Copyright 1999: Eva M. Thury and Margaret K. Devinney. All rights reserved. Draft only. For use by Drexel University students taking LIT 335 only.

In this section, we look at stories about Daniel Boone, the North American pioneer. Boone, who was born in 1734, played a significant role in the exploration and settlement of Kentucky in particular and the U. S. western frontier in general. It is a complicated task to turn the lens of mythology on our own heroes, and especially on a historical figure like Boone. Since we are inside the culture, it is hard if not impossible for us to study it without introducing our own biases into the analysis. It is not clear whether modern-day citizens of the United States (or "Americans," as we call ourselves) would acknowledge that we considered Boone a hero or admired his accomplishments. To some extent, people's response to Boone will depend on their political views: what they think represent the United States' accomplishments, and what directions they think their country's future actions should take. Nonetheless, by many accounts of the development of Americans' sense of themselves, the story of Daniel Boone has had a significant effect on how the citizens of the United States explain their actions or how they define themselves in relation to their country.

Another difficulty with Daniel Boone is that he is a historical figure. As a result, some may believe that the story of his life consists of a determinate set of facts, and therefore is not mythology. In fact, such views represent the attitude toward mythology that we have argued against in this book. In Chapter I, we pointed out that according to the most common definition of the word used today, myth means "a false story." We, however, have suggested that regardless of their fidelity to historical detail, myths are actually true stories, because they embody the principles and values of individuals and societies. When we are looking at a story in the remote past, like the adventures of Gilgamesh, or the capture of Troy, it is difficult to determine which aspects of the story rely on historical facts, and which represent cultural truths that have transformed idiosyncratic historical details into more universally applicable stories.

Let us consider Gilgamesh, who with his companion Enkidu conquered Humbaba, the king of the cedar forest (see p. xx). Certainly, the story of this act must have stirred the citizens of Uruk in somewhat the same way as American settlers were once inspired by tales of Daniel Boone's settlement of Kentucky. Although the adventures of Gilgamesh are shrouded in antiquity, they too are based on historical fact. Ancient documents tell us that Gilgamesh was the king of Uruk in Mesopotamia in around 2700 BC. However, as Boone's story is so much closer in time to our own, we have many more details about the circumstances of his life. We know that the conquest of the Native Americans who lived in Kentucky before its colonization by Boone and his companions took place over many years, and consisted of a series of encounters, some honorable, and some treacherous, on each side. In contrast, the conquest of Humbaba is presented as a single expedition in which heroic action belonged exclusively to Gilgamesh and Enkidu. The manifold details that were involved in the ancient story have disappeared from our sight, and leaving behind an account of the universal forces of nature and culture that clashed in the cedar forest. (See Levi-Strauss on Gilgamesh for a more extensive analysis of the myth in this light.)

Here is another example. It may well be the case that a historical figure named Odysseus never existed, although Homer's portrait of him is quite successful at representing him as an actual person (see p. xx). Scholars who study The Odyssey point out that its hero is an individual with particular features, starting from the old hunting scar on his leg which he acquired while he was proving himself as man on his first boar hunt. Odysseus displays a host of characteristics we usually associate with individuals: he cries and laughs; he experiences fear and undergoes spiritual and psychological growth. Nonetheless, Homer's portrait of this hero is probably a composite that embodies aspects of many Greek leaders in the Bronze Age. However, the individual historical details that underlie Odysseus' struggles are too remote from us to compete with his "life story" as a hero.

In contrast, we have abundant historical evidence that Daniel Boone did exist, as well as volumes of testimony to his characteristics as a particular individual. His life consisted of many activities a day, and we have records that attest to hundreds of things he did and said. From this material we know that Boone was a poor reader, in his youth went on some wild forays in pursuit of women and drink, and encountered a host of legal difficulties in business ventures. There are accounts of Boone's courtship of his wife, as well as details of his marriage and stories about how he brought up the nine of his children who lived beyond infancy. In addition, Daniel Boone grew up surrounded by Native Americans and there are records of a wide range of his encounters with them, from his childhood onwards, including his adoption into the Shawnee tribe as a grown man. In a sense we are too close to Boone. We can see many aspects of him as a man. Our own perspectives will of course shape what we notice and what we make of it. That is, it remains for us to determine which, if any, of these characteristics were relevant to his status as hero.

In examining and evaluating the myth of Daniel Boone, we are confronted with a vast supply of material on his life. Lyman Copeland Draper, a nineteenth century historian, roamed the west in a wide-ranging search for historical sources documenting the trans-Appalachian migration, including stories, letters, account books and family records. Draper amassed 486 volumes which include the most important sources for information relating to the life of Daniel Boone. The Draper Manuscript Collection at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin includes a five-volume life of Boone, as well as extensive interviews with Boone's relatives, and documents and interviews relating to Boone and to Kentucky.

However, investigation of Boone's life does not stop there. John Bakeless, a notable twentieth-century biographer of Boone, provides a four-page list of acknowledgments which catalogues the materials he consulted in the effort to represent Boone's life accurately. Bakeless reports working at the Library of Congress, the library of the New York Bar Association, the libraries of many local historical societies. At Bakeless' request, libraries and records offices across the country tracked down previously unknown newspaper stories, maps, and legal records, including Boone's marriage certificate. To represent the Native American aspect of Boone's story, Bakeless studied the records of the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology, and consulted an expert on the Shawnee language.

In fact, over time, different accounts of Boone's life have emphasized some of the information in these sources, and neglected some of it. The information chosen was not randomly selected; the facts of Boone's life were shaped into patterns that had meaning for the storytellers and their audiences. Based on these patterns, there arose the stories we as a society know best about Daniel Boone. These stories survive because they once seemed to define the nature of the American West. As a result, the story of Boone gives us a chance to consider myths in the making. We can examine the historical detail of the life of the hero, as well as the stories that were told about him. Of course, looking at all the stories relating to Boone is much too big a task for us here. We will limit ourselves to the discussion of one account of his life that was influential in the development of the United States as we know it, John Filson's The Discovery, Settlement And present State of Kentucke: -- To which is added -- I. The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon. Filson's narrative, written in 1784, purported to be an autobiography of Boone. This account by Filson has been the focus of extensive analysis by Richard Slotkin in Regeneration through Violence: the Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860, from which we provide extensive excerpts below.

Slotkin's book is a study of the stories European-Americans told about themselves as they settled in the New World. He analyzes a variety of different materials, including sermons and tracts written by religious groups, accounts of the war with the Indians, and personal narratives describing captivity by the Indians. He finds the Filson account of Boone's life a highly significant component of the myth that shaped the American frontier, and thus determined the character of the United States of America as a nation. In this sense, the Boone of Filson's narrative can be compared with Cyrus and Romulus, the heroes described by Otto Rank who undertook heroic quests to establish a nation (q.v.). To demonstrate the strength of Slotkin's argument, we have compared his analysis with excerpts from what we view as an influential version of Boone's life written for young children by Irwin Shapiro in 1956. Where Slotkin speaks of the “immortality of Filson’s vision” this Little Golden Book version of Boone’s life says, “The days of Daniel Boone are long since gone, [but] there are folks who say that from the woods [there still] comes a voice calling, ‘Come along, Daniel! Come along, Daniel! Come along, come along, Daniel Boone’ And the same folks say that if you listen hard enough, you will hear your name called too.” Our comparison suggests that a modern version of the Daniel Boone story, written for children over 150 years after Filson's account, reproduces the fundamental elements of his narrative of Daniel Boone's life, as outlined by Slotkin. This shows how influential Filson's version of Daniel Boone's life was: for Shapiro, as for Filson, the moral of the story of Daniel Boone is the same: we as Americans find ourselves by exploring nature. To this day, this value colors Americans' sense of who they are and what constitutes the nature of their quest, and their country's mission.

As we noted in the opening paragraph of this introduction, the meaning of myth of Daniel Boone for Americans will depend in part on their beliefs about the history and the destiny of the United States. For those whose values emphasize sensitivity to the culture and claims of Native Americans, the expansion of the frontier will represent the story of imperialistic self-aggrandizement at the expense of a native people. For those who emphasize the role of the United States as a great nation which exerts a positive force throughout the world, the life of Daniel Boone will represent just one chapter in a story which embodies human striving and human progress. In all probability, many readers will see aspects of both perspectives in the story of Daniel Boone.

Before we examine Filson's narrative in more detail, it will be helpful to consider two broader aspects of the myth of Daniel Boone: the relationship of the hero to Native Americans, and the role of women in the conquest of the frontier.

Excerpt

by Richard Slotkin

Introduction

In 1784 John Filson, a schoolmaster turned surveyor and land speculator, returned from two years in Kentucky. In Wilmington, the metropolis of his home state of Delaware, he published the Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke, an elaborate real-estate promotion brochure designed to sell farm lands in the Dark and Bloody Ground to easterners and Europeans. Sales resistance was likely to be high. The Revolution had just ended, and the bloody Indian wars which had decimated the Kentucky settlements were still sputtering out in petty raids and secret murders. Thus Filson faced the classic problem of writers about the frontier since Underhill's time: how to portray the promise of the frontier without destroying his own credibility by glossing over the obviously perilous realities of the pioneer's situation.

Filson attempted to persuade his audience by composing, as an appendix to that book, a literary dramatization of a hero's immersion in the elemental violence of the wilderness and his consequent emergence as the founder of a nascent imperial republic. In "The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon" Filson created a character who was to become the archetypal hero of the American frontier, copied by imitators and plagiarists and appearing innumerable times under other names and in other guises-in literature, the popular arts, and folklore-as the man who made the wilderness safe for democracy. The Boone narrative, in fact, constituted the first nationally viable statement of a myth of the frontier.

Myth, as I would define it, is a narrative formulation of a culture's world view and self-concept, which draws both on the historical experience of that culture and on sources of feeling, fear, and aspiration (individual and universal/archetypal) deep in the human subconscious and which can be shown to function in that culture as a prescription for historical action and for value judgment. A myth is a narrative which concentrates in a single, dramatized experience the whole history of a people in their land. The myth-hero embodies or defends the values of his culture in a struggle against the forces which threaten to destroy the people and lay waste the land. Myth grows out of the timeless desire of men to know and be reconciled to their true relationship to the gods or elemental powers that set in motion the forces of history and rule the world of nature. In the case of the American colonies, whose people were not native to the soil, this desire took the form of a yearning to prove that they truly belonged to their place, that their bringing of Christian civilization to the wilderness represented the fulfillment of their own destiny as children of Jehovah (rather than a perversion of that destiny) and of the land's destiny as the creation of God. (This yearning, common to all the colonies, was most clearly and intensely articulated by the Puritans.)

Filson's narrative, then, to qualify as myth, would have to draw together all the significant strands of thought and belief about the frontier that had been developed in the historical experience of the colonies, concentrate those experiences in the tale of a single hero, and present that hero's career in such a way that his audience could believe in and identify with him. Moreover, the tale would have to be constructed in such a way that it could grow along with the culture whose values it espoused, changing and adjusting to match changes in the evolution of that culture. Otherwise the tale would lose that essential quality of seeming to be drawn from the original sources of cultural experience. Ultimately, Filson's tale would have to dramatize convincingly the interdependence of Boone's destiny, the historical mission of the American people, and the destiny appointed for the wilderness by natural law and divine Providence. The evidence suggests that the Boone legend first put before the public by Filson did, in fact, fulfill these requirements.

The adoption by the national reading public of the myth of Daniel Boone implied their acceptance of a certain myth-scenario of interaction between themselves, their land, and the dark races belonging to their land. In Filson's legend and in the myth that grew out of it, the roles and characters of hunter and husbandman are ambiguously equated through the association of the hero's career of seminomadic wandering, violence, and opportunity-seeking with the agrarian imagery and morality expounded by Jefferson and Crevecoeur. Implicit in this ambiguity is a scenario of national progress in which the land and its resources are to be "cultivated" through their quick exploitation and given their "improved" value by speculation and in which the Indian is to be redeemed through the expropriation of his land, physical removal to desert and inhospitable regions, or (if necessary) extermination.

Filson's Boone Narrative

"The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon" is the key to the immortality of Filson's vision of the West and of the fame of his hero, Daniel Boone. This chapter of Kentucke proved far more popular than the rest of the book. It was lifted out of its context and reprinted as a separate pamphlet in anthologies of Indian war narratives and captivity narratives, and in popular literary periodicals in both Europe and the United States. It became the vehicle by which Filson's version of the frontier myth was transmitted to the literary giants of the American Renaissance and to the European Romantics. The narrative crystallizes everything that Filson had to say about the West, echoing his vision of its utopian future and paralleling the narrative movement into the wilderness that Kentucke as a whole follows. The Boone narrative does not state Filson's ideas explicitly (this is left for the "Conclusion"); the ideas are implicit within the drama of its events. This structuring of the book permitted Filson to concentrate on the depiction of Boone's character and allowed later writers to change the context in which the narrative was set, in accordance with changing interpretations of the frontier. For this reason, and because Boone himself was the sort of figure who continued to generate popular legends, the Boone narrative finally proved pregnant of more meanings than its author could have intended.

The Boone narrative, though ostensibly Boone's own narration of his adventures, is actually Filson's careful reworking of Boone's statements and of the legends that Filson had heard about Boone from his fellow frontiersmen. The narrative is a literary myth, artfully contrived to appeal to men concerned with literature; it is not folk legend. Filson selects incidents for portrayal and breaks into the strict chronology of events in order to establish in his reader's mind a sense of the rhythm of Boone's experience and to emphasize certain key images and symbols that define the meaning of Boone's experience. Boone's "Adventures" consist of a series of initiations, a series of progressive immersions that take him deeper into the wilderness. These initiations awaken Boone's sense of his own identity, provide him with a natural moral philosophy, and give him progressively deeper insights into the nature of the wilderness. Each immersion is followed by a return to civilization, where Boone can apply his growing wisdom to the ordering of his community, and by a momentary interlude of meditation and contemplation, in which Boone can review his experience, interpret it, and formulate the wisdom gained from it. As a result of these rhythmic cycles of immersion and emergence, he grows to become the commanding genius of his people, their hero-chief, and the man fit to realize Kentucky's destiny.

Filson casts Boone's adventures as a personal narrative, developed by the Puritans as a literary form of witness to an experience of God's grace. "The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon" combines the conventions of form and substance of three types of personal narratives-the conversion narrative of the type written by Jonathan Edwards in his "Personal Narrative"; the narrative of personal triumph in battle, as written by Mason and Church; and the captivity narrative, the account of ordeals suffered at the hands of the wilderness's human children, the Indians. But Filson revolutionizes the Puritan forms by substituting nature or the wilderness for Jehovah as his symbol of deity. The impression conveyed by the Puritan personal narrative is that of a tightly closed, systematic, intimate universe, bound together by explicitly articulated, organic bonds between God and man-a universe manageable in size but containing all important things. The wilderness is the realm of chaos, impinging on the ordered cosmos but somehow outside the world protected by God. Filson, however, substitutes all of the wilderness landscape, its ambiguous and even hellish elements as well as its pure and paradisiacal qualities (its wigwams as well as its settlements), for the Word of God in the symbolic universe of Boone's personal narrative. He thus expands the boundaries of that universe to include the wild continent as an integral and vital part of the divine plan for the regeneration of man. At the same time, by retaining the individual experience as the central focus and source of perspective in his narrative, he preserves the sense of organic unity and order that the Puritan form possessed.

The Boone narrative begins with an account of and an apology for the hero's motivation for leaving his family and moving to Kentucky. The account is carefully calculated to overcome the objections made by opponents of emigration from Increase Mather to Buffon. If a man is civilized, why would he leave society for the savage solitude of the forest? And if he is not civilized, how can he be set up as a hero for civilized men to emulate? Boone's justification is largely pragmatic: the final results of his act are good, whatever his motives. He creates a new society through his emigration, and he does not destroy the existing society by leaving it. He returns in the end to his family. Thus the trinity of values on which Anglo-American society is based-social progress, piety, and the family-is invoked at the outset as the basic standard for judging Boone's actions. But Filson reinforces this defense by having Boone present himself as a man nurtured in the values of the eighteenth century, so that he can further justify his emigration by appealing to the "divinities" of natural religion-natural law, human reason (and the desire for knowledge), and divine Providence:

Curiosity is natural to the soul of man, and interesting objects have a powerful influence on our affections. Let these influencing powers actuate, by the permission or disposal of Providence, from selfish or social views, yet in time the mysterious will of heaven is unfolded, and we behold our own conduct, from whatever motives excited, operating to answer the important designs of heaven. Thus we behold Kentucke, lately an howling wilderness, . . . rising from obscurity to shine with splendor, equal to any other of the stars of the American hemisphere.l3

This passage provides a major insight into the pattern of experience that is rhythmically repeated throughout the Boone narrative and the whole of Kentucke. Boone enters the wilderness in a state of innocence and naiveté, unsure of his own motivations and of the ultimate outcome of his adventures, but trusting in the strength of his own character and the goodness of nature to create ultimate good out of present confusion. This trusting immersion in the wilderness ultimately results in the attainment of self-knowledge and an understanding of the design of God-a state of awareness which Boone attains when he is able to stand above his experience, view it from outside, and exercise his reason upon it in order to reduce it to its essential order.

This pattern of experience is followed in the first crucial section of the narrative, in which Boone is initiated into a knowledge of the wilderness of Kentucky. With four friends, he enters Kentucky in 1769, after a fatiguing journey and "uncomfortable weather as a prelibation of our future suffering." The naive hero is exposed to a series of experiences that give him direct knowledge of both the terror and the beauty of Kentucky. His arrival is a pastoral idyll, in which the wilderness appears to be the bucolic retreat of a divine country squire. Even the buffalo are compared to domesticated cattle. Behind the picture of peace there is a bare suggestion that the violence of man may disrupt the natural harmony: "The buffaloes were more frequent than I have seen cattle in the settlements, browzing on the leaves of the cane, or croping [sic] the herbage on those extensive plains, fearless, because ignorant, of the violence of man." 14 But Boone himself is as ignorant of the threat as are the buffalo.

Boone's description of the wilderness has a peculiarly neoclassic flavor about it, with nature appearing as an artful landscape designer and master gardener, the creator of the well-wrought forest. At another level nature is Boone's hostess, welcoming him into a formal garden planted with an eye toward elegance of form and color, with animals provided apparently for the amusement of the guests:

We . . . passed through a great forest, on [sic] which stood myriads of trees, some gay with blossoms, others rich with fruits. Nature was here a series of wonders and a fund of delight. Here she displayed her ingenuity and industry in a variety of fruits and flowers, beautifully coloured, elegantly shaped, and charmingly flavoured; and we were diverted with innumerable animals presenting themselves perpetually to our view.15

In the eyes of Filson's Boone, the beauty of wild nature lies in the extent to which it imitates cultivated nature and implies that civilization is itself the crown of natural evolution.

Into this idyllic and civil landscape the violence of man intrudes, catching the innocents unaware. Boone and one companion are captured, their other friends driven off, their camp and furs plundered. The two men manage to escape their captors and return to camp, where they find Boone's brother Squire arrived before them. This coincidence provides Boone with an opportunity for one of those philosophical asides in which he finds the essential meaning of his experience and derives from that meaning a practical wisdom. In this case he discovers that friendship and human society are balm for the hurts inflicted by human enmity and evil: "[Our] meeting so fortunately in the wilderness made us reciprocally sensible of the utmost satisfaction. So much does friendship triumph over misfortune . . . and substitute . . . happiness in [its] room."16 Soon his companion is killed by Indians, and Boone and Squire are left alone in the wilderness. Yet he can still maintain his cheerfulness and confidence, indulge in civilized conversation, and articulate a stoic philosophy of asceticism and self-control:

Thus situated, many hundred of miles from our families in the howling wilderness, I believe few would have enjoyed the happiness we experienced. I often observed to my brother. You see now how little nature requires to be satisfied. Felicity . . . is rather found in our own breasts than in the enjoyment of external things . . . it requires but a little philosophy to make a man happy.... This consists in a full resignation to the Will of Providence, and a resigned soul finds pleasure in a path strewed with briars and thorns.17

Boone's initiation into knowledge of the wilderness cannot be accomplished, however, while even one civilized amenity remains to him. He must be stripped to the barest essentials for survival, in order to meet nature directly and without encumbrances. Thus, when their supplies run low, Squire returns to the settlement, leaving Boone with no trace of civilized life except his rifle-"without bread, salt or sugar, without company of my fellow creatures or even a horse or dog." The dark elements in the wilderness have all but subdued the light. Death has nearly triumphed over life, loneliness has succeeded companionship, and melancholy passions have all but toppled the controlling power of "philosophy and fortitude."18 But at this point the narrative takes a sudden turn, and Boone's melancholy is converted into a vision of the beauty and order of nature, which strengthens his spirit and gives him the determination to settle permanently in Kentucky.

Boone's melancholy takes the form of a morbid introspection, a dwelling on the insecurity of his position and his separation from his wife and family. This melancholy nearly destroys him and is overcome only when the beauty of the natural landscape forces him to turn his eyes outward. In the Puritan narrative of life in the wilderness, salvation depended on the opposite process. The Puritan needed the sense of insecurity to make vivid his dependence on God, and he pursued a course of rigorous introspection precisely in order to develop that sense of personal weakness. Where the protagonist of the Puritan captivity, yearning for God's felt presence, hearkened to a voice from the church or from his Bible, Filson's hero hears the voice of God calling him deeper into the wilderness. Filson's God makes himself apparent through the landscape, and the Word of God becomes apparent to the reader as the landscape alters Boone's attitude gradually from gloom to light and peace.

The Boone Narrative as Myth

a) Boone as hunter-husbandman

Part of Filson's success can be attributed to his conscious artistry in altering and ordering his raw materials for literary presentation. He departed in a number of ways from the facts of Boone's career in order to fit him into the necessary mold of hunter-husbandman-philosophe. Boone was fifty years old when Filson met him, the patriarch of a large and still-expanding family and the possessor of a great reputation among his fellow frontiersmen. To characterize him as a novice receiving his initiation into the ways of the wilderness, Filson had to suppress the facts that Boone was in his late thirties when his "Adventures" began, that he had long been familiar with the conditions of life in the wilderness, and that he had already developed the mental attitude and physical prowess needed for survival. But Filson was also fortunate in that the real Boone's character and activities contributed to the legend's credibility-over the next forty years of Boone's (and the legend's) life-in large and even small ways.37 By an uncanny coincidence, Boone's personal history embodied the symbolic patterns of Voltaire's and Rousseau's imagery: Boone was born of good Quaker parents in Pennsylvania and was formally adopted by the good savages of the Shawnee nation. His personal philosophy of life apparently combined the Indian love of hunting, personal freedom, and combat with the Quaker's scrupulous morality, disapproval of cruelty and waste and gentleness toward the helpless. It was part of the legend that developed early in his life that he killed neither Indian nor animal, except when compelled by necessity, and that he took no scalps.

Filson's portrayal of Boone as a hunter-husbandman is accurate as far as it goes, but it falls short of depicting Boone's real attitude toward farming. Although Boone did stake out and work a subsistence farm in the manner of the physiocratic yeoman, he never did fit into the yeoman's mold. He was primarily a hunter and trapper, who cleared only as much of his land as was needed for kitchen crops and a little salable tobacco to keep his family fed during his long absences.

b) Rebecca Boone as a character in the myth

The most significant of the legends that had gathered around Boone before Filson met him centers on his love of the wilderness and his sense of identification with the land. This legend constitutes an eighteenth-century Kentucky equivalent of the primitive divine king and sacred marriage myths, in which a tribal hero meets and cohabits or weds with an avatar of the feminine nature spirit, thus insuring renewed life to both tribe and land.

The legend concerns Boone's courtship of his wife, Rebecca Bryan. He was fire-hunting one dark night, stalking the forest with a blazing torch whose light was supposed to attract a deer to his stand. The deer would have to be killed by a shot aimed between the two points of reflected firelight that would mark its eyes, because the animal would be otherwise invisible. After a long wait Boone saw the double gleam and prepared to fire, but some intuition stayed him. He moved toward the gleams, pushed aside the brush, and discovered Rebecca, who turned and fled home. According to the legend, she told her family she had been scared by "a painter," or panther, and soon afterward Daniel came courting.44

The fire-hunt legend was well known to the Boones themselves, and they often repeated it to their children (who refused to believe it). Yet this legend and others which show Boone as the wild, lonely hunter were neglected or omitted by Filson. (Later, western Writers like Timothy Flint and Romantics like Fenimore Cooper rediscovered them and worked them into the literary versions of the Boone myth.) Filson wished to retain the idea that Boone's hunting trips initiated him into a deep intimacy with the powers of nature and that the health of his spirit was essential to the realization of nature's plan for the Kentucky land. Being committed to the philosophy and pastoral imagery of physiocracy, he would have wished to deny that the wild, man-shy spirit of the deer symbolized nature in Kentucky or that the symbolic hero of the American frontier had the lonely, restless spirit of the hunting panther, rather than the virtuous placidity of the yeoman.

Filson made other important alterations of the facts in his new images of Boone, Rebecca, and the wilderness. Rebecca underwent the most considerable change. In life a strong and intelligent woman, she stood almost as tall as Daniel Boone, who himself was over the average in height. It was she who held their large family together while he vanished on long hunts, which might last a season or a couple of years. When he was taken by the Shawnee and presumed dead, she packed up her family and moved east to Carolina by herself through Indian country at the height of the Indian wars. When he grew old and was attacked by rheumatism, she accompanied him on hunts, helped him kill game, and was accounted a fair shot.

Filson all but eliminates Rebecca Boone from his account. She appears only as "my wife," never by name, and no attention is paid to her considerable accomplishments as provider and protector. She first appears in Boone's meditation on his loneliness during the first exploration of Kentucky; in this passage the thought of his family far away in the settlement inclines him to melancholy, and he has to put aside the sentiment. Next, she appears as the "first white woman" to stand beside the Kentucky river, a symbol of the establishment of civilization on the river and of the settlement's weakness and exposure to the savagery of the wilderness. She does not appear again until after Boone has returned from his Shawnee captivity and beaten off the Indian attack on Boonesborough. Then the reader learns that she returned to Carolina, heartbroken over the thought of his death. For Filson, Rebecca is simply a generalized "amiable Spouse," subject to the conventional weaknesses of the sentimental heroine, suffering deprivations and heartbreak without acquiring (in the narrative) a personality of her own.

Even in Filson's account, Boone's wife remains a symbol of the spirit of nature. But where the folk myth emphasizes her wildness and freedom and shyness of man, Filson's myth emphasizes her civilized qualities, her conformity to the conventional idea of woman in Anglo-American society - a morally strong but physically weak creature in need of a hero's protection, a victim suffering dutifully under physical discomfort and the pangs of womanly sentiment, so completely identified with her role as wife and mother that she has no identity independent of her social role.

c) Daniel Boone as the archetypal hero

The archetypal hero begins in a state of innocence or unawareness of the powers that are latent in himself and in his environment. Filson's Boone narrative fits the archetype rather closely. In the first cycle of adventures, Boone begins by dwelling on a peaceful farm. Curiosity and the spirit of adventure lure him willingly to the threshold of Kentucky. After preliminary struggles with the Indians and his own melancholy fears, he descends into the western wilderness, which (as we have seen) is archetypal of the unconscious hidden mind, the kingdom of dreams, death's Valhalla. He submits to the ordeal of captivity and battle with the Indian presence and is initiated in the wilderness life by means of hunting the deer. He tastes the land's sweetness and returns with his vision to the world of his past, there to quicken the frontiersmen's ambition and aspiration. Next, in the captivity cycle of his adventures, he leaves the peaceful island of Boonesborough to hunt deer and salt, is carried over the threshold of the Indians' world in defeat and captivity, is initiated and adopted into the tribe, resists a series of temptations that test his character, and returns with the new wisdom to become the war chief of his people. His return is at once a resurrection (his wife has thought him dead) and a transformation (he has become a hero and chief). In a final test, he goes forth to battle, is plunged into misery and despair by his son's death, but returns to the land of death to retrieve and appropriately inter his son's body. He emerges with renewed strength-a superhuman strength from which his land and people will draw sustenance and which they will employ to achieve peace and to establish their settlements in the land (apotheosis).

Equal in importance to its resemblance to the monomyth is the resemblance in structure between the Boone myth and the other myths that had developed out of the particular anxieties and experiences of the American colonists and had found expression in the conversion narratives, the captivity narratives, and the discovery-emigration narratives. The Boone narrative draws on the traditional beliefs, evocative symbols, images, and narrative structures of these earlier myth forms, reconciling their contradictions of value and inconsistency of subject matter. At the same time, Filson alters their character by absorbing them into the myth of the hunter and warrior. The narrative of Boone's adventures recapitulates the experiences portrayed in the several narrative genres of Colonial literature about the frontier: Boone is sequentially the emigrant, the explorer, the captive, the convert, the hunter, and the hero. In each case, the protagonist of the narrative lives in an initial state of innocence on a (literal or figurative) island of sheltered light, walled in from the dark power of the sea or the wilderness, unaware of the powers within himself and in the God of this world. This passive state of happiness is disrupted, in the convert s case, by his discovery of the corruption in his native island (England); in the captive's' case, by Indians who symbolize the sinful potential of his own soul and who drag the protagonist across the threshold and into the wilderness. In all four myth forms, the journey leads to the discovery of a dark land and the illumination of the dark land in the protagonist's own soul. For Boone, as for the captive, the emigrant, and the convert, it is necessary that he abandon family ties to embark on the quest. The trial of his ability to bear and justify this disruption of family-as well as the deaths of other relatives and companions during the adventure-is the most important test in his ordeal. In each case the protagonist achieves a return from the land of his quest, bearing a message or a gift that will enlighten and redeem his people.

Conclusion

Although Filson's Boone has the Romantics' emotional rapport with nature, trust in intuitive wisdom, and ability to feel strong passions, his greatest need is for order. Thus he modulates his passions to the controllable level of sentiments by the exercise of reason. Although moved by the "ruins . . . of a world" which greet him in his first attempt to cross the mountains, Boone, like the Hudson River school painter, is more moved by the sunlit vistas from his sweet spring on the mountaintop. Great passions are necessary to his realization of his full potential for human feeling; but in order for him to attain heroic stature, he must restrain his passion, forget private grief, and attend to the public good.

For Filson, Boone's solitary hunting trips are, not ends in themselves, but means to a social end. Solitude has value in the Boone narrative only insofar as it contributes to the ultimate creation of a better society; hunting is noble only insofar as it clears the way for husbandry. Sentiments are of use only because they lead to self-knowledge and consequently to a higher quality of self-restraint. Here Filson echoes the Puritan insistence on self-restraint and attention to duty and opposes the Romantic tendency to luxuriate in strong passions, in images of darkness and chaos, in the symbolic toppling of ancient dynasties, worlds, and gods. The lesson of the frontier experience was that the maintenance of civilization against the powers of the wilderness was possible only through complete knowledge of one's own capacity for good and evil and of the wilderness's inherent threats and promises. Too much preoccupation with darkness would have weakened Boone's ability to resist the terrors of his environment and construct a viable social order. He had to retain a positive vision of a perfected civilization as his final goal. In this concern Filson's Boone prefigures that peculiar sense of social place, mission, and obligation that informs the characters of Cooper's Leatherstocking tales and the works of Emerson, Whitman, and their generation. Even in the darker writers of the American Renaissance, like Hawthorne and Melville, who did not put forward positive visions of an ideal America, the sense of obligation to society or civilization appears as a feeling of spiritual malaise or guilt for having pursued art into an antisocial wilderness of darkness, chaos, and blood.

Like Crevecoeur's study of American character, Filson's Boone narrative offers a kind of composite portrait, containing many possible hero types-some themselves expressing antithetical values-within a single figure. Filson's Boone, however, is more hunter, warrior, and wanderer than he is farmer, while Crevecoeur's farmer enters Boone's world only by compulsion. Filson's hero is also more clearly personalized than Crevecoeur's posturing farmer; he is, after all, based on a living man. Nevertheless, as of 1784 Europe and America have each accumulated a gallery of stock figures and melded them into a composite image of an American hero, though each took a very different path in refining that composite into a single archetype. For the Americans it was the hunter who proved the most appealing figure. Writers working in the frontier vein gradually brought that figure forward and explored and described the depths of significances of his mind and heart.

Boone's personal myth continued to grow, as the old hunter continued to pursue his seasonal hunting and exploring expeditions until he was well into his eighties. Filson ceased to control his version of the myth not long after he had written it, and the literary version of the myth embarked on a long career of modification by European rationalists and Romantics and by American spokesmen for the northeastern, southern, and western sections of the new nation. Several distinct but related variations resulted, the peculiar emphasis and direction of each determined by the cultural needs and prejudices of the different sections and intellectual periods. Through them all, two major themes persisted: the Filsonian vision of the frontier hero as an untutored republican-gentleman-philosophe and the folk vision of Boone as the mighty hunter, child of the wilderness, and exemplar of values derived from sources outside Anglo-American civilization.