Daniel Boone is often called
the most famous pioneer and frontier hero there ever was.
He is especially known for his exploration of the
wilderness of Kentucky, USA.
Boone was born in Pennsylvania, USA
on November 2, 1734 to a family of Quakers. When he was
young, he never had a chance to go to school and learn to
read or write. By 1750, when he was 16 his family moved
to North Carolina, where Daniel spent most of his time
hunting. When he was 23, he got married, and eventually
had 10 kids.
In 1769, when he was 35, he went
with John Finley and his brother to Kentucky. Of course,
this was before Kentucky was an American state. In fact,
it was seven years before the United States even became a
country!
It had always been his dream to go
to Kentucky. Contrary to some popular belief, he never
wore a coonskin cap, and when he went to Kentucky, he
wore a black felt cap. Daniel Boone hunted and explored
in Kentucky for two years. He was captured and released
by Indians in Kentucky, but only for a brief period of
time. Boone always respected Indians, but nonetheless, he
was captured four times by them. He then built a cabin in
Kentucky, and moved his family there.
In 1775, Boone led an expedition
that blazed a trail through the Cumberland Gap in
Virginia and into Kentucky. This trail came to be known
as the Wilderness
Trail, and thousands of
settlers followed it into Kentucky. It was one of the
most important trails of the early United States. It was
not an entirely new trail. The Indians had been using a
similar trail through the natural gap in the mountains
(Cumberland Gap) for hundreds of years. Boone's
expedition made agreements with the Indians for using the
trail, and Boone also cut 200 miles of new trail into
Kentucky territory.
After Boone was captured again, and
then accepted as a member of the Indian community, he
pretended that he loved Indian life, but he still waited
for just the perfect time to escape. One day, the Indians
decided to attack the fort near where he lived. He
escaped to warn his people. The Indians used very clever
warfare, but the weather was against them and they
withdrew.
Daniel Boone was rich beyond
belief, and he owned over 100,000 acres of land, but
lawyers sued him and took his land, because he had not
acquired the legal right to the land. Daniel Boone always
wanted to be in areas that were basically unpopulated, so
in 1799, he moved west again, into Missouri. He said that
Kentucky was getting too crowded for him. When he was so
old that he could not even aim his rifle straight, he set
traps to catch animals. He died on September 26,
1820.
