Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer - Hardcover

Faragher, John Mack

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805016031 ISBN 13: 9780805016031

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co, 1992

Synopsis

Boone scouted the trans-Appalachian West for settlement, surveyed and helped build the Wilderness Road, and led the settlers' struggle against the Shawnee defenders of Kentucky. Drawing from popular narrative, public record, documentation from Boone's own hand, and recollection gathered by 19th-century antiquarians, the author employs the methods of the new social history to produce a portrait that defines Daniel Boone and the times he helped shape. Includes 16 pages of black and white illustrations. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

About this title

Review:

The legend of the American frontier is largely the legend of a single individual, Daniel Boone, who looms over our folklore like a giant. Boone figures in other traditions as well: Goethe held him up as the model of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "natural man," and Lord Byron devoted several stanzas of his epic poem Don Juan to the frontiersman, calling Boone "happiest of mortals any where." But folklore is not history, and we are fortunate to have a reliable and factual life of Boone through the considerable efforts of John Mack Faragher. The contradictory admirer of Indians who participated in their destruction, the slaveholder who cherished liberty, the devoted family man who prized solitude and would disappear into the woods for years at a time--the real Boone is far more interesting than the mythical image, and in this book we finally catch sight of him.

About the Author:

John Mack Faragher is the Arthur Unobskey Professor of American History at Yale University. He is the author of Women and Men on the Overland Trail, for which he received the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, and the acclaimed Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie.

About this edition

• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0805016031
• ISBN 13: 9780805016031
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 429