The Matt Walsh Show - July 17, 2026


Everyone Needs To Know The Real Story of Daniel Boone

Hosted by
Matt Walsh
Mentioned
Daniel Boone Shawnee Walsh Sheltui Genius James Salt
The Legend Of Ernest Shackleton And His Insane Rescue Mission Ep. 1807 - Try Not To CRINGE While Watching These Democratic Socialists HUMILIATE Themselves

Episode Stats


Length

14 minutes

Words per minute

191.06

Word count

2,791

Sentence count

175

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

7

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Daniel Boone, the pioneer, trailblazer, and eventual folk hero of the American frontier, had been captured by the Shawnee while out collecting salt in 1778. He was given a new name, Sheltui, which means Big Turtle, and taken into captivity.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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00:00:56.580 a licensed insurance agency. The Shawnee Warriors were standing in two parallel lines about five
00:01:02.140 feet apart. They were armed with clubs and tomahawks. Daniel Boone's task was very simple.
00:01:08.820 He had to run between the two lines, ducking and dodging as best he could, and absorbing whatever
00:01:13.560 blows landed on him. If he fell, the consequences were clear. He would be beaten to death on the
00:01:19.480 spot. If he made it to the end, still standing, the reward was a little less clear. He might be
00:01:24.400 allowed to live, or he might not. Boone did not hesitate. He weaved his way through the gauntlet,
00:01:29.380 making it from one end to the other quickly. While sustaining relatively minor injuries,
00:01:33.740 the Shawnee chief, a man called Blackfish, was impressed. So impressed that he decided to let
00:01:39.260 Daniel Boone live, at least for now. He would take Boone as a prisoner, and in keeping with
00:01:44.060 the custom of many Indian tribes, give him a new name, Sheltui, which means big turtle.
00:01:49.960 It was February of 1778.
00:01:52.660 Daniel Boone, the pioneer, trailblazer, and eventual folk hero of the American frontier,
00:01:58.580 had been captured by the Shawnee while out collecting salt.
00:02:01.840 In those days, and in that part of the country, still in its infancy,
00:02:05.380 getting salt was not as simple as running to the grocery store,
00:02:08.960 and salt itself was not merely a seasoning to make your food taste better.
00:02:12.740 It was a vital survival necessity.
00:02:14.680 Salt was how you preserve meat.
00:02:16.920 And back in Boonesboro, the settlement that Boone founded, they were running dangerously low.
00:02:22.260 So Boone set out with a group of 30 men to the Salt Springs, about 60 miles away.
00:02:27.020 It was an arduous task, which would take several weeks to complete.
00:02:30.180 And it would leave the settlement, one of only a scattered few in the wilderness of Kentucky, vulnerable to attack.
00:02:36.100 But they had no choice.
00:02:37.740 The Shawnee found Boone and his men while they were out near the Salt Spring.
00:02:40.860 Boone's group was badly outnumbered, had no hope of resistance.
00:02:44.960 The even worse news was that a number of Shawnee wanted to execute all the prisoners outright.
00:02:49.540 And there was news somehow even worse than that.
00:02:52.160 This same Shawnee party was on its way to Boonesboro,
00:02:54.940 which, with Boone and his company captured, was almost entirely defenseless.
00:02:58.920 Boone's wife and children, and the wives and children of many of the rest of the men, were sitting ducks.
00:03:04.100 But Daniel Boone was crafty when he needed to be.
00:03:06.660 He convinced Blackfish that if they left the settlement alone for the winter,
00:03:11.080 he would personally accompany the Shawnee back to the settlement in the spring and persuade the
00:03:15.700 residents to surrender peacefully. Boone was apparently convincing enough in this ruse that
00:03:20.660 some of his own men thought he had turned traitor, a fact that down the line would lead to a
00:03:25.380 court-martial. For now, Blackfish bought Boone's argument and he was persuaded to let all the men
00:03:30.660 live as prisoners, but first they, or at least Boone, would have to run and survive the gauntlet,
00:03:35.780 which he did. Boone remained in captivity for several months, long enough that the people back
00:03:40.680 in Boonesboro, to include his wife and children,
00:03:42.880 gave him up for dead.
00:03:44.180 But things changed in June of 1778.
00:03:46.260 Boone learned that Blackfish was planning
00:03:48.260 to assemble a war party and descend on Boonesboro.
00:03:51.560 He had apparently abandoned his plans for diplomacy.
00:03:54.360 Boone knew that he had to make a move and make it fast.
00:03:57.200 So he made a run for it.
00:03:58.400 He escaped the Shawnee Village
00:03:59.740 and fled into the wilderness.
00:04:01.640 He would have to make it home in time
00:04:03.000 to warn them of the coming attack,
00:04:04.700 but there was a problem.
00:04:05.880 Home was 160 miles away.
00:04:08.500 160 miles through the wilderness,
00:04:10.280 a distance that Boone would have to travel mostly on foot
00:04:13.780 after his horse collapsed and died early in the journey.
00:04:16.900 Now, it's hard for our modern minds
00:04:18.180 to appreciate a distance like 160 miles.
00:04:21.140 And these days, we might drive that length in an afternoon.
00:04:23.440 When you factor in a Starbucks stop
00:04:25.520 and maybe a bathroom break, it should take about three hours.
00:04:28.080 But 160 miles on foot through the forest
00:04:31.180 with Indian warriors hot on your trail 0.99
00:04:33.560 and an army of natives on their way 1.00
00:04:35.040 to murder your entire family is a different matter entirely. 1.00
00:04:39.560 And this must all be done with almost no provisions.
00:04:41.820 Indeed, we know that Boone carried very little.
00:04:44.540 Whatever supplies he had could not have amounted to much.
00:04:47.240 One account suggests that during the entire journey,
00:04:49.700 he ate only a single meal and a small piece of dried venison.
00:04:53.560 Whether that account is perfectly accurate or not,
00:04:55.160 the broader reality is not a doubt.
00:04:56.620 Boone was not undertaking a carefully supplied expedition.
00:04:59.840 He was fleeing for his life
00:05:01.680 and for the lives of everybody in the settlement.
00:05:04.280 He had to get there and he had to get there fast.
00:05:06.760 An extraordinary journey lay before him.
00:05:09.500 It was not his first, it would not be his last.
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00:06:20.440 Daniel Boone was born in Pennsylvania in 1734, more than four decades before the United States would even exist as a country.
00:06:27.240 The frontier of the British colonies lay far to the east of where most Americans live today.
00:06:32.980 Beyond it stretched millions of acres of forest, mountains, rivers, and wilderness that Europeans had barely explored.
00:06:39.980 Much of the continent remained a blank space on the map.
00:06:42.820 From an early age, he seemed drawn to it.
00:06:45.440 Boone learned to hunt as a boy and quickly developed a reputation for spending long stretches of time alone in the woods.
00:06:51.240 While most people viewed the wilderness as an obstacle, something to be conquered or endured,
00:06:56.320 Boone was at home there.
00:06:57.620 He could navigate by landmarks that other people barely noticed,
00:07:01.100 track animals through dense forest, survive with remarkably little.
00:07:05.760 These skills were not unique on the frontier.
00:07:07.500 Many men possessed them.
00:07:08.540 What was unusual was Boone's appetite for the unknown.
00:07:12.160 Now, most settlers wanted to build a life at the edge of civilization.
00:07:15.020 Boone always seemed more interested in what lay beyond the edge, out in the wild.
00:07:19.940 In 1773, Boone, by now married with eight children,
00:07:22.720 and led a party of roughly 50 people into the wilds
00:07:25.740 of the Kentucky territory.
00:07:27.380 He had first heard the stories two decades earlier,
00:07:30.000 tales of a land thick with game, rich and wild,
00:07:33.120 and all but untouched by European hands.
00:07:35.820 Now he meant to go out and see it for himself
00:07:37.960 and to bring his family with him,
00:07:39.240 to establish what would be one of the first
00:07:41.360 Anglo-American settlements in Kentucky.
00:07:43.680 But the frontier rarely let such ambitions pass 0.95
00:07:46.680 without exacting a price,
00:07:47.920 and as so often happened out there,
00:07:49.860 tragedy struck before they ever arrived.
00:07:52.520 Along the way, a small detachment sent back to retrieve supplies lost its way trying to rejoin Boone's main party.
00:07:59.540 Somewhere in that confusion, the group was ambushed by Indian warriors.
00:08:02.940 Among them was Boone's own son.
00:08:05.880 16-year-old James was tortured, butchered, and left mutilated and dead alongside five others.
00:08:12.020 Daniel Boone came upon the grisly scene later that same day.
00:08:16.380 The whole company, traumatized by what they saw and gutted by the loss, resolved to return, turn back.
00:08:22.520 Boone urged them to press on he still wanted to go but it was no use two years later in 1775 Boone
00:08:28.800 tried again he went back into the very wilderness that had swallowed his son's life a place that had
00:08:33.920 every reason to haunt him and every reason to keep him away this time he led a band of about 30
00:08:39.560 heavily armed men with axes and together they hacked and cut their way through the Cumberland
00:08:44.400 Gap carving open a path to the land west of the Appalachian Mountains yet even then the wilderness
00:08:50.580 was not finished testing him.
00:08:52.280 Only days before reaching their destination,
00:08:54.280 Boone's party was ambushed once more.
00:08:56.600 Two of his men were killed.
00:08:57.960 But this time, they held their ground,
00:08:59.160 fought off the attack, and pressed on.
00:09:00.840 In April of that year, on the banks of the Kentucky River,
00:09:02.940 Daniel Boone raised a small fort,
00:09:04.620 a refuge for his family and several others.
00:09:07.300 He called it Boonesboro.
00:09:08.680 Now, of course, life in a little fortress in the wilderness,
00:09:11.420 ringed by hostile natives, was anything but easy.
00:09:14.360 The fort was under near-constant threat.
00:09:17.100 And about a year after it was built,
00:09:18.280 the Boone family suffered yet another brush with tragedy,
00:09:20.580 Boone's 13-year-old daughter, Jemima, had gone canoeing with two friends within sight of the
00:09:25.920 walls when they were spotted by an Indian raiding party, a mixed band of Shawnee and Cherokee
00:09:30.760 warriors. The girls were pulled from the boat and carried off. Their captors meant to take them
00:09:35.300 north, all the way across the Ohio, and deep into Shawnee territory. When Daniel Boone learned that
00:09:40.000 his daughter had been taken, he gathered a small group of men and set off after them. Fortunately,
00:09:44.000 the girls had the presence of mind to leave a trail, snapping branches, dropping torn scraps 0.99
00:09:48.560 of fabric along the way, a thread for Boone to follow through the trees. Three days later,
00:09:54.060 the rescue party crept up on the Indians as they ate breakfast over a campfire. The men opened fire,
00:09:58.800 cutting down several of the captors. The rest scattered into the wilderness. The girls were
00:10:03.460 recovered alive and mostly unharmed. As the story goes, one of the warriors killed that morning was
00:10:08.780 a son of Chief Blackfish, the very same chief who would take Boone himself prisoner three years
00:10:14.300 later. So as Boone tore through the forest in 1778, it was not the first desperate dash he had
00:10:19.900 made to save his family. He completed that journey 160 miles, the bulk of it on foot, in just five
00:10:26.200 days. He reached Boone's burrow and the family and neighbors who had long since given him up for dead
00:10:32.080 in September. Blackfish and the Shawnee had not yet arrived. There was still time to ready the
00:10:37.640 fort for battle. And so that's exactly what they set about doing. A few days later, the enemy force
00:10:42.760 appeared. Boone counted more than 400 Indians, mostly Shawnee, a scattering of Cherokees and
00:10:48.320 Delawares, at least 12 French Canadian militiamen fighting on behalf of the British. Against this
00:10:53.100 formidable host, Boone had at the very most 60 men, maybe as few as 40. He'd just run for his
00:10:59.520 life across 160 miles of wilderness. Now he'd have to stand and fight for it and for the lives of
00:11:05.500 everybody inside the fort. The siege dragged on for some 10 days. The Shawnee tried every tactic
00:11:10.980 they could devise at one point they even attempted to tunnel beneath the walls of the fort but after
00:11:15.540 a week and a half of fighting they abandoned the effort and withdrew boone's men had suffered only
00:11:20.580 five or six casualties the fort had held and the settlement survived having saved boomsboro
00:11:25.700 daniel boone would go on to claim nearly 100 000 acres of kentucky land and yet before the century
00:11:32.020 was out by 1798 he would lose every last acre of it boone was a brilliant pioneer but he was no
00:11:38.900 businessman. The fine print of land titles and deeds was simply beyond him or beneath his
00:11:45.440 interest. He was a man who would always rather be out in the woods instead of bent over paperwork
00:11:50.040 at the county clerk's office. Boone, who had fought in one of the final battles of the
00:11:54.400 Revolutionary War, later tried to volunteer for the War of 1812, only to be turned away on the
00:11:59.540 entirely reasonable grounds that he was 78 years old. But Daniel Boone was not a man who took such
00:12:04.380 hints. Five years later, not long after the death of his wife, at the age of 82, he set out on what
00:12:11.180 proved to be his last great expedition into the wild. He pushed deep into uncharted territory
00:12:17.000 along the Missouri River. The journey stretched on for six months, and it carried with it
00:12:22.120 one final brush with hostile Indians. Boone was forced to lie hidden in the brush for
00:12:27.140 20 days to elude a band of Osage warriors. He made it home alive, sick, spent, exhausted,
00:12:33.620 but hauling with him a heavy load of valuable furs.
00:12:37.540 In 1820, Daniel Boone's remarkable life came at last to its end.
00:12:41.300 He died in Missouri and was buried there beside his wife on the family farm.
00:12:45.820 25 years later, a delegation from Kentucky with the blessing of Boone's family
00:12:49.640 exhumed his grave and carried him to be reburied in Frankfurt.
00:12:54.620 And from that act sprang a mystery that endures to this day.
00:12:58.320 Locals in Missouri have long insisted that the Kentucky delegation dug up the wrong body. 0.53
00:13:03.320 More than a century afterward, a forensic analysis suggested they may have been right, 0.94
00:13:07.740 that the remains reburied in Kentucky might have belonged to a black man,
00:13:11.320 in all likelihood one of the family's slaves.
00:13:13.420 The riddle was never solved, which is why even now you can visit the official grave of Daniel Boone in Missouri
00:13:17.760 and his other official grave in Kentucky.
00:13:19.740 Both states maintain with equal conviction that they hold the final resting place of Daniel Boone.
00:13:25.800 Perhaps a fitting epilogue for a man who, more than anything else in his life,
00:13:29.440 could never quite stay in one place for very long.
00:13:32.600 once upon a time there was a country not just a country but a big one an empire in that empire
00:13:47.300 there was an upper middle class family where two boys were raised by their mother loved books
00:13:53.120 uncle tom's cabin the bible their father admired the country's leaders were patriotic and happy
00:14:00.240 Both sons went to universities where they were radicalized.
00:14:03.900 One of the brothers read a book and convinced him to try to shoot the country's leader.
00:14:07.820 He was hanged.
00:14:09.160 The other brother read the same books, but decided to lead a movement.
00:14:13.500 First they came for the universities, and no one seemed to care.
00:14:17.020 Then they took over the unions, and again, no one seemed to care.
00:14:19.800 Then they created their own media organizations and took over the cities.
00:14:23.140 And again, most people just ignored them.
00:14:25.420 Change, after all, was something they could believe in.
00:14:28.520 Until it was too late.
00:14:29.460 Sound familiar? This is the real history of communism, the Russian Revolution. 0.52