Sherry Chandler

The isolate, white male hunter

In The Land Before Her. Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860 (UNC Press, 1984), Annette Kolodny analyzes the mythology of Daniel Boone thus:

In the end, of course, the nation took to its heart the heroic mythology of the wilderness hunter . . . For, in fantasy as in life, if the wilderness was to be possessed by the cultivators, then it could be no place for the hunters; and if the hunters triumphed, then however appealing their gardens, the cultivators would have to be barred (or removed). And so, while historically the wilderness was given over, frontier by frontier, to the cultivators, in fantasy it forever remained the domain of the male hunter-adventurer (albeit stripped of his commercial and settlement associations). Daniel Boone emerged from his original incarnation as a brooding, meditative protector of settlements to become Boone the isolate, white male hunter, companion to the Indian. [p. 67]

It is just this mythological interface of forest and garden that Robert Morgan explores in his popular Boone. A Biography (Algonquin Books, 2009). Except that where Kolodny presents the forest as feminine and erotic to the men who made the myth, Morgan sees it as feminine and maternal: great mother wilderness opposed to father commerce. (I’ll grant some overlap here between the erotic and the maternal; the overarching point is the forest as feminine object of desire.)

Morgan’s book has been advertised as a portrait of the real Boone, but I found it more a portrait of Boone the larger-than-life hero. John Mack Faragher tries to sort fact from legend in his Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer, and Meredith Mason Brown, in Frontiersman: Daniel Boone and the Making of America, places Boone in the social history of his time. Both of these are books of standard biography, but I found Morgan’s book more a work of creative nonfiction or maybe even historical criticism. Morgan is willing to enter Boone’s mind, to tell you what the great man thought and felt. He concludes that the meeting between Boone and John James Audubon did take place, because it was right that the great woodsman and the great naturalist should have met. The fact of their physical presence in the same place at the same time is irrelevant.

Morgan really admires Boone; I would go so far as to say that he loves Boone and the lost forest of his myth. Identifying with Boone is not necessarily a bad thing. I find myself doing it. And Morgan is a poet, after all, an excellent poet, but probably more interested in the spirit than the fact of the matter, the truth of the heart. In a biography, what I perceived as the lack of objectivity made me uncomfortable. I can draw my own conclusions, build my own what-if castles.

The fact is, whatever else it may have been, Boone’s was always a commercial enterprise. Even the indigenous nations had turned commercial hunters by the time Boone enters the scene.

I argued with Morgan a lot, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I argue with a lot of books that I find valuable. I was uncomfortable enough with this book that I put it down for several weeks. I found him too willing to accept the positive and argue away the negative. Or maybe it was just my bitter feminist bent that doubted, maybe the truth of my heart is found in a different place.

When I came back to it recently I was more receptive. Possibly I was in a different emotional and intellectual place — I’ve found that I have to be “ready” to read some books — or perhaps it was because I’d reached the point in Boone’s life where settlement catches up with him and his footprint is a little more life sized.

Which is to say, exactly that point of his original incarnation as a brooding, meditative protector of settlements as opposed to Boone the isolate, white male hunter, the point where he talks to Filson, keeps a tavern, commands a militia.

Toward the end of the biography, when Boone is in Missouri acting as a sort of don on his Spanish land grant, continuing to find ways to explore and hunt, my skepticism returned. This is where arthritic aging Boone makes it all the way out to the Rockies, where he meets Audubon, where legend once again overlaps fact like the shingled land claims in Kentucky, and where Morgan believes and I doubt.

All that said, Boone is a beautifully written book, well researched, and with a comprehensive bibliography and set of notes. Morgan is excellent writing about the Shawnee, portraying them as neither savage nor noble. His picture of Boone’s life as a captive and Blackfish’s adoptive son is wonderful in giving us the texture of that life, i’s attraction for a man of Daniel Boone’s predelictions. Morgan is also very good in his portrait of Rebecca Boone. I give him high marks for that.

And I see in my sidebar that I have pulled a quote from William Stafford:

Poverty plus confidence equals
pioneers. We never doubted.

’sang

Digging ginseng for sale to China being one of the few ways Appalachian residents have of making a little cash money off the land, I was interested to learn that Daniel Boone was one of the first Kentuckians to try to exploit this particular natural resource.

Here, from Frontiersman. Daniel Boone and the Making of America (LSU Press, 2008), is what Meredith Mason Brown has to say about the ginseng trade in the late 17^th century:

Boone’s ginseng efforts [in 1787-1788] reflected that Kentucky, though on America’s western frontier, was part of a global economy. The Chinese treasured ginseng, which was believed to increase mental activity and potency—perhaps because its forked root, to one possessed of a strong imagination, looked vaguely like a two-legged human (its Chinese name, jen-shen, means “man-shaped”). Ginseng roots that were old and wrinkled were particularly esteemed because the plant’s long life was thought to be transferable to its consumer, For many years wild ginseng root had been exported from North America, much of it ultimately for the Chinese market, ever since a French Jesuit priest reported his discovery of ginseng in the woods near Montreal. The total recorded amount of ginseng shipped from Britain’s continental American colonies in 1770 was over thirty-seven tons. In February 1784 the Empress of China, the first American ship to trade with China after the Treaty of Paris was signed, sailed from New York harbor with almost thirty tons of ginseng in her cargo. The backers of the voyage, including the American merchant Robert Morris, made a fortune, selling to the Chinese primarily ginseng from western Virginia and Pennsylvania and selling to the Americans Chinese tea, silk, cotton, and porcelain. After the ship returned to New York in May 1785, the success of the venture was widely reported in the American press. The Chinese had paid five dollars a pound for the ginseng that made up most of the ship’s cargo. [p. 213]

One thing I just noticed in keying this text in is how far Brown goes to distance himself from any belief in sympathetic magic: “was believed.” “looked vaguely,” “to one possessed of a strong imagination.”

The other thing to notice is that it was then and has been since the merchants who make the fortune from such trade. The supplier takes the risks and gets little. Boone’s efforts, like all of his efforts to strike it rich after the Revolution, didn’t pay out. Though he shipped enough root in the spring of 1788 to yield the modern equivalent of half a million dollars, his keelboat was swamped when it ran into a log-jam and his ginseng was damaged. And then, it turned out that he wasn’t the only frontiersman shipping ’sang. By the time his sons got their goods to Philadelphia, the market was glutted and prices had plummeted.

Cat with long hunter

Boone hunted turkeys as food, not to sell, and he also occasionally killed panthers and wolves. Panther skin was not readily marketable but had ceremonial value.  When Boone and other Boonesborough leaders parleyed with their Indian besiegers during the siege of Boonesborough in 1778, the Indians spread a panther skin on a log for the negotiators to sit on.

–Meredith Mason Brown, Frontiersman. Daniel Boone and the Making of America. LSU Press, 2008

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I am off to Wildacres for the week. Though I will have wi-fi, I will also have good friends and Blue Ridge scenery so posting will be light to non-existent.