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Everyone Needs To Know The Real Story of Daniel Boone · The Matt Walsh Show

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: The Shawnee Warriors were standing in two parallel lines about
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: five feet apart. They were armed with clubs and tomahawks.
• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Daniel Boone's task was very simple. He had to run
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: between the two lines, ducking and dodging as best he could,
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: and absorbing whatever blows landed on him. If he fell,
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: the consequences were clear. He would be beaten to death
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: on the spot. If he made it to the end
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: still standing, the reward was a little less clear.
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: He might be allowed to live, or he might not.
• 0:28
  Speaker 2: Boone did not hesitate.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: He weaved his way through the gauntlet, making it from
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: one end to the other quickly. While sustaining relatively minor injuries,
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: the Shawnee chief, a man called Blackfish, was impressed, so
• 0:39
  Speaker 1: impressed that he decided to let Daniel Boone live, at
• 0:42
  Speaker 1: least for now. He would take Boone as a prisoner and,
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: in keeping with the custom of many Indian tribes, give
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: him a new name, Sheltowee, which means big turtle. It
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: was February of 1778. Daniel Boone, the pioneer, trailblazer, and
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: eventual folk hero of the American frontier, had been captured
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: by the Shawnee while out collecting salt. In those days,
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: and in that part of the country still in its infancy,
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: getting salt was not as simple as running to the
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: grocery store. And salt itself was not merely a seasoning
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: to make your food taste better. It was a vital
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: survival necessity. Salt was how you preserve meat. And back
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: in Boonesboro, the settlement that Boone founded, they were running
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: dangerously low. So Boone set out with a group of
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: 30 men to the Salt Springs, about 60 miles away.
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: It was an arduous task, which would take several weeks
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: to complete. And it would leave the settlement, one of
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: only a scattered few in the wilderness of Kentucky, vulnerable
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: to attack. But they had no choice. The Shawnee found
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: Boone and his men while they were out near the
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  Speaker 1: Salt Spring. Boone's group was badly outnumbered, had no hope
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: of resistance. Even worse news was that a number of
• 1:48
  Speaker 1: Shawnee wanted to execute all the prisoners outright. And there
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: was news somehow even worse than that. This same Shawnee
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: party was on its way to Boonesboro, which, with Boone
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: and his company captured, was almost entirely defenseless. Boone's wife
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: and children, and the wives and children of many of
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  Speaker 1: the rest of the men, were sitting ducks. But Daniel
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: Boone was crafty when he needed to be. He convinced
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: Blackfish that if they left the settlement alone for the winter,
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: he would personally accompany the Shawnee back to the settlement
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: in the spring and persuade the residents to surrender peacefully.
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: Boone was apparently convincing enough in this ruse that some
• 2:23
  Speaker 1: of his own men thought he had turned traitor, a
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: fact that down the line would lead to a court martial.
• 2:28
  Speaker 2: For now, Blackfish bought Boone's.
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: Argument and he was persuaded to let all the men
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: live as prisoners, but first they, or at least Boone,
• 2:35
  Speaker 1: would have to run and survive the gauntlet, which he did.
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: Boone remained in captivity for several months, long enough that
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: the people back in Boonesboro, to include his wife and children,
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: gave him up for dead.
• 2:46
  Speaker 2: But things changed in June of 1778.
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: Boone learned that Blackfish was planning to assemble a war
• 2:51
  Speaker 1: party and descend on Boonesboro. He had apparently abandoned his
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: plans for diplomacy. Boone knew that he had to make
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: a move and make it fast, so he made a
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: run for it. He escaped the Shawnee village and fled
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: into the wilderness. He would have to make it home
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: in time to warn them of the coming attack, but
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: there was a problem. Home was 160 miles away, 160
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  Speaker 1: miles through the wilderness, a distance that Boone would have
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: to travel mostly on foot after his horse collapsed and
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: died early in the journey.
• 3:18
  Speaker 2: Now it's hard for our.
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: Modern minds to appreciate a distance like 160 miles. And
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: these days we might drive that length in an afternoon
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: when you factor in a Starbucks stop and maybe a
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: bathroom break, it should take about three hours. But 160
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  Speaker 1: miles on foot through the forest with Indian warriors hot
• 3:34
  Speaker 1: on your trail and an army of natives on their
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: way to murder your entire family is a different matter entirely.
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  Speaker 1: And this must all be done with almost no provisions. Indeed,
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: we know that Boone carried very little. Whatever supplies he
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: had could not have amounted to much. One account suggests
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: that during the entire journey, he ate only a single
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: meal and a small piece of dried venison. Whether that
• 3:55
  Speaker 1: account is perfectly accurate or not, the broader reality is
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: not a doubt. Boone was not undertaking a carefully supplied expedition.
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: He was fleeing for his life and for the lives
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  Speaker 1: of everybody in the settlement. He had to get there,
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: and he had to get there fast. An extraordinary journey
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: lay before him. It was not his first. It would
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: not be his last. June means summer is officially here.
• 4:16
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• 4:20
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• 4:22
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• 4:24
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• 5:22
  Speaker 1: Daniel Boone was born in Pennsylvania in 1734, more than
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  Speaker 1: four decades before the United States would even exist as
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  Speaker 1: a country. The frontier of the British colonies lay far
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  Speaker 1: to the east of where most Americans live today. Beyond
• 5:35
  Speaker 1: it stretched millions of acres of forest, mountains, rivers, and
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  Speaker 1: wilderness that Europeans had barely explored. Much of the continent
• 5:42
  Speaker 1: remained a blank space on the map. From an early age,
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  Speaker 1: he seemed drawn to it. Boone learned to hunt as
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  Speaker 1: a boy and quickly developed a reputation for spending long
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: stretches of time alone in the woods. While most people
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: viewed the wilderness as an obstacle, something to be conquered
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  Speaker 1: or endured, Boone was at home there. He could navigate
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: by landmarks that other people barely noticed, track animals through
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  Speaker 1: dense forest, survive with remarkably little. These skills were not
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: unique on the frontier. Many men possessed them. What was
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: unusual was Boone's appetite for the unknown. Most settlers wanted
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: to build a life at the edge of civilization. Boone
• 6:17
  Speaker 1: always seemed more interested in what lay beyond.
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: The edge, out in the wild.
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: In 1773, Boone, by now married with eight children, led
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: a party of roughly 50 people into the wilds of
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: the Kentucky Territory. He had first heard the stories Two
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: decades earlier, tales of a land thick with game, rich
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: and wild and all but untouched by European hands. Now
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  Speaker 1: he meant to go out and see it for himself
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  Speaker 1: and to bring his family with him to establish what
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: would be one of the first Anglo-American settlements in Kentucky.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: But the frontier rarely let such ambitions pass without exacting
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: a price. And as so often happened out there, tragedy
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  Speaker 1: struck before they ever arrived.
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: Along the way, a.
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  Speaker 1: Small detachment sent back to retrieve supplies lost its way
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  Speaker 1: trying to rejoin Boone's main party. Somewhere in that confusion,
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: the group was ambushed by Indian warriors. Among them was
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: Boone's own son. 16-year-old James was tortured, butchered, and left
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: mutilated and dead alongside five others. Daniel Boone came upon
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: the grisly scene later that same day. The whole company,
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  Speaker 1: traumatized by what they saw and gutted by the loss,
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  Speaker 1: resolved to return, turn back. Boone urged them to press on.
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  Speaker 1: He still wanted to go, but it was no use.
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  Speaker 1: Two years later, in 1775, Boone tried again. He went
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  Speaker 1: back into the very wilderness that had swallowed his son's life,
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: a place that had.
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  Speaker 2: Every reason to haunt him and every reason to keep
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  Speaker 2: him away.
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  Speaker 1: This time he led a band of about 30 heavily
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  Speaker 1: armed men with axes, and together they hacked and cut
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: their way through the Cumberland Gap, carving open a path
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  Speaker 1: to the land west of the Appalachian Mountains. Yet even then,
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: the wilderness was not finished testing him. Only days before
• 7:55
  Speaker 1: reaching their destination, Boone's party was ambushed Once more, two
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: of his men were killed. But this time, they held
• 8:00
  Speaker 1: their ground, fought off the attack, and pressed on. In
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: April of that year, on the banks of the Kentucky River,
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  Speaker 1: Daniel Boone raised a small fort, a refuge for his family.
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  Speaker 2: And several others. He called it Boonesboro.
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  Speaker 1: Now, of course, life in a little fortress in the wilderness,
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  Speaker 1: ringed by hostile natives, was anything but easy. The fort
• 8:16
  Speaker 1: was under near-constant threat. And about a year after it
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  Speaker 1: was built, the Boone family suffered yet another brush with tragedy.
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  Speaker 1: Boone's 13-year-old daughter, Jemima Bronson, had gone canoeing with two
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  Speaker 1: friends within sight of the walls when they were spotted
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  Speaker 1: by an Indian raiding party, a mixed band of Shawnee
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  Speaker 1: and Cherokee warriors.
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  Speaker 2: The girls were pulled from the boat and carried off.
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  Speaker 1: Their captors meant to take them north, all the way
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  Speaker 1: across the Ohio and deep into Shawnee territory. When Daniel
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  Speaker 1: Boone learned that his daughter had been taken, he gathered
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  Speaker 1: a small group of men and.
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  Speaker 2: Set off after them. Fortunately, the girls had the presence.
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  Speaker 1: Of mind to leave a trail, snapping branches, dropping torn
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  Speaker 1: scraps of fabric along the way. a thread for Boone
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  Speaker 1: to follow through the trees. Three days later, the rescue
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  Speaker 1: party crept up on the Indians as they ate breakfast
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  Speaker 1: over a campfire. The men opened fire, cutting down several
• 9:01
  Speaker 1: of the captors. The rest scattered into the wilderness. The
• 9:04
  Speaker 1: girls were recovered alive and mostly unharmed. As the story goes,
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: one of the warriors killed that morning was a son
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  Speaker 1: of Chief Blackfish, the very same chief who would take
• 9:14
  Speaker 1: Boone himself prisoner three years later. So as Boone tore
• 9:17
  Speaker 1: through the forest in 1778, it was not the first desperate.
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  Speaker 2: Dash he had made to save his family.
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  Speaker 1: He completed that journey 160 miles, the bulk of it
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  Speaker 1: on foot, in just five days. He reached Boonesboro and
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  Speaker 1: the family and neighbors who had long since given him
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  Speaker 1: up for dead in September. Blackfish and the Shawnee had
• 9:37
  Speaker 1: not yet arrived. There was still time to ready the
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: fort for battle. And so that's exactly what they set
• 9:42
  Speaker 1: about doing. A few days later, the enemy force appeared.
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: Boone counted more than 400 Indians, mostly Shawnee, a scattering
• 9:49
  Speaker 1: of Cherokees and Delawares, and at least 12 French-Canadian militiamen
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  Speaker 1: fighting on behalf of the British. Against this formidable host,
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: Boone had, at the very most, 60 men, maybe as
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: few as 40. He had just run for his life
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: across 160 miles of wilderness. Now he'd have to stand
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: and fight for it and for the lives of everybody
• 10:07
  Speaker 1: inside the fort. The siege dragged on for some 10 days.
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  Speaker 1: The Shawnee Tried every tactic they could devise. At one point,
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: they even attempted to tunnel beneath the walls of the fort.
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: But after a week and a half of fighting, they
• 10:19
  Speaker 1: abandoned the effort and withdrew. Boone's men had suffered only
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: five or six casualties. The fort had held and the
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: settlement survived. Having saved Boonesboro, Daniel Boone would go on
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: to claim nearly 100,000 acres of Kentucky land. And yet
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: before the century was out, by 1798, he would lose
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  Speaker 1: every last acre of it. Boone was a brilliant pioneer,
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: but he was no businessman. The fine print of land
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: titles and deeds was simply beyond him or beneath his interest.
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  Speaker 1: He was a man who would always rather be out
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: in the woods instead of bent over paperwork at the
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: county clerk's office. Boone, who had fought in one of
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: the final battles of the Revolutionary War, later tried to
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: volunteer for the War of 1812, only to be turned
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: away on the entirely reasonable grounds that he was 78
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: years old. But Daniel Boone was not a man who
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: took such hints. Five years later, not long after the
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: death of his wife, At the age of 82, he
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: set out on what would prove to be his last
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: great expedition into the wild. He pushed deep into uncharted
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: territory along the Missouri River. The journey stretched on for
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: six months and it carried with it One final brush
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: with hostile Indians, Boone was forced to lie hidden in
• 11:28
  Speaker 1: the brush for 20 days to elude.
• 11:30
  Speaker 2: A band of Osage warriors.
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: He made it home alive, sick, spent, exhausted, but hauling
• 11:36
  Speaker 1: with him a heavy load of valuable furs. In 1820,
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: Daniel Boone's remarkable life came at last to its end.
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: He died in Missouri and was buried there beside his
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: wife on the family farm. 25 years later, a delegation
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  Speaker 1: from Kentucky with the blessing of Boone's family exhumed his
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: grave and carried him to be reburied in Frankfort. And
• 11:57
  Speaker 1: from that act sprang a mystery that endures to this day.
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: Locals in Missouri have long insisted that the Kentucky delegation
• 12:03
  Speaker 1: dug up the wrong body. More than a century afterward,
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: a forensic analysis suggested they may have been right, that
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: the remains reburied in Kentucky might have belonged to a
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: black man, in all likelihood one of the family's slaves.
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: The riddle was never solved. which is why even now
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: you can visit the official grave of Daniel Boone in
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: Missouri and his other official grave in Kentucky. Both states
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: maintain with equal conviction that they hold the final resting.
• 12:25
  Speaker 2: Place of Daniel Boone.
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: Perhaps a fitting epilogue for a man who, more than
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: anything else in his life, could never quite stay in
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: one place for very long. Once upon a time, there
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: was a country, not just a country, but a big one,
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: an empire. And in that empire, there was an upper
• 12:50
  Speaker 1: middle class family where two boys were raised by their mother,
• 12:54
  Speaker 1: loved books, Uncle Tom's cabin, and the Bible. Their father
• 12:58
  Speaker 1: admired the country's leaders, were patriotic and happy. Both sons
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: went to universities where they were radicalized. One of the
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: brothers read a book and convinced him to try to
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: shoot the country's leader.
• 13:09
  Speaker 2: He was hanged. The other brother read the same books,
• 13:13
  Speaker 2: but decided to lead a movement. First they came for
• 13:16
  Speaker 2: the universities, and no one seemed to care. Then they
• 13:19
  Speaker 2: took over the unions, and again, no one seemed to care.
• 13:21
  Speaker 2: Then they created their own.
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: Media organizations and took over the cities. And again, most
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: people just ignored it. Change, after all, was something they
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: could believe in.
• 13:30
  Speaker 2: Until it was too late. Sound familiar? This is the
• 13:34
  Speaker 2: real history of communism, the Russian Revolution.