“As he jolted on his wagon seat, stopping and starting his horses, then stopping them again, Daniel Boone was not happy. For irksome hours day after day his impatience had grown, while he waited for the engineers far ahead to chop out of the Pennsylvania forest the bumpy road over which he was traveling . . . This bouncing about in a wagon was not what he had come here for. To be in the rear, choking on the dust of others, was no habit of his. It was an insult to his courage and to his prowess as a hunter . . .  The shooting was what young Daniel was impatient to be doing right now. The hunting expedition on which he found himself in those June and early July days of 1755 was different from any he had been on before. It was out after bigger game than all of the countless deer, buffalo, and bears he had shot. It was out after bigger game than he had ever dreamed of bagging . . . The game this time was an enemy stronghold.”

What a way to open a book! John Mason Brown assumes that we know something of Daniel Boone. Because, honestly, what American in 1952 didn’t know something about Daniel Boone? Today, it is probably a different story, but that doesn’t make the opening any less exciting. Presuming that we have a sense that Daniel Boone is a frontiersman and a hunter (the cover alone suggests that), Brown makes us think that this first scene is that of a great hunting expedition. And, it was. But not the kind we are thinking of. Instead, he is telling us about young Boone (not yet 21, we are told) traveling with the British regulars and General Braddock to take Fort Duquesne from the French in the French and Indian or Seven Years War. And, presuming once again that some of us may not know enough history to really be able to place that moment in history, he slips in this intrigue:

“Sometime on the 8th of July Daniel had to pull to one side of the road to make way for a wagon that was hurrying to the front. In it was a tall, brown-haired Virginian, aged twenty-three; the same Colonel George Washington who the year before had been compelled to surrender to the French at Fort Necessity. The journey for him in the bouncing wagon was sheer agony. For some weeks he had been a very ill man, the victim of a fever so burning that General Braddock had had to leave him behind at Little Meadows.”

Brown does a brilliant job of planting readers firmly in this moment of history, giving us many details to help make meaningful connections in our minds. I am not sure that I ever really considered that Daniel Boone and George Washington may have known each other, nor that they were comparably aged. A few chapters later, we learn that Daniel Boone is thought to be the grandfather of Kit Carson. And that makes sense, but it did surprise me!

“A man, according to him, needed three things to be happy – ‘a good gun, a good horse, and a good wife.’ Daniel already had a gun and a horse (both good). Within a year he had a wife (also good).” 

The true story of Daniel Boone’s life reads like a storybook. It is no wonder that it has been retold so many times and in so many ways. When we started buying “lots” of Landmark Books (to get the ones we needed), Daniel Boone was nearly always included. There are so many copies of this book out there. Now that I have read it, I can see why. It was printed early in the series (#21) and was reprinted by Sterling Point Books, and is available on audio.

If you have a young reader who falls in love with this story, let me recommend Stephen Meader’s Down the Big River and Gary Paulsen’s Tucket books as follow-ups.