Frontiersman: Daniel Boone and the Making of America

21. Life after Death

260 21 Life after Death Already mythic during his life, Boone after his death not only survived but evolved in countless stories, biographies, novels, poems, and paintings. That survival and evolution continues to this day, assisted both by the magnitude and drama of what Boone did and by the scarcity of autobiographical material that survived him. Tellers of the Boone story have each been able to fashion a Boone to their own liking because they have been little constrained by the man’s own words. Filson’s account of Boone was no more than a short sketch, ending in 1783. After the loss in the Missouri River during the War of 1812 of the autobiography that Boone had dictated to a grandson, Boone had tried again, dictating his life and adventures to a grandson-in-law named Dr. John Jones. The idea was that Jones would prepare the narrative for press, with the profits to go to Boone. Nathan said the narrative was never completed because of Boone’s Loutre Lick trip and his subsequent sickness and changes of residence among his children. Jones promised to give Nathan the incomplete narrative, but it was never found after Jones died suddenly in the early 1840s.1 So people recounting Boone’s story after his death were left largely unfettered by Boone’s own telling of his story. They took full advantage of their liberty to shape their picture of him to their own purposes.2 Some presented Boone as a child of nature, an exemplar of the earthly Rousseau-like Paradise of life in the wilderness. This was how Lord Byron presented him in his book-length Don Juan, a poem begun in 1818 as a picaresque ramble that was “meant to be a little quietly facetious upon everything .”3 For more than sixteen long cantos Byron follows the Spanish lover Don Juan—whose amorous entanglements bear more than an occasional resemblance to those of Byron—from his childhood in Spain, to Turkey 261 Life after Death (where he is sold into slavery), to joining the Russians in their siege of the Turkish-held city Ismail at the mouth of the Danube, to Russia (where Catherine the Great takes him as a lover), and to England (sent on an embassy by Catherine). The preceding sentence may give the impression that Don Juan is tightly plotted—but as Virginia Woolf said, it has “an elastic shape which will hold whatever you choose to put into it . . . [Byron] could say whatever came into his head.”4 Byron wrote to a friend: “You ask me for the plan of Donny Jonny: I have no plan—I had no plan, but I had or have materials . . . . Why, Man, the Soul of such writing is its licence; at least the liberty of that licence, if you like.”5 In Don Juan itself the poet wrote, without embarrassment , “Note or text/I never know the word which will come next.”6 What came next, in the middle of canto 8, were stanzas describing Boone in idyllic terms. The canto, published in 1823 (three years after Boone died), tells of the Russians’ siege of Ismail. After describing the Turks’ defeat and before recounting the bloody sack of the city, Byron pauses to praise the God-made country over the man-made (and man-destroyed) city, by pointing to Daniel Boone and his progeny: LXI Of all men, saving Sylla the man-slayer, Who passes for in life and death most lucky, Of the great names which in our faces stare, The General Boon, back-woodsman of Kentucky, Was happiest amongst mortals anywhere; For killing nothing but a bear or buck, he Enjoy’d the lonely, vigorous, harmless days Of his old age in wilds of deepest maze. LXII Crime came not near him—she is not the child Of solitude; Health shrank not from him—for Her home is in the rarely trodden wild, Where if men seek her not, and death be more Their choice than life, forgive them, as beguiled By habit to what their own hearts abhor— In cities caged. The present case in point I Cite is, that Boon lived hunting up to ninety; Frontiersman 262 LXIII And what’s still stranger, left behind a name For which men vainly decimate the throng, Not only famous, but of that good fame, Without which glory’s but a tavern song— Simple, serene, the...