There was need in Boone’s case of fortitude, not only of the physical but of the moral sort. In 1792 Kentucky, which had formerly been a county of the state of Virginia, was set up as a state by itself, with courts, jails, judges, lawyers and all the appurtenances of the artificial civilization that Boone had hoped to leave forever behind him.
Then came lawsuits regarding the lapping titles. Daniel Boone, his blue eyes troubled and bewildered, found himself among the haggling officials of the law courts. It broke his heart. Stunned but not protesting, he gave up that beautiful land he had enabled all these others to find and to hold. He was old now, and had fought the main fight of his life only to find himself the loser.
He left now for the mouth of the great Kanawha, but found the hunting poor. A son of his had crossed the Mississippi River and sent back word that there was still a West, still a country where were buffalo and elk, where were otter and beaver in the streams. There was to be one more pilgrimage for Daniel Boone, a pilgrimage down the Ohio River, ending in the region, still wilderness, not far from the point that is now the city of St. Louis. Bear in mind that this latter point was not within the United States. Daniel Boone was an emigrant from the land he had founded. He was going now out from under the infant Stars and Stripes.
In token of his character, the Spanish governor of Louisiana gave Boone some sort of trifling commission. He was made commandant or syndic, an official with about the same importance as a country justice of the peace to-day. By the terms of his settlement in that country Boone was entitled to a tract of something like ten thousand acres of land. He was wrongly informed that, as he was an officer of the state, he need not settle nor improve his land. Once more a fatal mistake for the man who knew the book of nature better than the printed page.
Late in his life we find the American government, now reaching its control over this trans-Missouri country, taking up the question of Boone’s tract of land and allowing him, with extreme generosity, one-tenth of that which by every right and title of justice ought to have been his own in fee simple in return for what he had done for the civilization of America. This was the poor pittance that Daniel Boone, one of the great Americans, was able to hand down to his posterity.
With this poor heritage go the few incidents of a meager and in some cases uncertain personal history, the main facts of which have been given above. There is even uncertainty, or rather discrepancy, regarding the date of his death. One writer states that he died at the age of eighty-four, in the year 1818. The date of his death was really September twenty-sixth, 1820, he being at that time eighty-six years of age.
In his later years Boone kept up those practices that had endeared themselves to him in his earlier lifetime. In a mild way he was a trapper, and always he was a hunter. Even when he had passed his eightieth year he went regularly each fall in pursuit of the deer, the turkey, the elk or the furred animals, or followed his simple pastime of squirrel hunting, in which he was very expert. It was his custom on these excursions to exact a promise from his attendant that, in case of his death, his body should be properly cared for. He long kept his coffin under his bed at his home, near Charette, Missouri. Once, taken sick in camp, he marked out the place for his grave, and told his negro servant (some say his Indian friend or servant) what should be done with his body.
From this indisposition, however, he recovered, and went on several other hunts later. Failing gradually, though not from any specific disease, Boone met the great and final enemy with the same fortitude that had been with him all his life. He had said farewell to all earthly ambitions, and was ready to die when the time might come. He kept the coffin under his bed not in any bravado, but in a simple wish for complete preparedness. His personal habits remained sweet and simple as of old.
Boone seems to have wandered a little farther to the West than his home near St. Louis. It is said that he “saw the mouth of the Kansas River,” and that he noted, with the impatient longing of an old man, the passing up-stream, into the mysterious Northwest, of those early parties of fur traders, the voyagers who were now heading the far Western American migration. It was now too late in the closing years. It is said that he trapped on the Kaw and the Osage, and he is said to have made one journey “up the Missouri, and to have reached the mouth of the Yellowstone”, whence he was driven back by savages.
His sons and grandsons were figures in Western history, always frontiersmen, travelers. A granddaughter became the wife of a governor of Oregon. His grandson, Kit Carson, was to hold fast the family traditions on many a Western trail; but there were to be no more trails for Daniel Boone. Overtaken once more by America, once more surrounded by the civilization from which he had by choice always alienated himself, he at length lay down peacefully to his final sleep beneath the trees.