Frontiersman: Daniel Boone and the Making of America (Southern Biography Series) [Hardcover]

Meredith Mason Brown (Author)

Book Description

Series: Southern Biography | Publication Date: September 15, 2008

The name Daniel Boone conjures up the image of an illiterate, coonskin cap-wearing patriot who settled Kentucky and killed countless Indians. The scarcity of surviving autobiographical material has allowed tellers of his story to fashion a Boone of their own liking, and his myth has evolved in countless stories, biographies, novels, poems, and paintings. In this welcome book, Meredith Mason Brown separates the real Daniel Boone from the many fables that surround him, revealing a man far more complex-and far more interesting-than his legend.

Brown traces Boone's life from his Pennsylvania childhood to his experiences in the militia and his rise as an unexcelled woodsman, explorer, and backcountry leader. In the process, we meet the authentic Boone: he didn't wear coonskin caps; he read and wrote better than many frontiersmen; he was not the first to settle Kentucky; he took no pleasure in killing Indians. At once a loner and a leader, a Quaker who became a skilled frontier fighter, Boone is a study in contradictions. Devoted to his wife and children, he nevertheless embarked on long hunts that could keep him from home for two years or more. A captain in colonial Virginia's militia, Boone later fought against the British and their Indian allies in the Revolutionary War before he moved to Missouri when it was still Spanish territory and became a Spanish civil servant. Boone did indeed kill Indians during the bloody fighting for Kentucky, but he also respected Indians, became the adopted son of a Shawnee chief, and formed lasting friendships with many Shawnees who once held him captive.

During Boone's lifetime (1734-1820), America evolved from a group of colonies with fewer than a million inhabitants clustered along the Atlantic Coast to an independent nation of close to ten million reaching well beyond the Mississippi River. Frontiersman is the first biography to explore Boone's crucial role in that transformation. Hundreds of thousands of settlers entered Kentucky on the road that Boone and his axemen blazed from the Cumberland Gap to the Kentucky River. Boone's leadership in the defense of Boonesborough during a sustained Indian attack in 1778 was instrumental in preventing white settlers from fleeing Kentucky during the bloody years of the Revolution. And Boone's move to Missouri in 1799 and his exploration up the Missouri River helped encourage a flood of settlers into that region. Through his colorful chronicle of Boone's experiences, Brown paints a rich portrayal of colonial and Revolutionary America, the relations between whites and Indians, the opening and settling of the Old West, and the birth of the American national identity. Supported with copious maps, illustrations, endnotes, and a detailed chronology of Boone's life, Frontiersman provides a fresh and accurate rendering of a man most people know only as a folk hero-and of the nation that has mythologized him for over two centuries.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This is the fourth biography of Boone since 1992—it's the most readable and balanced, and, because it benefits from those earlier studies, also the most complete and satisfying. Every biographer of Boone has to contend with the idolatry that grew up around the man when he was alive. But Brown, in his first book, steers clear of hero worship. He sees Boone whole, praising him where praise is warranted while scrupulously recording his failings—risking his family's lives, losing sons in battles with Indians, never succeeding as a land speculator. Yet Boone emerges again as a truly remarkable figure. Caught up in the Revolutionary War, the unending Indian warfare that followed and westward expansion, he managed to remain a loyal American while moving among the tribes whose ways he knew and, unlike so many others, respected. His legendary marksmanship and daring protected him and his followers for decades. Brown's Boone remains a larger-than-life figure: heroic without posturing, steadfast without foolishness, patriotic without Indian hatred. This is a book for those who seek an accurate, not pietistic, history of a way of life long past. 25 illus., 8 maps. (Sept.)
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Review

"Meredith Mason Brown's engaging and informative biography of Daniel Boone is a worthy addition to the shelf of books about the most famous of American pioneers. In these pages, Brown gives us not only a thoroughly researched account of Boone's life, but also a persuasive interpretation of his character--of the decency and pragmatism that defined the man. What emerges is a Boone cut down to life size, yet all the more a hero for his time and ours." --Stephen Aron, author of How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay

"There have been several biographies of Daniel Boone in recent years, but Frontiersman now sits atop the list as the most engaging, engrossing, and--not a minor matter--far and away the best written." -- Joseph J. Ellis, winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation

"Good biographies of Daniel Boone abound, the recent ones being Michael Lofaro's Daniel Boone: An American Life and Robert Morgan's Boone: A Biography, so Brown, a lawyer whose ancestors knew Boone quite well, sees no need to tread familiar biographical territory. Instead, he explores Boone's role in transforming the United States from a collection of English Colonies on the Atlantic seaboard to a young republic that stretched to the Rocky Mountains and how Boone illustrates the fluidity and conflicting loyalties of the frontier. As part of this exploration, Brown examines Boone's complex relationships with American Indians and looks at Boone's work as a surveyor, pronouncing him competent, and showing how conflicting land claims and surveys made it almost impossible for Boone to realize anything but trouble from the land he acquired in Kentucky. By taking a different approach to Boone and carefully basing his judgments on primary sources, Brown has produced a well-written book that nicely complements the earlier biographies. Thus it belongs in most academic and public libraries." --Stephen H. Peters, Library Journal

"So anyone speaking of Boone after all that's been expressed better have something new to say. Meredith Mason Brown does. If there's a word that captures the originality of this volume, it's sinewy."--Thomas T. Noland Jr., Louisville Courier-Journal

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 375 pages
• Publisher: Louisiana State University Press; First Edition edition (September 15, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0807133566
• ISBN-13: 978-0807133569
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #106,727 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Meredith Mason Brown, a graduate of Harvard College (where he majored in history) and Harvard Law School, is a lawyer and historian who lives in Stonington, Connecticut. For close to four decades, he practiced law in New York with Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, where he chaired and co-chaired the firm's mergers and acquistions group and its corporate group. He is an author or editor of many books and articles on legal topics, and of many articles on American history. His ancestors in Virginia and Kentucky knew Daniel Boone well.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A funny and entertaining book, and beautifully written, April 13, 2009

By 

Stephen Givens (Tokyo, Japan) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Frontiersman: Daniel Boone and the Making of America (Southern Biography Series) (Hardcover)

This is a funny and entertaining book, and beautifully written. It is packed with fascinating information about life on the frontier and in the backwoods-- what they ate, how they caught it, who they slept with and how they died. You will learn how they loaded and fired a musket, as well as why a dollar bill is called a "buck".

The author does a masterful job of setting a larger historical and geographic context. The British, the French, the Indians, the struggle for control of the Ohio Valley, why Detroit and Louisville became what they did, the Revolution and Boone's ambiguous role in it.

The book portrays the complicated relationship between whites and Indians realistically and without mawkish sentimentality. Boone was captured by the Shawnees and adopted by the chief Blackfish. He lived with the Shawnees for close to a year and had an Indian wife. At the same time two of Boone's sons were tortured, scalped and killed by the Indians, and Boone buried their remains himself where he found them.

Not least, the book gives you the sense of what this lost world must have been like, and what kind of man Daniel Boone probably was. You get a detailed picture of how much America changed, and how much was lost and gained, within the single lifetime of Daniel Boone. This is a large accomplishment.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Life On The Frontier, January 25, 2009

By 

Aucoot (Marion, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Frontiersman: Daniel Boone and the Making of America (Southern Biography Series) (Hardcover)

I've read a lot of American history but 'Frontiersman' gave me a better feel for life at the edge of the expanding American experience than any previous read. The ever-shifting relationships between hunters, gatherers and carpetbaggers of all stripes and ethnicities made simple survival paramount.... and still they pushed on. Brown captures both the romance and the grittiness of this and ties it all together in the life of its leader, the foremost of America's pioneers. Even the smells come through.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars "The Most Revolting of Sepulchers, A Dull Biography" (p. 265), March 16, 2011

By 

David Uri Ben Carmel (Israel) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Frontiersman: Daniel Boone and the Making of America (Southern Biography Series) (Hardcover)

To read the other reviews, one would think that this is one of the great books of our day. We are told that it is funny, fascinating, brings events to life ("even the smells", no less). It is none of these. I actually would not have taken the time to review this book but for the exaggeration in the prior reviews.

This is a serviceable biography, but nothing more. The chapter describing Kentucky's role in the Revolutionary War is very well presented and left me wanting to learn more, and the endnoting system is excellent. Beyond that, the chapters ranged from good-enough to dry. And there are too many of the latter.

Since so many of reviewers rave of the quality of the book's writing, a few specific examples to the contrary are in order: The writing is too often repetitive (e.g., the author criticizes Filson's authorized biography time after time, and tells us four times (or was it five or six...or seven) that Filson re-wrote Boone's words, to say nothing of having used "purple prose" (a favorite phrase)). And the author has an annoying habit of again and again using the word "If" not to present a possibility but as a means of comparison ("If Rebecca was lonely and feared for her life in northwestern North Carolina in 1771, her life cannot have been better in 1775..." (p.27); "But if Boone talked of hunting, he also prepared for his own end." (P.253); and numerous times between). This is an awkward technique that sounds smart when one is a university student, and it would not merit comment here if it occurred once or twice. But we are treated to this construction repeatedly, and a better editor would have suggested more mature phrasing. There are other examples, but the larger point is that in too many places this book is a chore to read.

For all of the above, I did not hate this book. It is what it is: a decent biography of Daniel Boone. But I have to believe that there are better works. Interestingly, "Frontiersman" identifies six Boone biographies published since 1990 as having been relied upon significantly (author/editors Belue, Faragher, Houston, Lofaro, Hammon and Morgan). Before a reader purchases this book, he might first want to consider these or other alternatives.