Daniel Boone, the Appalchians, and a certain kind of man

As I rode the airplane to Wisconsin this week I began reading Boone by Robert Morgan, a biography of Daniel Boone. The Fess Parker version of Boone on TV was the myth I grew up with, but he was also still talked about by my dad and the folks where my dad grew up in eastern Kentucky. My dad's hometown, Williamsburg, KY, is along the Cumberland River not far from Cumberland Gap. Daniel led many groups of settlers, including Abraham Lincoln's grandfather, across that Gap, and as a 'long hunter' he made many hunting and trapping expeditions into the area where my dad grew up. Boone most likely ran trap lines along Jellico Creek and Beck's Creek in same areas where my dad later trapped muskrat, raccoon, and the occasional mink.



Reading about Boone has been somewhat like reading about my father. Morgan comments at one point in the first chapter that 'there was almost a Franciscan humility and reverence for life in the young Boone, yet he was a hunter, a killer of wild animals.' That description is true of a great many hunters I have known but especially of my dad. Later Morgan comments 'the young Daniel often demonstrated a tendency to wander off without much concern for the worry his absence might cause others'. When on a hunt or out fishing, that was certainly true of my dad, and also of my brother, who would wander off for hours some times when we were in high school, wandering through the woods until my mother thought he must have been in an accident or something. Later, Morgan quotes Thoreau from Walden saying, "There is a period in the history of the individual, as of the race, when the hunters are 'the best of men', as the Algonquins called them". I think this concept of the life of an outdoorsman like Boone as the best life, the life most in tune with God's world, resonated very much with my dad.



The book makes it clear how in Boone's day when game was plentiful this could also be an economically viable life. I had read of how the Appalachian settlers had pursued a 'farm and forest' economy where hunting trapping and farming were both vital parts of their income. The book points out how, during a winter hunting/trapping trip that might last several months, Boone would return with hundreds of deer skins and beaver/muskrat/mink/otter pelts that would provide as much income as an entire year of business for a blacksmith or weaver. By my dad's time, however, that kind of harvest from the woods had long since ended. Nonetheless, that ideal of the woodsman providing vital income lived on though the reality had died out.



That vision of the woodsman as the best of men and the best provider for his family never resonated with me as it did with my brother. Yet I can relate to it and understand it from having seen it so vividly in my dad while growing up. In some ways my dad and all those who share that vision must feel like they were born into the world at the wrong time. Yet I think that very balanced view of the natural world, both revering it and harvesting it at the same time, has an important lesson in it that both the environmentalists (who revere without harvesting) and the industrialists (who harvest without revering) get wrong. So I am grateful for having seen that view of nature lived out before me as I grew up. It is a very Biblical point of view.



I am also grateful for the love of the woods though I am not a hunter. Boone's love for the Appalachians in particular is shared by most of the people who live there. Growing up I both loved and hated the place. I hated the poverty that was so rampant, the lack of education and the lack of basic facilities even. I was in junior high school before my grandfather's house got indoor plumbing, and going outside to the outhouse in the dead of winter was no fun! Yet there is something about the mountains, the forests, the woods that still draws me to the place. I am awed by the American West, its canyons and majestic peaks. But there something about the Appalachians that seems to be in my blood. It was in my dad's blood, too, and in Daniel Boone's from what I can tell. From the Smokies in the south to the bluegrass in the north, it is a special place. I can understand why the Cherokee viewed as almost sacred.