How Daniel Boone laid the foundation for Missouri and the American Frontier

DEFIANCE, Mo. (KMIZ)

His name is on significant landmarks around the Show-Me State and in Boone County, like the Daniel Boone Regional Library or the Daniel Boone Little League Fields.

But who was Daniel Boone?

While he wasn't from Missouri, he made the state his home for much of his life, helping to form it into what it is today.

Boone was born in Pennsylvania in November 1734 and went on to live in a number of states, from North Carolina to Kentucky, eventually laying roots on land that would later become Missouri.

"He lived about 22 years here in Missouri before he passed away," said Derek Van Booven, the lead interpreter at the Daniel Boone Home property. "A lot of Daniel's life is setting up the foundations for what his kids and for what other early Americans will end up doing in the creation of Missouri."

Daniel Boone arrived in 1799 on land known as Spanish Illinois or Upper Louisiana. It's now Defiance, Missouri, in St. Charles County. Boone was given a land grant of 850 acres and 600 acres for everyone who arrived with him. Boone never lived on his 850 acres, eventually selling it off in pieces to help settle debts and get his family on a firm financial footing.

"Daniel, some of his younger kids and his extended family network were some of the first Americans to arrive west of the Mississippi River in Spanish territory," Van Booven said.

The Boone family lived there from 1800 onward, with his son Nathaniel building the main home starting in 1807 and finishing it in 1817. It is a four-story limestone structure built in a prime location right near the Femme Osage Creek -- a mansion of sorts for the time period.

According to Van Booven, Boone was named a syndic and a commandant by the Spanish government for the commissioned land.

"He was, sort of the executive and judicial and military authority for everyone living in this area, which they called the Femme Osage District after the river," Van Booven said. "He was actually in charge of distributing land to people, who got what land, who was allowed to come into this specific area, and so it stays a very sort of Boone neighborhood for a long, long time."

Daniel stayed on his daughter Jemima Callaway's property in present-day Marthasville for some time, but later moved with Nathan and his family in his last few years of life.

Despite the home being known for Daniel Boone, and owned by his son Nathan, the two men were probably there the least, with the fur trade, land surveying and speculation being how the family made most of its wealth. The Boones also operated a salt works further up the river in Mid-Missouri, which later became known as the Boone's Lick, a name that has stood the test of time.

"A lot of the roads coming into this area still to this day run along the Femme Osage Creek," Van Booven said. "So even our modern transportation systems and highways can be traced back to these waterways and the old Native American roads that were here when the Boones were first coming into the area."

The Boone's Lick Trail from St. Charles to a salt lick in Howard County helped fuel the growth of several Mid-Missouri cities. The road passed through Fulton, helping to make it the Callaway County seat, and helping with Columbia's growth in the city's early years.

Boone's Lick Country, also known as Boonslick, is still known as a cultural region of Missouri, with the salt lick itself now a state historic site in Howard County.

The work at the lick and elsewhere would take the men away from the property for weeks or even months at a time.

Those holding down operations on the home property also helped produce a delicacy of the time, only available in the nearby woods, the sugar cone. Everything year-round was influenced by the seasons and the weather, and it was a massive team effort.

"This would be one of the few sort of sweet treats that you might get throughout the year. But it takes a lot of labor to produce this," Van Booven said. "Hours of collecting the sap, gathering it into large basins and then boiling it down, and that's an almost all-day process."

Collecting maple sugar and the production of sugar cones was a big staple of early life in Missouri as it was a natural sugar, you could barter with it and sometimes even get hard cash for it at the market. That exact process was what took the life of Daniel's wife, Rebecca, in 1813 when she caught pneumonia from the cold, according to Van Booven. Nathan's wife, Olive, moved into the matriarchal role over the property.

A mixed legacy

The Boones didn't build their wealth on their own -- they also owned slaves.

"We have a record of the Boones being slave holders from at least the late 1780s onwards, from tax records, from census data, and from their own writings," Van Booven said. "This was an exploitative relationship at the end of the day, even though it was smaller scale, even though they were living in closer proximity to the Boones."

The enslaved helped build the majority of the home's 2.5-foot-thick limestone walls. They did most of the cooking, they also processed the majority of the animal hides brought back from hunting trips and produced much of the clothing.

The highest confirmed number of slaves on the Boones' property was 12, which Van Booven said is sizable for Missouri at the time. The total would have been higher when factoring in the extended Boone family network in the region.

Much of their impact comes without a name attached to it, such as the work of Nathan's wife's enslaved body servant and possible midwife, only known to history as "Olive's Girl." Olive's Girl built the first chimney in the Boone home and raised 12 of Nathan and Olive's 14 children to adulthood, a rarity for the time period.

"This really high rate of survival and all the descendants that come through Nathan and Olive's line may very well be thanks to a woman who we were never given her actual name," Van Booven said. "We don't know what happened to her, but she left her fingerprints all across this house and in the very memories of the family."

Many of Nathan and Olive's children go on to marry into other families with last names significant to Missouri's history: Zumwalts and Van Bibbers. Other Boone grandchildren married into other familiar last names like Callaway, Randolph or Morgan. Panthea Grant Boone even married one of Missouri's first governors, Lilburn Boggs.

"Daniel has close to 70 grandkids. He goes on to have well over 300 great-grandchildren and thousands of modern descendants," Van Booven said.

Historical records also recount Derry Coburn, who assisted Boone on his hunting trips in later years as arthritis began to break down his physical abilities.

"Derry was someone who had been enslaved by the Boone family for quite some time, likely trafficked from Kentucky like most of their household," Van Booven said. "He would be doing things like taking care of the camp, helping to process the hides the Boones bring in, making sure basically everything was running smoothly and that was not something that he had a choice in."

According to Van Booven, Coburn lived long enough to eventually see himself freed by the Boone family in his late 60s. Another man named Sam is also believed to have made his way to freedom from the property of Daniel Morgan Boone, reportedly in the company of a woman, Van Booven said.

"We can't understand Daniel fully without talking about the enslaved people who helped make his lifestyle possible, but from whom he was also learning as well," Van Booven said. "It was an enslaved man at Boonesborough, the town named after Daniel, that helped teach Daniel how to make black powder, which, for somebody who made his living largely on a rifle, that was an indispensable skill that was handed down through an African American man."

It's unclear how the Boones treated their enslaved workers, but the family was invested in the system of slavery.

The legacy of Daniel Boone also crossed paths with the indigenous tribes of Missouri at the time.

"A lot of their wealth was also built off of land speculation and land surveys, which were only profitable if native peoples were removed from the areas those speculations and surveys were taking part in," Van Booven said.

Indigenous relations

The region was one of the centers for the Mississippian culture, and the city of Cahokia, now part of the modern-day St. Louis metro area, was larger than London at its height. Refugee native groups like the Shawnee, the Delaware, and the Cherokee were also coming into Missouri around the same time to escape American westward expansion.

"The impetus for the Spanish Empire to invite Daniel and other Americans like him into the area, is that they are meant to be a buffer between the Spanish settlements and the Osage or Wahzhazhe nation," Van Booven said.

The Osage was the dominant power of Missouri at the time Daniel arrived. The Spanish had just gone to war with the Osage nation a few years prior, in 1793. The Osage still had trade dominance on the waterways and powerful connections.

Van Booven described Boone's relationship with the Native Americans as mostly peaceful but tense at times. Boone's most common interactions with them revolved around poaching, which is also where many of the problems arise. The Boone family and other settlers would often cross into Native American lands to hunt.

"There's a particular account in the late 1810s where Nathan and a fellow of his were stopped while they were beaver hunting, and because it had been a repeat offense, they were actually stripped of everything and left to find their way home in the winter," Van Booven said.

That winter, the Osage had reached a crisis point in their food supply and had already warned the settlers about poaching on their lands.

These tribal tensions also bled into the War of 1812. While Daniel did not fight in the war, two of his adult sons and many of his grandchildren did, according to Van Booven. The state government later passed a law in the late 1830s that prohibited any native person from being within the stated boundaries of the state of Missouri, without the specific permission of an acting agent and without a pass. That law was not repealed until the late 20th century, Van Booven said.

"To this day, there is no native reservation within the state of Missouri. None of the nations that were exiled during the Boones' period have been able to return as nations to Missouri," Van Booven said.

Daniel Boone died less than one year before Missouri was ratified as a state; he was 85 years old. It's unclear what his cause of death was, but Van Booven said he struggled with arthritis and poor eyesight for many years before he died. Boone was also significantly older for a time period that was quite war-ridden and lacked access to quality medical care.

Even though Boone's life ended, his legacy was just beginning. The Boone family stayed affluent and important for years to come in Missouri's history.

"Two of his relatives were involved in the Missouri convention, which created our first constitution. His son, Nathan, would go on to be involved with surveying projects. His son, Daniel Morgan, helped survey the site for Jefferson City. They're involved in multiple treaty negotiations with the Osage Nation," Van Booven said.

Lasting legacy

Daniel Boone is also used as a symbol of sorts for the forward push of Manifest Destiny in the formative years of United States history.

Daniel was buried with his wife Rebecca in a Marthasville cemetery and unbothered for a little more than a decade, until graverobbers paid a visit in the mid-1830s. Following that, the Boone family commissioned a local blacksmith and stone carver to produce new Missouri limestone grave markers.

Those headstones can be found today in Fayette, Missouri, at the Central Museum of History on the Central Methodist University Campus. Joseph Morris, a summer intern and local history teacher, said the new stones marked the Marthasville gravesites from 1836 to 1845 until they were disturbed again.

"The State of Kentucky sent a few representatives of the Frankfort Cemetery Commission to disinter the Boone couple and move them to the Frankfort City Cemetery, where they currently reside today," Morris said.

This move by Kentucky was the start of a dispute that spanned more than 150 years with the state of Missouri.

"Both cemeteries claim him, both cemeteries say that they are the rightful resting place of Daniel Boone. So it's a great big question mark, we really don't know where Daniel Boone is," Morris said.

Though legal proceedings have calmed since the 1990s, questions linger over communication with the Boone family about the bodies being moved, according to Morris. The only family member known to be present at the exhuming of the bodies in 1845 was Rebecca Bryan Boone's nephew, Marion McKinney. McKinney later confirmed the limestone markings' authenticity to the Central Museum, according to Morris.

Morris said the bodies were not properly exhumed either, with many of the bones for both Daniel and Rebecca being left behind.

"We know that, of the remains that they took femurs, ribs, skulls and the bones that were intact and stable enough to be transported," Morris said.

Once brought to Kentucky, it took the state 17 years to erect a formal monument in the Frankfort Cemetery for Daniel and Rebecca, and a lot happened during that period.

"The Frankfort City Cemetery received some pretty harsh shelling and artillery bombing during a battle during the Civil War, and the grave sites at Frankfort were grave robbed throughout the Civil War as well," Morris said. "The Boone family has been grave robbed at least three times that we know of."

The Marthasville limestone markings arrived at the Central Museum of History 120 years ago after being donated by friends of the Boone family from the Defiance area.

"These stones represent not only the last tangible touchstone that we have to an American archetype, but they also represent an opening chapter into his postmortem life," Morris said.

Daniel and Rebecca's original tombstones have never been recovered.

It doesn't take a person long to find some place or something influenced by Daniel Boone and his family in Missouri. The names of at least five counties in Mid-Missouri alone are influenced by Boone and his family.