Thoughtful, well written, balanced look at Boone

books:

	• Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (An Owl Book) John Mack Faragher Holt Paperbacks, 1993 - 448 pages average customer review:based on 21 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Reputable bio of an American icon

What do most of us know about Daniel Boone? Boonesborough? Cumberland Gap? Maybe even the Wilderness Road? Then there are the trumped up tales for which the most part, are fictitious.
Dr. Faragher does justice to this American frontiersman. He digs, rummages and investigates into the volumes written about Boone and turns this into a respectable, readable biography.

Settling Kentucky was a decade's long gruesome endeavor. Many lives were lost. The English, French, Indians and soon to be Americans engaged in numerous grisly battles to claim this region. Boone was involved in many of these bloody clashes and maintained till his closing days that he only killed three Indians in his life.
Even after being held prisoner for four months by the Shawnees, the man respected the Native Americans more so than the land hungry speculators who came in shortly after he opened these same territories.

He was a man of the woods, always living on the edge of society. A restless individual, who as the years went by, despised many components of civilization due to the ramifications thereof.
Insightful.

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A true woodsman

This book provided very detailed information regarding Daniel Boone and his relatives. He's a legend worth learning about. You'll be able to separate the myths about him from the truth, according to the best available data.
Be ready for a long read.

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Daniel Boone

Daniel Boone lived from 1734 to 1820.

I knew almost nothing about Boone before reading this biography, and so cannot critique the book on its historical or biographical accuracy. My only complaint is that it is not longer. This seems an excellent book to begin a study of Daniel Boone. It has gotten me curious to read more.

And yes, I am one of those who grew up watching Fess Parker's TV show Daniel Boone.

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Thoughtful, well written, balanced look at Boone

The style of this work reminded somewhat of McCullough's (writer of a biography of John Adams)in that the writer seeks to understand Boone's motivations within the context of the times he lived in. Unlike Adams however much less in definitely known about Boone and the writer is forced to include many stories and legends that are needed to embelish the biography but also pose the risk of pulling Boone's image and reputation in undesirable or unfair directions. The problem of course is that there are hundreds of legends and hundreds of variations on those legends and the writer must pick and chose how much weight to give the views of his different sources. Overall he has done a good job and the reader is treated to a realistic view of life in Kentucky when buffaloes roamed, the plight of the Indians etc... Recommended

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Daniel Boone, The Real Man

Daniel Boone was a long hunter and it brought him to the hunting ground of Kentucky. He hunted the land several times before he brought his family to Boonesborough a fort on the Kentucky River. Faragher shows that Boone was a man of character. He loved the frontier and wanted to be a part of it. Boone wanted to live in peace with the Indians but at times he found them to be his enemy. The people he encouraged to come west began to crowd him and he began to look for a new frontier farther west. The Author was very factual about the man, Daniel Boone. By Ruth Thompson author of "The Bluegrass Dream" and "Natchez Above The River"

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History for 1993

In the first and most reliable biography of Daniel Boone in more than fifty years, award-winning historian Faragher brilliantly portrays America?s famous frontier hero. Drawing from popular narrative, the public record, scraps of documentation from Boone?s own hand, and a treasure of reminiscence gathered by nineteenth-century antiquarians, Faragher uses the methods of new social history to create a portrait of the man and the times he helped shape. Blending themes from a much vitalized Western and frontier history with the words and ideas of ordinary people, Faragher has produced a book that will stand as the definitive life of Daniel Boone for decades to come, and one that illuminates the frontier world of Boone like no other.

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