography (6 page)

T
HERE HAS
been much debate about Boone’s education. Late in life he told his children he had never had one day of schooling. A nephew later told a story of young Daniel attending a school taught by an Irishman who was both fond of the bottle and handy with the cane. The teacher frequently repaired to the woods for a sip from his hidden jug. One day while squirrel hunting Daniel found the bottle and laced the liquor with an herbal emetic. Later, as he was wracked by violent heaves and spasms, the teacher noticed Daniel giggling and realized he was the culprit. Attempting to whip the boy, the sick Irishman got knocked to the floor by the independent youth.
Sarah Boone rebuked her son for violence
but didn’t force him to return to school.

Whatever the truth about his schooling, the fact is that Daniel Boone could read and write. As a militia officer, storekeeper, land agent, surveyor, magistrate, and legislator he wrote thousands of letters
and reports, many of them still in existence. And he enjoyed reading, especially history books, the Bible, and later
Gulliver’s Travels
. There is reason to believe he knew
Robinson Crusoe
quite well. But his spelling was erratic, even imaginative. The orthography of his many notes and letters, bills and survey accounts, is part of the legend. Lyman Draper reports that
Boone was actually taught to read and write
by his brother Samuel’s wife, Sarah Day. Draper offered his own description of Boone’s writing: “
He could at first do little more
than write his own name in an uncouth and mechanical way. To these humble beginnings, he added something as he grew up, by his own practical application . . . His compositions bear the marks of a strong common sense, yet, as might be expected, exhibiting defects in orthography, grammar and style, by no means infrequent.”

Draper applies strict, Victorian standards to Boone’s handwriting and spelling. Another story relating to Boone’s education, or rather lack thereof, concerns his bachelor uncle John who kept a subscription school nearby and was liberal in applying the rod. Daniel refused to attend, and Sarah took his side, critical of excessive caning. John complained to his brother Squire.

“It’s all right, John,” Daniel’s father answered. “
Let the girls do the spelling
and Dan will do the shooting, and between you and me that is what we most need.” Whether the story is true or not, it implies a very common course of events, as educated immigrants to America found little opportunity or time for education for their children. The second generation of the immigrants often had less education than the first. “
They took the powder horn and left the ink horn
at home,” the biographer W. H. Bogart later wrote. From infancy Daniel had been exposed to daily readings from the Bible, and it is likely its words made a lasting impression on him “
in the mighty solitudes
of his after years.”

There were few schools in the area of Oley at the time. But the fact is all the other Boone sons received a respectable education. As far as
we know only Daniel avoided school and the rules of grammar and spelling. It would seem his parents early on recognized his skills as a hunter and woodsman who provided the family with venison and turkey, squirrels and rabbits, as well as hides and furs. It was practical to let him do what he did better than anyone else.

Later in his life, in a moment of great danger, Boone would write sentences such as, “
Your company is desired greatly
, for the people are very uneasy, but are willing to stay and venture their lives with you, and now is the time to flusterate their [the Indians’] intentions, and keep the country whilst we are in it.” This letter, written to Richard Henderson on April 1, 1775, as Boone and his men were hacking out Boone’s Trace after being attacked by Indians, shows he had some command of language, as well as a flair for making up words and spelling. We don’t know, of course, how much help he had with the letter from his son-in-law Will Hays.

However poor or creative Boone’s spelling was, he did know how to spell his name, always with an
e
at the end, proving that the famed inscriptions such as “D. Boon Cilled a bar on tree in the year 1760” were almost certainly made by someone else.

Young Daniel’s greatest teachers were the woods themselves and the Indians he watched and questioned and imitated. We talk often of the impact of the white culture on the Native Americans, but the influence of the Indian culture on the white was just as significant.
As John Mack Faragher has pointed out
, in Europe hunting was the preserve of the nobility. Most of those who came to America learned to hunt from Indian ways. Not only did the settlers and hunters learn much about hunting and trapping and survival from the Indians, they also learned the use of herbs and roots and berries, medicines, the lay of the land and courses of rivers to the west.

The Boone family, like William Penn himself, had always been known to be friendly to the Indians. George III had organized a rescue of two Indian girls who had been kidnapped. Indians passing through the neighborhood were often invited to eat and drink and stay the
night at the Boone home. In 1736 a chief called Sassoonan, “
King of the Schuylkill Delawares
,” stayed at the Boone homestead with a party of twenty-five.

Relations between Indians and whites in Pennsylvania were more peaceful than in the other colonies. In the woods along the Schuylkill above Philadelphia, white hunters who lived like Indians were seen frequently along the trails and beside the streams. Indians of many different tribes mingled in the hills and villages north of Oley, Tuscaroras and Tutelas, Conoys and Nanticokes, Shawnees and Susquehannocks and Delawares. One nearby Indian village, called Manangy’s Town, was later renamed Reading.

Besides the minor outbreak of fighting in 1728, there were no Indian raids on the southeastern Pennsylvania frontier in the eighteenth century. It was a time when the Indians were learning from the Europeans to use firearms, wear woven cloth, build log cabins, use metal tools, and drink whiskey. And from the Natives the white hunters learned the ways of the American woods, the best techniques for hunting deer and bear and trapping beavers, mink, and otter. From the Indians the hunters learned to prepare bear bacon and jerk from venison. They learned to cure deer hides and buffalo hides and bearskins. And they learned the beauty and value of furs, the glistening pelts of beavers that populated almost every stream in the forest. The pelts of mink and otter, fox and muskrat, raccoon and pine marten, were also useful and beautiful, warm and silky to the touch. Most luxuriant of all was the otter, its fur deep and dark and sparkling, soft as a whisper to the fingertips, shining with mystery. In the Old World fur was reserved for royalty. In the North American forests fur was there for anyone with the skill to take it.

The hide of the deer was used mostly for clothing. Scraped and tanned, softened and smoothed, buckskin was common as khaki is now. Deer hides were such a familiar item of frontier trade that the Spanish dollar, worth about one hide, came to be called a buck. Buckskin served many purposes on the frontier, used for clothes, strings,
and pouches. Prepared right, it was soft and pliable. However, when wet, buckskin tended to become very heavy, and it shrank as it dried out.

The American long rifle, developed by German gunsmiths in Pennsylvania, was the weapon of choice for hunters of both races. It was light and sturdy and could be accurate at up to two hundred yards in the hands of a skilled marksman. But both white and Indian hunters used other firearms as well—British muskets, Dutch shotguns, pistols. A man’s rifle was his most important companion in the forest. The saying was he should select a rifle as carefully as a wife.

As they interacted more and more with the whites, Indians changed their customs and dress. With the traditional buckskin leggings and breech clout, the Indians often wore the long linen hunting shirts donned by the white woodsmen. The log cabin and stockade were almost impossible to build without metal tools. For centuries the Indians had lived in shelters made of poles and bark, hides and brush. But once the Indians had metal axes and saws, adzes and augers, they too made log dwellings, similar to those the whites built. It is said that Indians preferred to notch their logs on the underside, while whites notched theirs on the top.

It has long been observed that white and Indian communities on the frontier mirrored each other in many ways. From the Indians the whites learned herbal medicines, hunting techniques, crops fitted to the local climate and soil, preparation of hides and furs, geography of the regions farther west. From the whites the Indians acquired firearms, metal tools, whiskey, cloth, small grains, and a number of diseases that killed more Natives than all the wars combined.

It was in this world of mingling Indian and European cultures that Daniel Boone’s character and aspirations were formed. He became an expert marksman, tracker, and trapper. He never forgot a trail or place he’d seen. But at the same time he was part of a large close family, loyal and affectionate, good natured and often funny.
He loved to enjoy himself and be with friends before vanishing into the woods again, emerging days later with bear meat, a deer, pelts to trade. These two sides to his character seemed to be there from the first. From childhood he seemed to inhabit a “middle ground” between white and Indian cultures. And he served at times as a kind of double agent, his loyalties complex and divided between his several worlds and kinships.