Daniel Boone

Daniel Boone had already spent years hunting and exploring the Appalachian backcountry when a Virginia land company hired him in 1775 to blaze a route through the Cumberland Gap into the Kentucky country beyond. The path his crew of axmen cut became the Wilderness Road, and over the following decades some 200,000 settlers followed it west, founding Boonesborough and the first wave of American communities beyond the mountains. Boone fought Shawnee and other Native defenders of that same land repeatedly during the Revolutionary War years, was captured and briefly adopted into a Shawnee family in 1778, and escaped to warn Boonesborough of an impending attack.

Fame caught Boone early and never let go, mostly thanks to a 1784 biography by John Filson that embellished his exploits into something closer to folklore — a frontiersman who never lost a fight, never doubted himself, and single-handedly tamed a wilderness that in reality took thousands of settlers and considerable violence against Native nations to occupy. Boone himself profited little from the land he had opened: faulty surveys and legal disputes stripped him of most of the Kentucky property he had claimed, and by the 1780s he was effectively land-poor despite having made Kentucky possible for everyone else.

Boone moved to Missouri in 1799, then under Spanish control, partly to escape Kentucky's land litigation and partly, by his own account, simply to keep moving west. He died there in 1820 at 85, already a folk hero in popular almanacs and stage plays during his own lifetime — a status historians still have to work to separate from the documented record.