Everyone Needs To Know The Real Story of Daniel Boone
Episode Stats
Harmful content
Misogyny
1
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Toxicity
2
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Hate speech
7
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Summary
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
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a licensed insurance agency. The Shawnee Warriors were standing in two parallel lines about five
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feet apart. They were armed with clubs and tomahawks. Daniel Boone's task was very simple.
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He had to run between the two lines, ducking and dodging as best he could, and absorbing whatever
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blows landed on him. If he fell, the consequences were clear. He would be beaten to death on the
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spot. If he made it to the end, still standing, the reward was a little less clear. He might be
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allowed to live, or he might not. Boone did not hesitate. He weaved his way through the gauntlet,
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making it from one end to the other quickly. While sustaining relatively minor injuries,
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the Shawnee chief, a man called Blackfish, was impressed. So impressed that he decided to let
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Daniel Boone live, at least for now. He would take Boone as a prisoner, and in keeping with
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the custom of many Indian tribes, give him a new name, Sheltui, which means big turtle.
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Daniel Boone, the pioneer, trailblazer, and eventual folk hero of the American frontier,
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had been captured by the Shawnee while out collecting salt.
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In those days, and in that part of the country, still in its infancy,
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getting salt was not as simple as running to the grocery store,
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and salt itself was not merely a seasoning to make your food taste better.
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And back in Boonesboro, the settlement that Boone founded, they were running dangerously low.
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So Boone set out with a group of 30 men to the Salt Springs, about 60 miles away.
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It was an arduous task, which would take several weeks to complete.
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And it would leave the settlement, one of only a scattered few in the wilderness of Kentucky, vulnerable to attack.
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The Shawnee found Boone and his men while they were out near the Salt Spring.
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Boone's group was badly outnumbered, had no hope of resistance.
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The even worse news was that a number of Shawnee wanted to execute all the prisoners outright.
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And there was news somehow even worse than that.
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This same Shawnee party was on its way to Boonesboro,
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which, with Boone and his company captured, was almost entirely defenseless.
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Boone's wife and children, and the wives and children of many of the rest of the men, were sitting ducks.
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But Daniel Boone was crafty when he needed to be.
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He convinced Blackfish that if they left the settlement alone for the winter,
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he would personally accompany the Shawnee back to the settlement in the spring and persuade the
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residents to surrender peacefully. Boone was apparently convincing enough in this ruse that
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some of his own men thought he had turned traitor, a fact that down the line would lead to a
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court-martial. For now, Blackfish bought Boone's argument and he was persuaded to let all the men
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live as prisoners, but first they, or at least Boone, would have to run and survive the gauntlet,
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which he did. Boone remained in captivity for several months, long enough that the people back
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in Boonesboro, to include his wife and children,
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to assemble a war party and descend on Boonesboro.
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He had apparently abandoned his plans for diplomacy.
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Boone knew that he had to make a move and make it fast.
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a distance that Boone would have to travel mostly on foot
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after his horse collapsed and died early in the journey.
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And these days, we might drive that length in an afternoon.
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and maybe a bathroom break, it should take about three hours.
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to murder your entire family is a different matter entirely.
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And this must all be done with almost no provisions.
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Indeed, we know that Boone carried very little.
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Whatever supplies he had could not have amounted to much.
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One account suggests that during the entire journey,
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he ate only a single meal and a small piece of dried venison.
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Whether that account is perfectly accurate or not,
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Boone was not undertaking a carefully supplied expedition.
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and for the lives of everybody in the settlement.
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He had to get there and he had to get there fast.
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It was not his first, it would not be his last.
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Daniel Boone was born in Pennsylvania in 1734, more than four decades before the United States would even exist as a country.
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The frontier of the British colonies lay far to the east of where most Americans live today.
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Beyond it stretched millions of acres of forest, mountains, rivers, and wilderness that Europeans had barely explored.
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Much of the continent remained a blank space on the map.
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Boone learned to hunt as a boy and quickly developed a reputation for spending long stretches of time alone in the woods.
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While most people viewed the wilderness as an obstacle, something to be conquered or endured,
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He could navigate by landmarks that other people barely noticed,
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track animals through dense forest, survive with remarkably little.
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What was unusual was Boone's appetite for the unknown.
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Now, most settlers wanted to build a life at the edge of civilization.
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Boone always seemed more interested in what lay beyond the edge, out in the wild.
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In 1773, Boone, by now married with eight children,
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and led a party of roughly 50 people into the wilds
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He had first heard the stories two decades earlier,
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tales of a land thick with game, rich and wild,
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But the frontier rarely let such ambitions pass
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Along the way, a small detachment sent back to retrieve supplies lost its way trying to rejoin Boone's main party.
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Somewhere in that confusion, the group was ambushed by Indian warriors.
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16-year-old James was tortured, butchered, and left mutilated and dead alongside five others.
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Daniel Boone came upon the grisly scene later that same day.
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The whole company, traumatized by what they saw and gutted by the loss, resolved to return, turn back.
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Boone urged them to press on he still wanted to go but it was no use two years later in 1775 Boone
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tried again he went back into the very wilderness that had swallowed his son's life a place that had
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every reason to haunt him and every reason to keep him away this time he led a band of about 30
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heavily armed men with axes and together they hacked and cut their way through the Cumberland
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Gap carving open a path to the land west of the Appalachian Mountains yet even then the wilderness
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In April of that year, on the banks of the Kentucky River,
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Now, of course, life in a little fortress in the wilderness,
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ringed by hostile natives, was anything but easy.
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the Boone family suffered yet another brush with tragedy,
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Boone's 13-year-old daughter, Jemima, had gone canoeing with two friends within sight of the
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walls when they were spotted by an Indian raiding party, a mixed band of Shawnee and Cherokee
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warriors. The girls were pulled from the boat and carried off. Their captors meant to take them
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north, all the way across the Ohio, and deep into Shawnee territory. When Daniel Boone learned that
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his daughter had been taken, he gathered a small group of men and set off after them. Fortunately,
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the girls had the presence of mind to leave a trail, snapping branches, dropping torn scraps
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of fabric along the way, a thread for Boone to follow through the trees. Three days later,
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the rescue party crept up on the Indians as they ate breakfast over a campfire. The men opened fire,
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cutting down several of the captors. The rest scattered into the wilderness. The girls were
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recovered alive and mostly unharmed. As the story goes, one of the warriors killed that morning was
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a son of Chief Blackfish, the very same chief who would take Boone himself prisoner three years
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later. So as Boone tore through the forest in 1778, it was not the first desperate dash he had
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made to save his family. He completed that journey 160 miles, the bulk of it on foot, in just five
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days. He reached Boone's burrow and the family and neighbors who had long since given him up for dead
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in September. Blackfish and the Shawnee had not yet arrived. There was still time to ready the
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fort for battle. And so that's exactly what they set about doing. A few days later, the enemy force
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appeared. Boone counted more than 400 Indians, mostly Shawnee, a scattering of Cherokees and
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Delawares, at least 12 French Canadian militiamen fighting on behalf of the British. Against this
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formidable host, Boone had at the very most 60 men, maybe as few as 40. He'd just run for his
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life across 160 miles of wilderness. Now he'd have to stand and fight for it and for the lives of
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everybody inside the fort. The siege dragged on for some 10 days. The Shawnee tried every tactic
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they could devise at one point they even attempted to tunnel beneath the walls of the fort but after
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a week and a half of fighting they abandoned the effort and withdrew boone's men had suffered only
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five or six casualties the fort had held and the settlement survived having saved boomsboro
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daniel boone would go on to claim nearly 100 000 acres of kentucky land and yet before the century
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was out by 1798 he would lose every last acre of it boone was a brilliant pioneer but he was no
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businessman. The fine print of land titles and deeds was simply beyond him or beneath his
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interest. He was a man who would always rather be out in the woods instead of bent over paperwork
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at the county clerk's office. Boone, who had fought in one of the final battles of the
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Revolutionary War, later tried to volunteer for the War of 1812, only to be turned away on the
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entirely reasonable grounds that he was 78 years old. But Daniel Boone was not a man who took such
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hints. Five years later, not long after the death of his wife, at the age of 82, he set out on what
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proved to be his last great expedition into the wild. He pushed deep into uncharted territory
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along the Missouri River. The journey stretched on for six months, and it carried with it
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one final brush with hostile Indians. Boone was forced to lie hidden in the brush for
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20 days to elude a band of Osage warriors. He made it home alive, sick, spent, exhausted,
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but hauling with him a heavy load of valuable furs.
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In 1820, Daniel Boone's remarkable life came at last to its end.
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He died in Missouri and was buried there beside his wife on the family farm.
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25 years later, a delegation from Kentucky with the blessing of Boone's family
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exhumed his grave and carried him to be reburied in Frankfurt.
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And from that act sprang a mystery that endures to this day.
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Locals in Missouri have long insisted that the Kentucky delegation dug up the wrong body.
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More than a century afterward, a forensic analysis suggested they may have been right,
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that the remains reburied in Kentucky might have belonged to a black man,
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The riddle was never solved, which is why even now you can visit the official grave of Daniel Boone in Missouri
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Both states maintain with equal conviction that they hold the final resting place of Daniel Boone.
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Perhaps a fitting epilogue for a man who, more than anything else in his life,
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could never quite stay in one place for very long.
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once upon a time there was a country not just a country but a big one an empire in that empire
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there was an upper middle class family where two boys were raised by their mother loved books
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uncle tom's cabin the bible their father admired the country's leaders were patriotic and happy
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Both sons went to universities where they were radicalized.
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One of the brothers read a book and convinced him to try to shoot the country's leader.
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The other brother read the same books, but decided to lead a movement.
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First they came for the universities, and no one seemed to care.
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Then they took over the unions, and again, no one seemed to care.
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Then they created their own media organizations and took over the cities.
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Change, after all, was something they could believe in.
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Sound familiar? This is the real history of communism, the Russian Revolution.
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