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274 22 Coda A cloud of myth and legend surrounds Boone. There are contemporary accounts and letters (including several from Boone himself), but many of the stories about Boone were gathered decades after he died, from very old pioneers and from the children or grandchildren of pioneers. Many of the biographies contain more folktales than facts. There are physical Boone relics, but many are no more convincing than pieces of the True Cross. The myths, the legends, the dubious relics, are not Boone’s legacy. His legacy consists of the reality of his achievements, the strength of his character and principles, and the transformation of America that he helped to bring about. Consider Boone’s actual achievements. On foot, on horse, or by boat Boone traveled from eastern Pennsylvania down to Florida, across much of Virginia, Maryland, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Kentucky, into what is now Ohio and Michigan, across the Mississippi and well up the Missouri River. He blazed what became the Wilderness Road, from the Cumberland Gap up to the Kentucky River—the route on which hundreds of thousands of settlers were to travel on their way to Kentucky. He led settlers into Kentucky in 1775 to build Boonesborough, even after Indians killed several in the group he led. He was a leader in Boonesborough’s successful defense in 1778, which did much to prevent American settlers from abandoning Kentucky during the bloody years of the Revolution. He brought many settlers into Kentucky, and later into Missouri, both in person and by his example and the strength of his reputation. Boone’s achievements were based on the strengths of his character and principles. He had stamina and remarkable courage, sometimes to the point of excess. His formal education was minimal, but he had suppleness and 275 Coda quickness of mind in dealing with changing circumstances—for example, his captivity by the Shawnees. His humor and self-deprecation were engaging . So was his nondoctrinaire religious outlook “to Love and fear god, beleve in Jesus Christ, Dow all the good to my Nighbour and my Self that I can, and Do as Little harm as I Can help, and trust on gods marcy for the rest.”1 He dealt fairly with others, Indians as well as whites. Boone had weaknesses and deficiencies. He was not a good businessman. His scant formal education showed up in his phonetic spelling. He had little taste for large organizations or for regular attendance on legislative committees . His family connections were not grand. But in tight spots people looked to Boone. It was no accident that the frontiersmen on the Clinch River in 1774 wanted him as their captain, or that the station built in the wilderness for Col. Richard Henderson’s Transylvania Company was called Boonesborough , not Hendersonville. In addition to his skills as a woodsman and scout, Boone was a decent man, not the coonskin cap–wearing near-brute of the dime novels. Someone who knew him in Boonesborough described him as “a remarkably pleasant good natured mannerly man.”2 Judge David Todd, a member of a leading family of Kentucky settlers, who like Boone had moved to Missouri from Kentucky, said Boone “was a plain, gentlemanly man, good memory, mild, and equable. No ruffian, nor did he partake near as far as I have seen of the slovenly backwoods character.”3 Boone’s achievements, character, and principles helped to bring about the enormous transformations in America that happened during Boone’s long life: the westward expansion, the explosive growth in population of Kentucky and Missouri, the decline of game, the Indians’ dwindling power, the changes in the American economy, the nascent threat that slavery posed to the American Union, and the development of a sense of American national identity. In 1750, the year of Boone’s first long hunt, the total non-Indian population in the British colonies in what became the United States was 1.1 million .4 That population was located primarily within a hundred miles of the Atlantic coast. The U.S. Census Bureau keeps track of the population center of the United States. By the bureau’s definition the population center of the United States is the point at which an “imaginary, flat, weightless and rigid map of the U.S. would balance perfectly” if every person—counted where they lived on the day of the census—weighed the same. The earliest year for which the Census Bureau has calculated the country’s population center is [3.21...

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