On June 7, 1769, frontiersman Daniel Boone first saw the forests and woodlands of present-day Kentucky. The Kentucky Historical Society celebrates June 7 as "Boone Day." Born on November 2, 1734, Daniel Boone spent his youth hunting and trapping on the North Carolina frontier. By the late 1760s, Boone had ventured into the little known Cumberland Gap region. Although the location of the opening in the Appalachian Mountains had been mapped over fifteen years earlier, the French and Indian War discouraged exploration and settlement of the Kentucky wilderness. Without the manpower or resources to protect the frontier, the British continued to prohibit western migration. Boone was among the many settlers who ignored the Crown's 1763 ban against traversing the Appalachian Mountains.
In 1775, Boone worked with Richard Henderson's Transylvania Company to establish a trail through the Cumberland Gap. With twenty-eight associates, he constructed Wilderness Road--soon the primary route to the West. Just months after its completion, Boone's wife and daughter traveled the new thoroughfare, becoming the first Anglo-American women to settle Kentucky.
During the Revolutionary War, Kentucky was organized as a Virginia county and Daniel Boone served as captain in the local militia. In Kentucky, settlers feared both Indians and redcoats. Captured by the Shawnee in 1778, Boone escaped in time to warn Boonsborough residents of an impending British and Indian attack.
Already legendary in the bluegrass state, Boone's fame was furthered by the 1784 publication of his Adventures. In the 1930s, native Kentuckian Mrs. William Price recalled the Daniel Boone stories of her childhood for a WPA interviewer :
If I were not to tell you of the stories handed down to us by our father of Daniel Boone, the most adventurous of our states heroes, you would justly feel that we had not been taught the true folklore of the Kentucky forest and the stories of the huntsman. It was John Finley, a fur trader of Pennsylvania that led Daniel Boone and his brother-in-law, John Stuart, into Kentucky by way of Cumberland Gap, that famous trail which was afterward known as the Wilderness Road, which was travelled by the pioneers, and made famous in the battle of the Wilderness, during the Civil War. When the Transylvania Company was organized [in] North Carolina for the purpose of establishing a colony in Kentucky, it was on the report of which Daniel Boone had carried back with him to his old home on the Yadkin River that Colonel Henderson decided to send a colony to Kentucky under the delegation of Daniel Boone to treat with the Cherokees Indians for a tract of land lying between the Cumberland and the Kentucky rivers."Mrs. William Price," Marlin, Texas,
Effie Cowan, interviewer, between 1936-1940.
American Life Histories, 1936-1940An inveterate pioneer, Boone continued to move West. After the Revolutionary War, he settled for a few years in Kanawha County, Virginia. In 1799, he followed his son to Missouri. Although a brave man and respected leader, the frontiersman failed to capitalize on his adventures. In his 70s, Boone made a final attempt to profit from his career as a trail blazer. He petitioned the U.S. Congress for land grants in recognition for his having "been greatly instrumental in opening the road to civilization in the immense territories now attached to the United States." Daniel Boone died in St. Charles, Missouri, in 1820.
