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216 17 Living Legend, Shrinking Fortune Boone left Maysville a badly battered man. His fortunes did not improve in the next decade, as he moved his home from place to place, generally downward economically and farther away from towns and commerce (and courts and creditors). But while his fortunes declined, his reputation grew. Boone was becoming a legend in his own lifetime—a legend that helped to draw settlers and to transform Kentucky from the unpopulated wilderness that had so entranced Boone when he first hunted there. In 1784, the year Boone turned fifty, the first book extolling him appeared in print. John Filson, who had interviewed Boone at length the previous year, included “The adventures of Col. Daniel Boon” as the first appendix to Filson’s brief book grandly entitled “the discovery, settlement And present State of kentucke: and An essay towards the topography, and natural history of that important Country.” The book included a reasonably good map of Kentucky (Filson had been trained as a surveyor and had spoken to Boone and others in Kentucky), a description of Indian tribes east of the Mississippi, and an appendix listing the stages and distances of going from Philadelphia to the Falls of the Ohio by land through the Cumberland Gap and from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh and down the Ohio River to the Falls and beyond. The appendix on Boone’s adventures purported to be a first-person recounting by Boone of his hunts, settlement, and Indian fighting there, from Boone’s trip with John Finley in 1769 through the Battle of the Blue Licks and Clark’s expedition into the Shawnee villages in 1782. Right after the title page was a written endorsement, signed by Boone, Levi Todd, and James Harrod, recommending the book as “containing as accurate a description of our country [Kentucky] as we think can possibly be given.” The American edition of Filson’s book sold out. John Trumbull of 217 Living Legend, Shrinking Fortune Connecticut took the Boone narrative out of Filson’s book, stripped it of florid Filsonisms, and published it as a pamphlet, which remained in print for many decades. Filson’s book (borrowed without payment of royalties, there being no copyright protection) became a hit in Europe—translated into French by 1785, published in at least three editions in Germany (a source of many immigrants to Kentucky), and reprinted in England and Ireland during the 1790s.1 Boone came to realize the international reach of the book and of his fame. In 1797, for example, when he was canoeing alone on the Ohio River with his dog and his gun, a young English traveler on a flatboat haled him aboard. On hearing Boone’s name, the Englishman, “extremely happy in having an opportunity of conversing with the hero of so many adventures ,” produced a copy of Filson’s book (in the pilfered version appended to Gilbert Imlay’s Topographical Description) and began to read it aloud to Boone. Boone “confirmed all that was there related of him.” The Englishman, Francis Baily, twenty-one years old at the time, wrote in his journal that he “could observe the old man’s face brighten up at the mention of any of those transactions in which he had taken so active a part.”2 Why had Boone in 1783 spent hours talking to Filson? The two men could hardly be more different—the tough old frontiersman and the bookish young tenderfoot. Filson was in his early thirties when he arrived in Kentucky around 1782 from Pennsylvania. Filson must have come across as the former schoolteacher he was. Judging from his pencil sketch of himself, he was small, balding, and unprepossessing. But Boone liked to talk to a sympathetic hearer. Francis Baily wrote that when he mentioned to Boone the siege of Boonesborough, Boone “entered upon the subject with all the minuteness imaginable, and as descriptively as if it had recently happened,” and went on to describe his captivity by the Indians and to trace with a moistened finger on a board a map of where the Indians took him on the lakes, “and the old man interspersed his tale with many a pleasing anecdote and interesting observation.”3 Moreover, Filson and Boone shared a common objective: to become rich through a rise in the price of land in Kentucky. Boone still had significant Kentucky land claims when Filson interviewed him. So did Filson , in a smaller way. Filson proclaimed in the preface to his book that...

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