Product Description

The name Daniel Boone conjures up the image of an illiterate, coonskin cap-wearing patriot who settled Kentucky and killed countless Indians. The scarcity of surviving autobiographical material has allowed tellers of his story to fashion a Boone of their own liking, and his myth has evolved in countless stories, biographies, novels, poems, and paintings. In this welcome book, Meredith Mason Brown separates the real Daniel Boone from the many fables that surround him, revealing a man far more complex-and far more interesting-than his legend.

Brown traces Boone's life from his Pennsylvania childhood to his experiences in the militia and his rise as an unexcelled woodsman, explorer, and backcountry leader. In the process, we meet the authentic Boone: he didn't wear coonskin caps; he read and wrote better than many frontiersmen; he was not the first to settle Kentucky; he took no pleasure in killing Indians. At once a loner and a leader, a Quaker who became a skilled frontier fighter, Boone is a study in contradictions. Devoted to his wife and children, he nevertheless embarked on long hunts that could keep him from home for two years or more. A captain in colonial Virginia's militia, Boone later fought against the British and their Indian allies in the Revolutionary War before he moved to Missouri when it was still Spanish territory and became a Spanish civil servant. Boone did indeed kill Indians during the bloody fighting for Kentucky, but he also respected Indians, became the adopted son of a Shawnee chief, and formed lasting friendships with many Shawnees who once held him captive.

During Boone's lifetime (1734-1820), America evolved from a group of colonies with fewer than a million inhabitants clustered along the Atlantic Coast to an independent nation of close to ten million reaching well beyond the Mississippi River. Frontiersman is the first biography to explore Boone's crucial role in that transformation. Hundreds of thousands of settlers entered Kentucky on the road that Boone and his axemen blazed from the Cumberland Gap to the Kentucky River. Boone's leadership in the defense of Boonesborough during a sustained Indian attack in 1778 was instrumental in preventing white settlers from fleeing Kentucky during the bloody years of the Revolution. And Boone's move to Missouri in 1799 and his exploration up the Missouri River helped encourage a flood of settlers into that region. Through his colorful chronicle of Boone's experiences, Brown paints a rich portrayal of colonial and Revolutionary America, the relations between whites and Indians, the opening and settling of the Old West, and the birth of the American national identity. Supported with copious maps, illustrations, endnotes, and a detailed chronology of Boone's life, Frontiersman provides a fresh and accurate rendering of a man most people know only as a folk hero-and of the nation that has mythologized him for over two centuries.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #127672 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 375 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780807133569
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
This is the fourth biography of Boone since 1992—it's the most readable and balanced, and, because it benefits from those earlier studies, also the most complete and satisfying. Every biographer of Boone has to contend with the idolatry that grew up around the man when he was alive. But Brown, in his first book, steers clear of hero worship. He sees Boone whole, praising him where praise is warranted while scrupulously recording his failings—risking his family's lives, losing sons in battles with Indians, never succeeding as a land speculator. Yet Boone emerges again as a truly remarkable figure. Caught up in the Revolutionary War, the unending Indian warfare that followed and westward expansion, he managed to remain a loyal American while moving among the tribes whose ways he knew and, unlike so many others, respected. His legendary marksmanship and daring protected him and his followers for decades. Brown's Boone remains a larger-than-life figure: heroic without posturing, steadfast without foolishness, patriotic without Indian hatred. This is a book for those who seek an accurate, not pietistic, history of a way of life long past. 25 illus., 8 maps. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review
"Meredith Mason Brown's engaging and informative biography of Daniel Boone is a worthy addition to the shelf of books about the most famous of American pioneers. In these pages, Brown gives us not only a thoroughly researched account of Boone's life, but also a persuasive interpretation of his character--of the decency and pragmatism that defined the man. What emerges is a Boone cut down to life size, yet all the more a hero for his time and ours." --Stephen Aron, author of How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay

"There have been several biographies of Daniel Boone in recent years, but Frontiersman now sits atop the list as the most engaging, engrossing, and--not a minor matter--far and away the best written." -- Joseph J. Ellis, winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

Review
"Good biographies of Daniel Boone abound, the recent ones being Michael Lofaro's Daniel Boone: An American Life and Robert Morgan's Boone: A Biography, so Brown, a lawyer whose ancestors knew Boone quite well, sees no need to tread familiar biographical territory. Instead, he explores Boone's role in transforming the United States from a collection of English Colonies on the Atlantic seaboard to a young republic that stretched to the Rocky Mountains and how Boone illustrates the fluidity and conflicting loyalties of the frontier. As part of this exploration, Brown examines Boone's complex relationships with American Indians and looks at Boone's work as a surveyor, pronouncing him competent, and showing how conflicting land claims and surveys made it almost impossible for Boone to realize anything but trouble from the land he acquired in Kentucky. By taking a different approach to Boone and carefully basing his judgments on primary sources, Brown has produced a well-written book that nicely complements the earlier biographies. Thus it belongs in most academic and public libraries." --Stephen H. Peters, Library Journal

"So anyone speaking of Boone after all that's been expressed better have something new to say. Meredith Mason Brown does. If there's a word that captures the originality of this volume, it's sinewy."--Thomas T. Noland Jr., Louisville Courier-Journal

Customer Reviews

A funny and entertaining book, and beautifully written
This is a funny and entertaining book, and beautifully written. It is packed with fascinating information about life on the frontier and in the backwoods-- what they ate, how they caught it, who they slept with and how they died. You will learn how they loaded and fired a musket, as well as why a dollar bill is called a "buck".

The author does a masterful job of setting a larger historical and geographic context. The British, the French, the Indians, the struggle for control of the Ohio Valley, why Detroit and Louisville became what they did, the Revolution and Boone's ambiguous role in it.

The book portrays the complicated relationship between whites and Indians realistically and without mawkish sentimentality. Boone was captured by the Shawnees and adopted by the chief Blackfish. He lived with the Shawnees for close to a year and had an Indian wife. At the same time two of Boone's sons were tortured, scalped and killed by the Indians, and Boone buried their remains himself where he found them.

Not least, the book gives you the sense of what this lost world must have been like, and what kind of man Daniel Boone probably was. You get a detailed picture of how much America changed, and how much was lost and gained, within the single lifetime of Daniel Boone. This is a large accomplishment.

Frontiersman--A Fascinating Biogrraphy of Daniel Boone
Frontiersman is a fascinating new biography of that legendary man of the "wilderness", Daniel Boone. It is the story of a hero in constant peril--even captured and adopted by the dominant Indian tribe in Kentucky--who, against all the odds,survives to a ripe old age while almost all of his compatriots perish. Brown tells the exciting story with a detailed description of the life and culture of America's frontier at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries. He captures the violence, the cruelty and the greed that seemed to drive all sides in this frontier battle for land and survival. An historic tale, beautifully told.

A Great Read
Brown brings alive life on the American frontier in the second half of the 18th century, an interesting mix ranging from global politics to battles over hunting rights with the indegenous Indian tribes. The description of living conditions during the era is truely fascinating - when Boone went on a "long hunt" by himself it was indeed long, at times lasting up to two years! Boone is more the cement that holds this wider-ranging story together, one researched with meticulous detail yet written in clear and easy to digest prose. A major accomplishment that covers a relatively unknown but critical part of the American story.