Beowulf Essays (557 words) - Beowulf, Geats, Anglo-Saxon Paganism

Beowulf A hero is a person of distinguished courage who has outstanding qualities and abilities, who is admired for these having these aspects of their character and also admired for brave and noble acts. An Anglo-Saxon hero is a person who has good leadership qualities, is able and willing to provide people with a sense of security, and is willing to go into danger despite possible harm to themselves. These Anglo-Saxon heroes usually were kings or thanes because they distinguished themselves above others by doing a good for the greater of everyone. This person has to be willing to put their own lives on the line for the benefit of others. There are several heroic characteristics, all of which Beowulf possesses. First of these characteristics is honor. Honor is showing a sense of integrity in one's actions. When Beowulf went to the land of the Danes to kill Grendel, he did it not because he wanted money, but because he wanted to help out the Geats. Beowulf felt as if it was the right thing to do since he had been successful in past deeds which he proudly says in lines 321-322, where he says ?They had in remembrance my courage and might. Many had seen me come safe from the conflict,?. Beowulf expected no reward for his action, but rather just being able to ?put another notch in his belt.? Another heroic characteristic, which Beowulf possesses, is bravery. Bravery is being able to go against the odds and possibly risk your life in the process. An example of Beowulf showing bravery is when he goes to slay the dragon even though all his men abandon him. He realizes that the dragon is more powerful than he is, but he will still not back down. In line 1493, he says ?Not one foot's space will I flee from the monster,? thus showing his true bravery by not giving up to the more powerful foe. One more heroic characteristic of Beowulf is his strong sense of duty. This means that he is always devoted to his people, his king, and their security. An example of this is again when he goes to slay the dragon. He has no help, he realizes that the dragon is more powerful, and most importantly, he realizes that he will probably not be returning victorious from this battle. In other words, he will die. In lines 1470-1474, it says ?Sad was his spirit, restless and ready, And the march of Fate immeasurably near; Fate that would strike, seek his soul's treasure, And deal asunder the spirit and flesh. Not long was his life encased in the body!? This basically means that Fate was soon to run its course and he would loose his life in battle. He had to and did go along with this because he was the king and it was his responsibility to provide security for his people. Even though it was his responsibility, he didn't have to do it; he could have run away like others may have. Overall, a hero is a person with distinguished qualities who goes against adversity to commit good deeds despite what could happen to them. A hero is a person who does things out of honor, bravery, and duty, not for rewards. Beowulf encompasses all of these qualities. English Essays

Daniel Boone; a History

Daniel Boone; a History Free Online Research Papers Youth: Daniel Boone was born on October 22, 1734. Because the Gregorian calendar was adopted during Boones lifetime, his birth date is sometimes given as November 2, 1734 (the New Style date), although Boone used the October date.[4] He was the sixth of eleven children in a family of Quakers. His father, Squire Boone, Sr. (1696–1765), had immigrated to Pennsylvania from the small town of Bradninch, Devon, England in 1713. Squire Boones parents George and Mary Boone followed their son to Pennsylvania in 1717. In 1720, Squire, who worked primarily as a weaver and a blacksmith, married Sarah Morgan (1700–1777), whose family members were Quakers from Wales, and settled in Towamencin Township, Pennsylvania in 1708. In 1731, the Boones built a log cabin in the Oley Valley, now the Daniel Boone Homestead in Berks County, Pennsylvania, where Daniel was born.[citation needed] His other siblings were Edward, Elizabeth, George, Hannah, Israel, Johnathan, Samuel, and Sarah Boone. Daniel Boone spent his early years on what was then the western edge of the Pennsylvania frontier. There were a number of American Indian villages nearby. The pacifist Pennsylvania Quakers generally had good relations with the Indians, but the steady growth of the white population compelled many Indians to relocate further west. Boone received his first rifle at age 12 and picked up hunting skills from local whites and Indians, beginning his lifelong love of hunting. Folk tales often emphasized Boones skills as a hunter. In one story, the young Boone was hunting in the woods with some other boys, when the scream of a panther scattered the boys, except for Boone. He calmly cocked his squirrel gun and shot the animal through the heart just as it leaped at him. As with so many tales about Boone, the story may or may not be true, but it was told so often that it became part of the popular image of the man. [5] In Boones youth, his family became a source of controversy in the local Quaker community that existed in what is now present day Lower Gwynedd Township, Pennsylvania. In 1742, Boones parents were compelled to publicly apologize after their eldest child Sarah married John Wilcoxson, a worldling (non-Quaker), while she was visibly pregnant. When Boones oldest brother Israel also married a worldling in 1747, Squire Boone stood by his son and was therefore expelled from the Quakers, although his wife continued to attend monthly meetings with her children. Perhaps as a result of this controversy, in 1750 Squire sold his land and moved the family to North Carolina. Daniel Boone did not attend church again, although he considered himself a Christian and had all of his children baptized. The Boones eventually settled on the Yadkin River, in what is now Davie County, North Carolina, about two miles (3 km) west of Mocksville.[6] Because he spent so much time hunting in his youth, Boone received little formal education. According to one family tradition, a schoolteacher once expressed concern over Boones education, but Boones father was unconcerned, saying let the girls do the spelling and Dan will do the shooting†¦. Boone received some tutoring from family members, though his spelling remained unorthodox. Historian John Mack Faragher cautions that the folk image of Boone as semiliterate is misleading, however, arguing that Boone acquired a level of literacy that was the equal of most men of his times. Boone regularly took reading material with him on his hunting expeditions- the Bible and Gullivers Travels were favorites- and he was often the only literate person in groups of frontiersmen. Boone would sometimes entertain his hunting companions by reading to them around the evening campfire.[7] Hunter, husband, and soldier: As a young man, Boone served with the British military during the French and Indian War (1754–1763), a struggle for control of the land beyond the Appalachian Mountains. In 1755, he was a wagon driver in General Edward Braddocks attempt to drive the French out of the Ohio Country, which ended in disaster at the Battle of the Monongahela. Boone returned home after the defeat, and on August 14, 1756, he married Rebecca Bryan, a neighbor in the Yadkin Valley. The couple initially lived in a cabin on his fathers farm. They eventually had ten children.[citation needed] In 1759, a conflict erupted between British colonists and Cherokee Indians, their former allies in the French and Indian War. After the Yadkin Valley was raided by Cherokees, many families, including the Boones, fled to Culpeper County, Virginia. Boone served in the North Carolina militia during this Cherokee Uprising, and his hunting expeditions deep into Cherokee territory beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains separated him from his wife for about two years. According to one story, Boone was gone for so long that Rebecca assumed he was dead, and began a relationship with his brother Edward (Ned), giving birth to daughter Jemima in 1762. Upon his return, the story goes, his wife reproved him saying, Youd had better have stayed home and got it yourself. Boone was understanding and did not blame Rebecca. Whatever the truth of the tale, Boone raised Jemima as his own and favorite child. Boones early biographers knew this story, but did not publish it.[8] Boones chosen profession also made for long absences from home. He supported his growing family in these years as a market hunter. Almost every autumn, Boone would go on long hunts, which were extended expeditions into the wilderness, lasting weeks or months. Boone would go on long hunts alone or with a small group of men, accumulating hundreds of deer skins in the autumn, and then trapping beaver and otter over the winter. The long hunters would return in the spring and sell their take to commercial fur traders. In this business, buckskins came to be known as bucks, which is the origin of the American slang term for dollar.[10] Frontiersmen often carved messages on trees or wrote their names on cave walls, and Boones name or initials have been found in many places. One of the best-known inscriptions was carved into a tree in present Washington County, Tennessee which reads D. Boon Cilled a. Bar [killed a bear] on [this] tree in the year 1760. A similar carving is preserved in the museum of the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Kentucky, which reads D. Boon Kilt a Bar, 1803. However, because Boone spelled his name with the final e, and the inconsistency of an 1803 date east of the Mississippi after Boone moved to Missouri in 1799, these particular inscriptions may be forgeries, part of a long tradition of phony Boone relics.[11] In 1762 Boone and his wife and four children moved back to the Yadkin Valley from Culpeper. By mid-1760s, with peace made with the Cherokees, immigration into the area increased, and Boone began to look for a new place to settle, as competition decreased the amount of game available for hunting. This meant that Boone had difficulty making ends meet; he was often taken to court for nonpayment of debts, and he sold what land he owned to pay off creditors. After his fathers death in 1765, Boone traveled with his brother Squire and a group of men to Florida, which had become British territory after the end of the war, to look into the possibility of settling there. According to a family story, Boone purchased land in Pensacola, but Rebecca refused to move so far away from friends and family. The Boones instead moved to a more remote area of the Yadkin Valley, and Boone began to hunt westward into the Blue Ridge Mountains. [12] Kentucky: Boone first reached Kentucky in the fall of 1767 while on a long hunt with his brother Squire Boone, Jr. While on the Braddock expedition years earlier, Boone had heard about the fertile land and abundant game of Kentucky from fellow wagoner John Findley, who had visited Kentucky to trade with American Indians. Boone and Findley happened to meet again, and Findley encouraged Boone with more tales of Kentucky. At the same time, news had arrived about the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, in which the Iroquois had ceded their claim to Kentucky to the British. This, as well as the unrest in North Carolina due to the Regulator movement, likely prompted Boone to extend his exploration.[13] On May 1, 1769, Boone began a two-year hunting expedition in Kentucky. On December 22, 1769, he and a fellow hunter were captured by a party of Shawnees, who confiscated all of their skins and told them to leave and never return. The Shawnees had not signed the Stanwix treaty, and since they regarded Kentucky as their hunting ground, they considered white hunters there to be poachers. Boone, however, continued hunting and exploring Kentucky until his return to North Carolina in 1771, and returned to hunt there again in the autumn of 1772. On September 25, 1773, Boone packed up his family and, with a group of about 50 emigrants, began the first attempt by British colonists to establish a settlement in Kentucky. Boone was still an obscure hunter and trapper at the time; the most prominent member of the expedition was William Russell, a well-known Virginian and future brother-in-law of Patrick Henry. On October 9, Boones eldest son James and a small group of men and boys who had left the main party to retrieve supplies were attacked by a band of Delawares, Shawnees, and Cherokees. Following the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, American Indians in the region had been debating what to do about the influx of settlers. This group had decided, in the words of historian John Mack Faragher, to send a message of their opposition to settlement†¦. James Boone and William Russells son Henry were captured and gruesomely tortured to death. The brutality of the killings sent shock waves along the frontier, and Boones party abandoned its e xpedition. The massacre was one of the first events in what became known as Dunmores War, a struggle between Virginia and, primarily, Shawnees of the Ohio Country for control of what is now West Virginia and Kentucky. In the summer of 1774, Boone volunteered to travel with a companion to Kentucky to notify surveyors there about the outbreak of war. The two men journeyed more than 800 miles (1,300 km) in two months in order to warn those who had not already fled the region. Upon his return to Virginia, Boone helped defend colonial settlements along the Clinch River, earning a promotion to captain in the militia as well as acclaim from fellow citizens. After the brief war, which ended soon after Virginias victory in the Battle of Point Pleasant in October 1774, Shawnees relinquished their claims to Kentucky.[15] Following Dunmores War, Richard Henderson, a prominent judge from North Carolina, hired Boone to travel to the Cherokee towns in present North Carolina and Tennessee and inform them of an upcoming meeting. In the 1775 treaty, Henderson purchased the Cherokee claim to Kentucky in order to establish a colony called Transylvania. Afterwards, Henderson hired Boone to blaze what became known as the Wilderness Road, which went through the Cumberland Gap and into central Kentucky. Along with a party of about thirty workers, Boone marked a path to the Kentucky River, where he established Boonesborough. Other settlements, notably Harrodsburg, were also established at this time. Despite occasional Indian attacks, Boone returned to the Clinch Valley and brought his family and other settlers to Boonesborough on September 8, 1775.[16] American Revolution: Violence in Kentucky increased with the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783). Native Americans who were unhappy about the loss of Kentucky in treaties saw the war as a chance to drive out the colonists. Isolated settlers and hunters became the frequent target of attacks, convincing many to abandon Kentucky. By late spring of 1776, fewer than 200 colonists remained in Kentucky, primarily at the fortified settlements of Boonesborough, Harrodsburg, and Logans Station.[17] On July 14, 1776, Boones daughter Jemima and two other teenage girls were captured outside Boonesborough by an Indian war party, who carried the girls north towards the Shawnee towns in the Ohio country. Boone and a group of men from Boonesborough followed in pursuit, finally catching up with them two days later. Boone and his men ambushed the Indians while they were stopped for a meal, rescuing the girls and driving off their captors. The incident became the most celebrated event of Boones life. James Fenimore Cooper created a fictionalized version of the episode in his classic book The Last of the Mohicans (1826).[18] In 1777, Henry Hamilton, a British Lieutenant Governor of Canada, began to recruit American Indian war parties to raid the Kentucky settlements. On April 24, Shawnees led by Chief Blackfish attacked Boonesborough. A bullet struck Boones leg, shattering his kneecap, but he was carried back inside the fort amid a flurry of bullets by Simon Kenton, a recent arrival at Boonesborough. Kenton became Boones close friend as well as a legendary frontiersman in his own right.[citation needed] While Boone recovered, Shawnees kept up their attacks outside Boonesborough, destroying the surrounding cattle and crops. With the food supply running low, the settlers needed salt to preserve what meat they had, and so in January 1778 Boone led a party of thirty men to the salt springs on the Licking River. On February 7, 1778, when Boone was hunting meat for the expedition, he was surprised and captured by warriors led by Chief Blackfish of the Chilicothe Shawnee. Because Boones party was greatly outnumbered, he convinced his men to surrender rather than put up a fight.[citation needed] Blackfish wanted to continue to Boonesborough and capture it, since it was now poorly defended, but Boone convinced him that the women and children were not hardy enough to survive a winter trek. Instead, Boone promised that Boonesborough would surrender willingly to the Shawnees the following spring. Boone did not have an opportunity to tell his men that he was bluffing in order to prevent an immediate attack on Boonesborough, however. Boone pursued this strategy so convincingly that many of his men concluded that he had switched his loyalty to the British.[citation needed] Boone and his men were taken to Blackfishs town of Chillicothe where they were made to run the gauntlet. As was their custom, the Shawnees adopted some of the prisoners into the tribe to replace fallen warriors; the remainder were taken to Hamilton in Detroit. Boone was adopted into a Shawnee family at Chillicothe, perhaps into the family of Chief Blackfish himself, and given the name Sheltowee (Big Turtle). On June 16, 1778, when he learned that Blackfish was about to return to Boonesborough with a large force, Boone eluded his captors and raced home, covering the 160 miles (260 km) to Boonesborough in five days on horseback and, after his horse gave out, on foot.[19] During Boones absence, his wife and children (except for Jemima) had returned to North Carolina, fearing that he was dead. Upon his return to Boonesborough, some of the men expressed doubts about Boones loyalty, since after surrendering the salt making party he had apparently lived quite happily among the Shawnees for months. Boone responded by leading a preemptive raid against the Shawnees across the Ohio River, and then by helping to successfully defend Boonesborough against a 10-day siege led by Blackfish, which began on September 7, 1778. After the siege, Captain Benjamin Logan and Colonel Richard Callaway- both of whom had nephews who were still captives surrendered by Boone- brought charges against Boone for his recent activities. In the court-martial that followed, Boone was found not guilty and was even promoted after the court heard his testimony. Despite this vindication, Boone was humiliated by the court-martial, and he rarely spoke of it.[20] After the trial, Boone returned to North Carolina in order to bring his family back to Kentucky. In the autumn of 1779, a large party of emigrants came with him, including (according to tradition) the family of Abraham Lincolns grandfather.[21] Rather than remain in Boonesborough, Boone founded the nearby settlement of Boones Station. Boone began earning money at this time by locating good land for other settlers. Transylvania land claims had been invalidated after Virginia created Kentucky County, and so settlers needed to file new land claims with Virginia. In 1780, Boone collected about $20,000 in cash from various settlers and traveled to Williamsburg to purchase their land warrants. While he was sleeping in a tavern during the trip, the cash was stolen from his room. Some of the settlers forgave Boone the loss; others insisted that he repay the stolen money, which took him several years to do. A popular image of Boone which emerged in later years is that of the backwoodsman who had little affinity for civilized society, moving away from places like Boonesborough when they became too crowded. In reality, however, Boone was a leading citizen of Kentucky at this time. When Kentucky was divided into three Virginia counties in November 1780, Boone was promoted to lieutenant colonel in the Fayette County militia. In April 1781, Boone was elected as a representative to the Virginia General Assembly, which was held in Richmond. In 1782, he was elected sheriff of Fayette County.[22] Meanwhile, the American Revolutionary War continued. Boone joined General George Rogers Clarks invasion of the Ohio country in 1780, fighting in the Battle of Piqua on August 7. In October, when Boone was hunting with his brother Ned, Shawnees shot and killed Ned. Apparently thinking that they had killed Daniel Boone, the Shawnees beheaded Ned and took the head home as a trophy. In 1781, Boone traveled to Richmond to take his seat in the legislature, but British dragoons under Banastre Tarleton captured Boone and several other legislators near Charlottesville. The British released Boone on parole several days later. During Boones term, Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown in October 1781, but the fighting continued in Kentucky unabated. Boone returned to Kentucky and in August 1782 fought in the Battle of Blue Licks, in which his son Israel was killed. In November 1782, Boone took part in another Clark expedition into Ohio, the last major campaign of the war. Businessman on the Ohio: After the Revolution, Boone resettled in Limestone (renamed Maysville, Kentucky in 1786), then a booming Ohio River port. In 1787, he was elected to the Virginia state assembly as a representative from Bourbon County. In Maysville, he kept a tavern and worked as a surveyor, horse trader, and land speculator. He was initially prosperous, owning seven slaves by 1787, a relatively large number for Kentucky at the time, which was dominated by small farms rather than large plantations. Boone became something of a celebrity while living in Maysville: in 1784, on Boones 50th birthday, historian John Filson published The Discovery, Settlement And present State of Kentucke, a book which included a chronicle of Boones adventures.[23] Although the Revolutionary War had ended, the border war with American Indians north of the Ohio River soon resumed. In September 1786, Boone took part in a military expedition into the Ohio Country led by Benjamin Logan. Back in Limestone, Boone housed and fed Shawnees who were captured during the raid and helped to negotiate a truce and prisoner exchange. Although the Northwest Indian War escalated and would not end until the American victory at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794, the 1786 expedition was the last time Boone saw military action.[24] Boone began to have financial troubles while living in Maysville. According to the later folk image, Boone the trailblazer was too unsophisticated for the civilization which followed him and which eventually defrauded him of his land. Boone was not the simple frontiersman of legend, however: he engaged in land speculation on a large scale, buying and selling claims to tens of thousands of acres. The land market in frontier Kentucky was chaotic, and Boones ventures ultimately failed because his investment strategy was faulty and because his sense of honor made him reluctant to profit at someone elses expense. According to Faragher, Boone lacked the ruthless instincts that speculation demanded.[25] Frustrated with the legal hassles that went with land speculation, in 1788 Boone moved upriver to Point Pleasant, Virginia (now West Virginia). There he operated a trading post and occasionally worked as a surveyors assistant. When Virginia created Kanawha County in 1789, Boone was appointed lieutenant colonel of the county militia. In 1791, he was elected to the Virginia legislature for the third time. He contracted to provide supplies for the Kanawha militia, but his debts prevented him from buying goods on credit, and so he closed his store and returned to hunting and trapping. In 1795, he and Rebecca moved back to Kentucky, living in present Nicholas County on land owned by their son Daniel Morgan Boone. The next year, Boone applied to Isaac Shelby, the first governor of the new state of Kentucky, for a contract to widen the Wilderness Road into a wagon route, but the governor did not respond and the contract was awarded to someone else. Meanwhile, lawsuits over conflicting land claims continued to make their way through the Kentucky courts. Boones remaining land claims were sold off to pay legal fees and taxes, but he no longer paid attention to the process. In 1798, a warrant was issued for Boones arrest after he ignored a summons to testify in a court case, although the sheriff never found him. That same year Kentucky named Boone County in his honor. Missouri: In 1799, Boone moved out of the United States to Missouri, which was then part of Spanish Louisiana. The Spanish, eager to promote settlement in the sparsely populated region, did not enforce the legal requirement that all immigrants had to be Catholics. Boone, looking to make a fresh start, emigrated with much of his extended family to what is now St. Charles County. The Spanish governor appointed Boone syndic (judge and jury) and commandant (military leader) of the Femme Osage district. The many anecdotes of Boones tenure as syndic suggest that he sought to render fair judgments rather than to strictly observe the letter of the law. Boone served as syndic and commandant until 1804, when Missouri became part of the United States following the Louisiana Purchase. Because Boones land grants from the Spanish government had been largely based on verbal agreements, he once again lost his land claims. In 1809, he petitioned Congress to restore his Spanish land claims, which was finally done in 1814. Boone sold most of this land to repay old Kentucky debts. When the War of 1812 came to Missouri, Boones sons Daniel Morgan Boone and Nathan Boone took part, but by that time Boone was too old for militia duty. Boone spent his final years in Missouri, often in the company of children and grandchildren. He hunted and trapped as often as his failing health allowed. According to one story, in 1810 or later Boone went with a group on a long hunt as far west as the Yellowstone River, a remarkable journey at his age, if true. Other stories of Boone around this time have him making one last visit to Kentucky in order to pay off his creditors, although some or all of these tales may be folklore. American painter John James Audubon claimed to have gone hunting with Boone in the woods of Kentucky around 1810. Years later, Audubon painted a portrait of Boone, supposedly from memory, although skeptics have noted the similarity of this painting to the well-known portraits by Chester Harding. Boones family insisted that he never returned to Kentucky after 1799, although some historians believe that Boone visited his brother Squire near Kentucky in 1810 and have therefore reported Audubons story as factua l.[26] Boone died on September 26, 1820, at Nathan Boones home on Femme Osage Creek. His last words were, Im going now. My time has come. He was buried next to Rebecca, who had died on March 18, 1813. The graves, which were unmarked until the mid-1830s, were near Jemima (Boone) Callaways home on Tuque Creek, about two miles (3 km) from present day Marthasville, Missouri. In 1845, the Boones remains were disinterred and reburied in a new cemetery in Frankfort, Kentucky. Resentment in Missouri about the disinterment grew over the years, and a legend arose that Boones remains never left Missouri. According to this story, Boones tombstone in Missouri had been inadvertently placed over the wrong grave, but no one had corrected the error. Boones Missouri relatives, displeased with the Kentuckians who came to exhume Boone, kept quiet about the mistake and allowed the Kentuckians to dig up the wrong remains. There is no contemporary evidence that this actually happened, but in 1983, a forensic anth ropologist examined a crude plaster cast of Boones skull made before the Kentucky reburial and announced that it might be the skull of an African American. Black slaves were also buried at Tuque Creek, so it is possible that the wrong remains were mistakenly removed from the crowded graveyard. Both the Frankfort Cemetery in Kentucky and the Old Bryan Farm graveyard in Missouri claim to have Boones remains.[27] According to The Boone Family book by Hazel Atterbury Spraker (1982), Danielwas buried near the body of his wife, in a cemetery established in 1803 by David Bryan, upon the bank of a small stream called Teuque Creek about one and one-half miles southeast of the present site of the town of Marthasville in Warren County, Missouri, it being at that time the only Protestant cemetery North of the Missouri River. {page 578} edit Cultural legacy: Daniel Boone remains an iconic figure in American history, although his status as an early American folk hero and later as a subject of fiction has tended to obscure the actual details of his life. The general public remembers him as a hunter, pioneer, and Indian-fighter, even if they are uncertain when he lived or exactly what he did. Many places in the United States are named for him, including the Daniel Boone National Forest, the Sheltowee Trace Trail, and six counties: Boone County, Illinois, Boone County, Indiana, Boone County, Nebraska, Boone County, West Virginia, Boone County, Missouri and Boone County, Kentucky. His name has long been synonymous with the American outdoors. For example, the Boone and Crockett Club was a conservationist organization founded by Theodore Roosevelt in 1887, and the Sons of Daniel Boone was the precursor of the Boy Scouts of America. Emergence as a legend: Boone emerged as a legend in large part because of John Filsons The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boon, part of his book The Discovery, Settlement And present State of Kentucke. First published in 1784, Filsons book was soon translated into French and German, and made Boone famous in America and Europe. Based on interviews with Boone, Filsons book contained a mostly factual account of Boones adventures from the exploration of Kentucky through the American Revolution. However, because the real Boone was a man of few words, Filson invented florid, philosophical dialogue for this autobiography. Subsequent editors cut some of these passages and replaced them with more plausible- but still spurious- ones. Often reprinted, Filsons book established Boone as one of the first popular heroes of the United States.[29] Today there are schools named after Daniel Boone in Birdsboro Pennsylvania, Douglassville Pennsylvania, and Chicago Illinois. Like John Filson, Timothy Flint also interviewed Boone, and his Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone, the First Settler of Kentucky (1833) became one of the bestselling biographies of the 19th century. Flint greatly embellished Boones adventures, doing for Boone what Parson Weems did for George Washington. In Flints book, Boone fought hand-to-hand with a bear, escaped from Indians by swinging on vines (as Tarzan would later do), and so on. Although Boones family thought the book was absurd, Flint greatly influenced the popular conception of Boone, since these tall tales were recycled in countless dime novels and books aimed at young boys. Three American actors claim ancestry to Boone: singer Pat Boone, Richard Boone (1917-1981) of the CBS Have Gun, Will Travel television series, and Randy Boone, one of the regulars on NBCs western series, The Virginian. Fiction: Boones adventures, real and mythical, formed the basis of the archetypal hero of the American West, popular in 19th century novels and 20th century films. The main character of James Fenimore Coopers Leatherstocking Tales, the first of which was published in 1823, bore striking similarities to Boone; even his name, Nathaniel Bumppo, echoed Daniel Boones name. As mentioned above, The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Coopers second Leatherstocking novel, featured a fictionalized version of Boones rescue of his daughter. After Cooper, other writers developed the Western hero, an iconic figure which began as a variation of Daniel Boone.[35] In the 20th century, Boone was featured in numerous comic strips, radio programs, and films, where the emphasis was usually on action and melodrama rather than historical accuracy. These are little remembered today; probably the most noteworthy is the 1936 film Daniel Boone, with George OBrien playing the title role. Audiences of the baby boomer generation are more familiar with the Daniel Boone television series, which ran from 1964 to 1970. In the popular theme song for the series, Boone was described as a big man in a coonskin cap, and the rippinest, roarinest, fightinest man the frontier ever knew![36] This did not describe the real Daniel Boone, who was not a big man and did not wear a coonskin cap. Boone was portrayed this way because Fess Parker, the tall actor who played Boone, was essentially reprising his role as Davy Crockett from an earlier TV series. That Boone could be portrayed as a Crockett, another American frontiersman with a very different persona, was another exam ple of how Boones image could be reshaped to suit popular tastes.[37] References: Atterbury Spraker, Hazel. The Boone Family. Originally published Rutland, Vermont 1922, reprinted Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc. Baltimore, 1974, 1977, 1982; ISBN 0-8063-0612-2. A Genealogical History of the Descendants of George and Mary Boone who came to America in 1717, Also a biographical sketch of DANIEL BOONE, the pioneer. Bakeless, John. Daniel Boone: Master of the Wilderness. Originally published 1939, reprinted University of Nebraska Press, 1989; ISBN 0-8032-6090-3. The definitive Boone biography of its era, it was the first to make full use of the massive amount of material collected by Lyman Draper. Draper, Lyman. The Life of Daniel Boone, edited by Ted Franklin Belue. Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1998; ISBN 0-8117-0979-5. Belues notes provide a modern scholarly perspective to Drapers unfinished 19th century biography, which follows Boones life up to the siege of Boonesborough. Elliott, Lawrence. The Long Hunter: A New Life of Daniel Boone. New York: Readers Digest Press, 1976; ISBN 0-88349-066-8. Faragher, John Mack. Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer. New York: Holt, 1992; ISBN 0-8050-1603-1. The standard scholarly biography, examines both the history and the folklore. Jones, Randell. In the Footsteps of Daniel Boone. Blair: North Carolina, 2005. ISBN 0-89587-308-7. Guide to historical sites associated with Boone. Lofaro, Michael. Daniel Boone: An American Life. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2003; ISBN 0-8131-2278-3. A brief biography, previously published (in 1978 and 1986) as The Life and Adventures of Daniel Boone. 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