Heading West!

 Druy, Bob, & Tom Clavin.  Blood and Treasure: Daniel Boone and the Fight for America's First

         Frontier.  New York: St. Martin's Press, 2021.  ISBN: 9781250247131

Daniel Boone - now there is a name that is legendary!  What do you know about him?  How much of what you know is fact versus how much is fiction?  Born in Pennsylvania, trekked to North Carolina with his father,  he is known for trailblazing a path to Kentucky and settling that state while fighting Native Americans during the American Revolution.  But those facts do not tell the whole story.

 

Bob Drury and Tom Clavin provide an interesting biography of Daniel Boone in relation to the crossing the Appalachian Mountains, settling Kentucky, and the course of the American Revolution on the far western frontier.  They divide his life into four parts - The Frontier, The Explorers, The Settlers, and The Conquest.  The Frontier covers Boone's early life, his move to North  Carolina, his involvement with the Braddock disaster during the French and Indian War, his marriage, and his first ventures across the mountains.  The Explorers includes the Pontiac Indian War, the Royal Proclamation regarding settlers, Boone and party finding the Cumberland Gap, and early experiences trapping and exploring Kentucky.  The Settlers discusses Lord Dunmore's War, Logan's Lament, Boone and company moving across the mountains and the early settling of Kentucky with the kidnapping of his daughter, Jemina Boone, and two Callawy girls amidst rounds of assaults on white settlements.  The Conquest opens with the capture of Daniel Boone by the Shawnee, his escape to warn settlers of the British and Indians' forthcoming attack, his service as legislator in the Virginia House of Burgesses, his role in the Blue Lick disaster, and his later life.

In Blood and Treasure, Bob Drury and Tom Clavin provide the reader a life of Daniel Boone that is sympathetic without being a hero-worshiping hack job.  Boone is shown in context of events rather than being an isolated life.  The reader finishes Blood and Treasure more knowledgeable of the settling of the "West" and the surrounding events then in many other Boone biographies.