Two hundred years ago on this date, 26 September, Daniel Boone, age 85, died in Missouri, in his son Nathan’s stone house. His Missouri family by his side. Daniel had been ill for several days and knew the end was near. One of Nathan’s servants shaved him, Jemima cut his hair, knowing well his favorite style, and a granddaughter brushed his teeth. On the morning of the 25th, all the family came by his bed in Nathan’s front room to say goodbye. At the very end, just before dawn, with Nathan and Jemima each holding a hand, Daniel spoke his last words, “I am going; don’t grieve for me, my time has come.”
The family carried his fine coffin to Jemima’s house for the funeral, held in a barn, two days later. James Craig, Nathan’s son-in-law, preached the funeral before the large crowd. Later, family, servants, and friends proceeded to the nearby hillside to place him beside his beloved Rebecca.
I could write a book about his adventures, many authors have. In my favorite Boone: A Biography, Robert Morgan summed up Daniel’s life in a way I could never achieve. He wrote:
“The story of Daniel Boone is a story of rivers. He had crossed the Schuylkill and the Susquehanna and the Potomac, the Shenandoah and the Yadkin. He had crossed the Holston and the Watauga, the Clinch and Powell’s River. Beyond the Cumberland Gap he had crossed the Cumberland and the Kentucky, and the Big Sandy, the Licking and the Ohio, the Kanawha and the Scioto, the Miami and the Little Miami. He had crossed the Mississippi and followed the Missouri, the Gasconade, the Grand, and the Yellowstone. When Boone crossed that final river, the Styx or the Jordan, his larger life as mythic figure, legend and icon of the West, was just beginning.”
I could add many more, such as Dick’s River, nearby my home, now called Dix River. I could mention the Green River, near my father’s ancestral home. There are so many more.
Yet some 200 years after his death, I find many don’t know the stories of Daniel’s life, his adventures. Some in Kentucky have no idea where Rebecca and Daniel now lie, up above the Kentucky River on a hillside in Frankfort. I could bemoan the forgetfulness of our nation and my home state about their own fantastic history. Instead, I work to tell those stories, hoping against hope, some will read, some will listen, and some will remember.