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252 20 Last Days Tough as Boone was, he was mortal. After 1800 he must have been increasingly aware of his mortality. By 1805 three of his daughters had died. He was dealt a harder blow in 1813, when Rebecca, his wife for fiftysix years, died. For seven years Boone and Rebecca had shared a cabin on Nathan’s land, and Boone’s age and rheumatism kept the two of them close together for a longer period than ever before. As in past winters, Boone and Rebecca early in 1813 traveled together to the Callaways’ sugar maple grove to join in the sugar making. Rebecca—the robust Rebecca, the mother of ten, the care provider—fell ill. Boone took her to the Callaways’ house, but she died within a week, on March 18, 1813, aged seventy-three.1 Boone often described her death as an “inexpressible loss.”2 It may have been that it took Rebecca’s death to make Boone, who had traveled so far away from Rebecca so often and for so long, aware of how much he loved and relied on her—for family, common sense, warmth, humor, support, and partnership. Boone’s growing infirmities limited what he could do. He wanted to keep on with hunting and trapping, but rheumatism cramped his ability to get about. His hearing was going too, and his eyesight was no longer keen. In 1818 newspapers all over the country, as well as in Europe, copied a bogus story reporting that Boone had been found dead at a deer lick, kneeling by a stump on which he had rested his cocked rifle, poised for firing. Told about the story, Boone said the whole thing was impossible—his eyes were not good enough for hunting, though he could still trap.3 Boone kept on thinking about more hunting, of the long trips he had takenwithrifleandpowderhorn.InNovember1817,attheageofeighty-three, he set off on horseback with Nathan’s son James on a hunting trip, packing a gun, a kettle, traps, and provisions. On the first day they went about thirteen 253 Last Days miles from the house of Flanders and Jemima Callaway before making a shelter in the dark. Two inches of snow fell overnight. Young James managed to catch bare-handed a wild duck that landed near their campfire. They ate the duck for breakfast and pushed on another thirty miles to the northwest over the next two days, in biting cold, to Loutre Lick. Boone had intended to go on another thirty miles to the south fork of the Salt River, with the hope of camping for a few weeks and going after bear, deer, turkey, beaver, and perhaps an occasional buffalo. But the cold was too much for him. He stayed at the home of a granddaughter on Loutre Lick, while James Boone went back home to Nathan and Olive. Hearing that Boone was sick to the point of dying , Nathan ordered a coffin to be built and set off to Loutre Lick in a light carriage, to take his father’s body back. He was “agreeably surprised” to find that his father was alive, recovering, and able in a few days to ride home.4 Boone’s physical limitations did not keep him from talking about going out hunting again. As John Mason Peck, who interviewed Boone in 1818, put it, “Hunting was a ruling passion” for Boone.5 Even after the aborted hunt with his grandson, Boone kept working on a powder horn, scraping it thin with a piece of glass so the level of the powder inside could be seen. He told a visitor he would need the horn for his fall hunt. When he put the horn aside, the master of the house, out of Boone’s hearing, told the visitor that Boone had been working on that powder horn for five years, for a fall hunt “still in the future.”6 According to one of Boone’s friends in Missouri, Boone’s “friendship for the gun, & trap, & scouring the woods for discovery, continued till the last; and his friends, by stratagem, had to prevent his indulgence, when too debilitated to encounter them.”7 But if Boone talked of hunting, he also prepared for his own end. When he came back with Nathan from his aborted hunt with his grandson James, Boone, according to Nathan, “went to see the coffin that had been hastily provided for him. He thought it too rough and uncouth, and soon after he...

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