Daniel Boone

Daniel Boone was born November 2, 1734, and spent his early years learning the edges of the Thirteen Colonies before they had edges at all. In 1775 he blazed the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky and founded Boonesborough, one of the first English-speaking settlements west of the Appalachians. During the Revolutionary War he served as a militia officer fighting British-allied tribes; in 1778 the Shawnee captured him and their chief adopted him as "Sheltowee" - Big Turtle - but after months he escaped and returned to the struggle. He was elected three times to the Virginia General Assembly and fought at Blue Licks in 1782, one of the Revolution's last battles. After the war he worked as surveyor and merchant, but Kentucky land speculation buried him in debt. He resettled in Missouri in 1799 and spent his final two decades tangled in legal problems over land claims, dying September 26, 1820. An account published in 1784 had already made him famous across America and Europe, and after death the tall tales grew taller until the myth overshadowed the man - the first folk hero of a country that needed one.