Daniel Boone: The Pioneer of Kentucky

About the book

John S. C. Abbott sets out to replace the image of Boone as merely a rough backwoodsman with a portrait of courage joined to personal gentleness. Exploration, settlement, conflict, and family life become episodes in that exemplary design. The narrative belongs to a patriotic series, and its account of westward expansion carries settler assumptions and hostile descriptions of Indigenous peoples that should not be accepted as neutral history. Readers can follow the dramatic storytelling while asking whose experiences receive sympathy and whose are reduced to obstacles. The book is not Boone's own memoir. Its significance includes the way a later generation fashioned a national figure from a complicated frontier past, making character and adventure serve a larger story about the country's beginnings.

• Frontier memory
• Heroic biography
• Settlement and conflict

Why read it

For critical reading of the narrative techniques through which a frontier life became a national legend.

English biography by John S. C. Abbott · 1872