Boone, Daniel

1734–1820

American Frontiersman

Pictured as a buckskin-clad, rifle-toting, backwoods hunter, Daniel Boone has represented in American culture the settlement of the West and an archetypal American masculinity. During the late eighteenth century and the nineteenth century, Boone was transformed into a legendary embodiment of the masculine ideals of a new nation experiencing westward expansion, the market revolution, and urbanization.

Born in Pennsylvania, Boone received a rudimentary education and spent his youth on the North Carolina frontier. He married Rebecca Bryan in 1756 but rejected a settled life of farming to take up hunting and exploring in the Appalachian Mountains of Kentucky. Interested in opening the West to settlement, he helped construct a road across the Cumberland Gap in 1775 and established the Kentucky settlement of Boonesborough. He became involved in several unsuccessful land dealings, losing land in Kentucky for failure to meet preemption requirements and land in Missouri for failure to cultivate it. He fought in the American Revolution as a local militia captain, though primarily to defend his community against Native Americans. The aging Boone, already famed as a frontiersman, reacquired a portion of his land holdings from Congress six years before his death.

Despite Boone's missteps, biographers made him a symbol of heroic American manhood, embodying and reconciling several contradictory masculine ideals in post-Revolutionary and antebellum American culture. On one level, he exemplified republican manhood in choosing a life of simple virtue over what one nineteenth-century biographer called the “luxury and effeminacy” of an increasingly commercialized America (Herman, 436). At the same time, however, he became a model of urban, entrepreneurial, and individualistic [Page 62]middle-class manhood, resembling the ideal conveyed by contemporary writers of advice and success manuals for young men. Hunting in an unrestrained natural setting that symbolized the aggressively competitive urban marketplace, Boone mastered his environment and achieved self-made success, while also maintaining the internalized moral self-control that Americans called “character.”

Although the Boone ideal included a “wild” masculinity associated with Native American men and the American natural environment (particularly athleticism and hunting prowess), it also reflected most nineteenth-century Americans' association of manhood with whiteness. Called a “Romulus of Saxon blood” by one antebellum biographer (Herman, 450), the mythic Boone was an agent of Manifest Destiny (the idea that the expansion of the United States and its Euro-American institutions was divinely ordained), bringing commerce, cities, and white “civilization” to the frontier. Far from producing the savagery that white Americans perceived in Native Americans, hunting instilled in the idealized Boone the mental discipline, enterprise, aggression, and perseverance characteristic of middle-class manhood. Indeed, the fictional Boone was a gentle man influenced by the domestic affection and romantic love of the ideal Victorian husband.

The mythic Boone embodied the sporting aspirations of many middle-class men in the urbanizing, industrializing society of the nineteenth century. Concerned that nonmanual labor feminized men, many middle-class Americans saw in Boone an exemplar of the outdoor activities they deemed essential to male reinvigoration. Furthermore, Boone's idealized exploits in a violent world unsuitable for his wife reassured middle-class men that their competitive struggle in the commercial marketplace was a masculinizing rather than feminizing endeavor. During the late nineteenth century, these dimensions of the Boone ideal became increasingly important as the frontier disappeared and growing numbers of white middle-class American men embraced the “strenuous life.”

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