 Good morning. I'm Dick McCallum president of DSU. It's my sincere pleasure to be able to extend greetings and words of welcome to you We are so pleased that you are here last evening. We launched this symposium with an outstanding presentation by Dr. Brinkley Today when you look at the conference agenda you realize that it is filled with terrific speakers outstanding panels and a number of other significant events and celebrations I'm convinced that this day is a day that we will all enjoy and we will all be enriched by I Want to extend special thanks To the partners and the contributors who have helped make this symposium possible Without question. We could not assemble this kind of event without support in collaboration from partners. I Especially want to thank the city of Dickinson MDU resources group the North Dakota Humanities Council the DSU foundation The theater Roosevelt Midora Foundation and the theater Roosevelt National Park all Of these Organizations have helped us to assemble this great symposium. I'd like to give them a round of applause There are a number of dimensions to DSU's commitment to the theater Roosevelt project Later today, we're going to be sharing with you The status of our agreement with the Library of Congress and Dr. Hudson will be with us from the Library of Congress Again, that will be another interesting part of our symposium later today So we'll look forward to that conversation after lunch on now Very pleased to invite our symposium moderator to the podium He will begin by introducing our first speaker. Please welcome Clay Jinkensen. Well, good morning everyone and welcome to Our third annual theater Roosevelt symposium. It's the fourth. We've held we held one in 1958 and John F. Kennedy was one of the speakers, but our recent series began two years ago And this is the third. This is our symposium on theater Roosevelt the conservationist in the arena Just a couple of quick housekeeping notes. First of all, if you have a cell phone Please at this moment turn it off and for the young people and non young people in this room, please do not text During our sessions here. This is University campus and Very serious work is going on here today. We've asked speakers to come from all over the United States. This is their Academic work and we've been waiting a whole year for this moment And so we ask you to show them the deepest respect and forbearance in your own electronic communications We're delighted that you're all here. I think you're in for an extraordinary day. We're still Watching the weather about tomorrow, but we feel pretty certain that we'll be able to go to Medora for tomorrow's sessions But we'll keep you posted as the day unfolds so far the storm Doesn't look very dramatic But things can change quickly. I have the pleasure now of introducing Robert Morgan We've been so eager for Professor Morgan to join us. I want to read to you a passage from his new best-selling book Boone a biography of Daniel Boone It's the opening passage of the book and I'm after hearing Douglas Brinkley last night I just wondered Professor Morgan what Roosevelt would have thought of what you have written here because I think Roosevelt would have had conflict He would have been he wouldn't have been upset by what you've written But I think he would have been conflicted about what you have written. Here's the start forget the Coonskin cap He never wore one Daniel Boone thought Coonskin caps uncouth heavy and uncomfortable He always wore a beaver felt hat to protect him from the sun and rain The Coonskin topped Boone is the image from Hollywood and television In fact much that the public thinks it knows about Daniel Boone is Fiction he was neither the discoverer of Kentucky nor the first settler in the bluegrass region. He did not discover the Cumberland Gap known to the Indians as We see Ota Nor was he the first white man to dig in sing in the North American wilderness And though he held the rank of lieutenant colonel in the militia more than once he was for the most part a reluctant soldier and Indian fighter I Think if Roosevelt were reading this book and he would have gobbled it up perhaps in a single night He would have been both delighted and upset because Roosevelt was one of those people who deeply mythologized Daniel Boone Roosevelt helped to create one of America's first great conservation organizations the Boone and Crockett Club and Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett were iconic figures in the Rooseveltian imagination and I want to just Quickly tell one of my favorite stories about theater Rosa when he was out here between 1883 and 1887 he believed that he was in some sense Embodying the spirit of Daniel Boone as he understood Boone and when he came back in 1884 He asked young Lincoln Lang who was about 16 years old at the time to take him someplace where he could get an authentic Buckskin shirt It really mattered to Roosevelt to have a buck skin shirt and he told Poor Lincoln Lang the following The fringed tunic or hunting shirt made a buckskin said Roosevelt is the most picturesque and distinctly National dress ever worn in America It was the dress in which Daniel Boone was clad when he first passed through the trackless forests of the Alleghenies It was the dress worn by grim old Davy Crockett when he fell at the Alamo So Roosevelt wasn't going to be complete as a Western Frontiersmen cowboy and wilderness hunter until he was dressed as he thought Daniel Boone must have been dressed so poor Lincoln Lang took him off towards black butte near Amidon and there was a woman there by the name of mrs. Maddox and she was a Sower of skin she could make buckskin shirts She had recently gotten rid of her ne'er do well husband by hitting him on the head with a pan And she was a notoriously rough and tough character, and I'm just wondering whether Theodore Roosevelt who was now 26 years old told her His story of the authentic buckskin shirt if he did I would have loved to have seen her reaction Robert Morgan is An extraordinary Author he's a man of letters that greatest of titles in American life He's written 11 books of poetry eight books of fiction in 2007 he was the winner of the Academy of Arts and Letters award for literature. He's the Kappa Alpha professor of English at Cornell University He's been on Oprah He's published books that That are cherished. He just recently gave the Thomas Wolf lecture just a few days ago If you read his Biography, it's just filled with one award after the next we are so delighted to have you here. Please welcome Robert Morgan Thank You clay. Can you hear me is this microphone working? Okay? Well, I am absolutely thrilled to be here in Dickinson, North Dakota And I would like to thank President McCallum and all the people who made this possible I can't think of a happier occasion than to come here and celebrate Theodore Roosevelt and the frontier and Daniel Boone a Few years ago I Was interviewed on the little farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina where I grew up and The reporter looked around at the old barn and the corn patch by the creek and he said tell me I'm curious. How did you ever get from here to Cornell University? Because practically speaking you can't get there from here and I said to him I know why you would think that it's true. We were poor We didn't have a car or truck or tractor. We plowed with a horse. We kept our milk and butter in the spring house My parents did not have a lot of formal education But I had some distinct advantages for a future writer and One of the great ones was that I grew up among story tellers Stories told on the porch in the summertime and by the fireplace in the wintertime my grandpa had a endless store of stories about ghosts and Panthers he called them painters and bears and mad dogs and one of his favorite stories was about a man who was going to get married and He was going to build a house for his bride out on the side of the mountain and he found a rock perfect for a natural hearth and Built his chimney on that rock and the cabinet around it and they moved in on their wedding night built a huge fire in the fireplace not knowing that a great nest of rattlesnakes were sleeping through the winter under that rock The fire warmed the rock up the snakes thought it was spring that came crawling out The bride woke and heard this sound Roused her husband to go see what it was and he got out of bed and was bitten by hundreds of snakes and died Isn't that a great story to tell kids at bedtime? He would send us to bed terrified Stories and he had a lot of others like that about Panthers that tried to climb down the chimney and that sort of thing and as a writer. I have actually gone back to a lot of that material but my dad an Equally good storyteller loved to talk about history and though he had gone only to the sixth grade he loved to read history and talk about history and He had stories about the Civil War and about the Revolution and about the Cherokee Indians and About the family in the old days Two of his heroes his two greatest heroes were Daniel Boone and Theodore Roosevelt My dad was born in 1905 and the administration Theodore Roosevelt he called him Teddy and he loved to talk about all the great things that Teddy had said and done the Panama Canal His his work in conservation and the way given a pulpit Bully pulpit he could preach just about anywhere about the nation and the future and of course Daniel Boone His hero the frontier my dad was a kind of Daniel Boone actually He loved to hunt and trap and tramp in the woods and sort of like Daniel Boone He failed at all of his business enterprises and didn't much care because that gave him an excuse to go back to the woods And to be the kind of woodsmen that he wanted to be and my dad always said we were related to Boone Through his mother who was a Morgan. I never believed that but it turns out to be true to genealogists have sent me Genealogists showing that we have a common ancestor way back in North Wales called you Ellen up Morgan So there is that distant relation to Daniel Boone But I have been on book tour from coast to coast and in every single audience But one there has been a relative or descendant of Daniel Boone It is a big family any descendants or relatives of Boone in this audience We're going to break the record here It's my opinion that everybody in America is related to Daniel Boone and has a Cherokee grandmother probably Who was a princess? Well There are a lot of connections of course between Daniel Boone and figured or Roosevelt They're parallel in many ways Roosevelt knew the legend of Boone in the 19th century you can see that and saw him in The context of his own time and of course that's part of the complexity and the interest of history is that we do tend to see the past in Our own terms we understand the past in our own terms And that's exactly what theodore Roosevelt and the historians of his time were doing But in fact they did have an awful lot of things in common And I will try to touch on some of those things in fact Boone was a great hero of Theodore Roosevelt I believe he devotes three chapters of the winning of the West to Roosevelt And I'll read a short passage from one of those chapters after a while, but Daniel Boone was born in Oly, Pennsylvania outside Reading to a Quaker family in 1734 and and Grew up there From the time he was a boy People who knew him described him as in some ways different One of the ways he was different was that he slipped away into the woods For hours and later for days and then for weeks and and as he got older for months even To walk in the woods to hunt to study the ways of the forest and to study the ways of the Indians including the Shawnee Indians who lived there in, Pennsylvania at that time and He apprenticed himself to the Indians and to the hunters who lived like Indians from his youth He had a particularly close Relationship with Indians. He's almost unique in the history of the frontier in his great rapport with Native Americans He was sometimes called a white Indian He absorbed an enormous amount of the culture and even the spiritual beliefs of the Indians Whereas most frontiersmen felt themselves the enemies of Indians Boone often fit in and could get along with them quite well Now I have been asked a number of times Why a new book about Daniel Boone? There are many books about Daniel Boone Why is he relevant to our culture and to our time and to why a Biography and not a novel after all I am best known as a novelist The answer to the first question is I've always been interested in Boone since I was a child hearing my dad's stories about him and Working on that little farm and the Blue Ridge Mountains I would turn up arrowheads and pieces of pottery and it seemed to me even as a kid that the ground was haunted By the Indians by the Cherokees and the other Indians who had been there So I've always been interested in that connection to the Indians to the past and to the American landscape And I knew that Boone was a particularly important person in the contact between the white people and the Indians He was adopted by the Shawnees at one point He became shelter we big turtle of the Chilacothe Shawnees and he always was a member of that nation the rest of his life It's very likely he had a Cherokee wife He was very close to the Cherokees in North Carolina That's why he was hired as a diplomat to negotiate with the Cherokees by Judge Richard Henderson in 1775 I Wanted to see if I could peel away the folklore and the fake lore the myths and legends The Walt Disney movies the Fess Parker TV series and find a living breathing human being that we in the 21st century Could relate to and understand and it seemed better to do that in nonfiction Then in a novel after all if I presented a portrait of Boone that was not what people expected In a novel they could say always just taken liberties It's a novel but if I have the quotes if I have the end notes and the bibliography I think it would it would have more credence with readers and besides 25 years ago I have done a lot of research on Boone in the frontier for a long poem Which never got written but I had kept that research and I wanted to get back to that And perhaps in my old age, I'm more interested in history Maybe that in making up stories that they tell me that happens as you get older You get more and more interested in in history Boone was different even as a boy He would slip away into the woods to hunt But when he returned to the settlement, he was very popular. He was a devoted family Person he was a leader and in that combination is the complexity of Daniel Boone And to some extent the contradiction of his life. This is sort of the theme of my talk His dream was to live in the forest with the Indians hunting in the pristine wilderness But to have his family fairly close by It was an ideal he actually achieved four times in his life First in the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina in the mid 18th century again in Kentucky in the 1770s in Western Virginia two decades later and at the end of his life in Missouri Where he moved in 1799? Now the problem was that Boone was very famous even as a young man and Wherever he went other settlers would follow they would pour in chop down the trees killed the game drive the Indians out So there was only this window of time when he could achieve that ideal to live in the forest with the Indians to hunt with the Indians to hunt By himself often for long periods, but to have his family not too far away and You can see how that's relevant to the issue of conservation, right? I'll come to that later But this is the crux. This is the contradiction in Boone's life He was described in his early fame as the instrument for the settlement of the West And as an old man interviewed out in Missouri, he said but I know I have been the instrument for the destruction of the Indians hunting ground He said while I could never trust a Yankee by which he met Americans I Was never lied to by an Indian So Boone is very unusual in his rapport in his connection to Native Americans He respected them and they came to respect him. They recognized that Well in 1750 when Boone was about 16 His family took the Great Migration Across the Susquehanna River down to the Potomac up the Shenandoah Valley To a place they call Big Lick. We call it Roanoke, Virginia There they crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains into the Yadkin Valley in North Carolina They followed the path at that time called the Great Wagon Road Which followed Atheomiovi the warriors path or the trail of the armed ones which followed a buffalo trail Now Following the Wagon Road came US Highway 11 Following that came Interstate 81 Now remember when you drive on Interstate 81 that you're following The Wagon Road the Wilderness Road which followed the Warriors path which followed a buffalo trail And so many of our great highways in this country Actually follow buffalo trails because the buffalo through the thousands of years found the easiest ways to go The passes that were easiest to go through and the best places to ford the rivers and I love to think of this Continent as written on by the Indian roads highways trails and the buffalo trails and Our network of roads to a large extent actually follows that It was in the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina That boon became a famous hunter Even in his late teens he was already famous and one of my Questions was why did boon become so famous? There were hundreds even thousands of frontiersmen What was it about Daniel Boone that made him so famous and remembered by everybody and one answer to that is Boone himself who like Theodore Roosevelt was a wonderful storyteller and Something of an actor as was Theodore Roosevelt and they both knew how to dress the part We actually have a record of how Boone dressed when he was serving in the Virginia legislature in 1781 he's there with Jefferson and Patrick Henry and Randolph and they're wearing silks and brocade and there is Daniel Boone sitting in the legislature in Richmond wearing not a buckskin hunting shirt But the kind of Lindsay Woolsey hunting shirt that hunters really wore buckskin shirt when it gets wet He's just not very comfortable at all. So what they actually wore was a hunting hunting shirt made out of cloth and Buckskin leggings and there he is sitting in the legislature with these leggings made by Shawnee women with fine beadwork on them and moccasins Now somebody who dresses like that in the legislature is going to be remembered and that's exactly what Theodore Roosevelt did here He got a lot buckskin shirt the silver handle pistol and the buoy knife and Leggings he and the big hat he dressed the part They're very similar in that way and they both became famous when they were very young because they knew how to act the part I believe that Daniel Boone was what I call a verbal chameleon He could talk when he was talking to back woodsman like a back woodsman when talking to Jefferson He could talk more proper and when he was talking to Indians He could talk Indian talk in several senses We have good evidence that when things were really rough when there was about to be an attack when at a moment of great crisis Daniel Boone could stand up before 100 angry Indians and talk the big talk. That's what the Indians called it like a chief He could say my brothers. I'm delighted to see you. We will never be enemies We will always hunt together and live together Long as water runs downhill and grass grows green and spring and the stars hang in the heavens We will be friends and we will hunt and trap together and nobody will ever make us enemies He could talk them around. That's why it wasn't a great Indian fighter He could usually talk his way out of these confrontations and the Indians understood that he respected them and Usually did not kill or scalp. That's how he survived so long And when they demanded his furs his horde of beaver skins and deer hides and his fine Pennsylvania rifle which they would trade for their cheap musket. He would hand it over cheerfully and Say I'm delighted to see you and then he would pass his flask They and smoke the peace pipe So they liked him. He had a marvelous rapport with Native Americans very unusual Simon Kenton another great Frontiersman had a bad temper would get mad at the Indians and just barely escaped with his life more than once in dealing with them A great thing happened to Daniel Boone 1755 and what we call the French and Indian War he joined the militia and Served under Colonel George Washington. It was only 23 years old commander of the Virginia Militia under Edward Braddock and Therefore March to Braddock's defeat on the Monongahela Barely escaped with his life had to cut his horse loose and ride out of there as the arrows and bullets were flying But on the way to the Monongahela Boone met a young Irish trader named John Finlay Who had been down the Ohio River and traded with the Indians at the falls at Louisville And he told these stories by the campfire of this Paradise this promised land over the Alleghenies down the Ohio called Kentucky by the Urquay Meaning the level land Kentucky The Shawnee's called their settlement there Eskipa kathikki Meaning the blue limestone lick place But if you had a choice between calling a place Kentucky or Eskipa kathikki, which would you choose? And that's exactly what the white people did. They called it Kentucky and it's been called that ever since There were beaver buffalo elk deer cane clover blue grass It was paradise and there were no Indian towns there The white people didn't understand there were no Indian towns there because the Urquay had killed all the Indians who tried to settle there in the great fur wars It was their buffalo hunting preserve and other Indians would hunt there But they would slip in and out rather quickly everybody wanted Kentucky Washington wanted it Patrick Henry wanted it Jefferson wanted it the governors of the colonies wanted it the French wanted it the British wanted it It was considered the promised land And Boone devoted himself from then on to getting to the West English settlers have been trapped on the eastern side of the Alleghenies for a hundred and fifty years But they wanted to get across everybody wanted to get to the West and This dream of the West that Theodore Roosevelt Inherited has a long history Theodore Roosevelt was not the first person who believed that health and sanity lay in the West In some ways that dream goes all the way back to the Romans who dreamed of Gaul and Britain to the Normans Who dreamed of Wales and Ireland to the Irish who dreamed of Iceland to the Vikings who dreamed of Iceland and Greenland and Labrador and To the settlers on the east coast who dreamed of the Ohio Which the French had named La Belle Riviera the beautiful river and Jefferson says it outright in his notes in the state of Virginia The Ohio is the most beautiful river in the world. He just says it like that everybody wanted Ohio The truest line in the movie the Patriot which is a mess as far as history goes But when the bad guys told he's done such awful things he can never return to Britain in honor But it will be given land in the new world. He says let's talk about Ohio That is absolutely on the money. That's what everybody was talking about the Ohio Valley Well, it took Boone 14 years to actually get To the bluegrass because it was so dangerous and it was not clear how you got there you could go up To the forks and go down the Ohio River You could cross the mountain passes in Kentucky, but it was very dangerous and very expensive and he probably didn't get there until he was funded by Judge Richard Henderson who wanted to buy Kentucky from the Indians From the Cherokees now the Cherokees didn't own Kentucky, but they were happy to sell it to him and did in the 1775 So Theodore Roosevelt in his quest of the West in the 1880s was following a pattern Long established that you go to the with the Golden West the promised land and that's the place of health It's the place of sanity. It's the place of growth. It's how you grow It's how you become bigger somehow in the West It is the American dream going back to the very beginning and the other nationalities too I Will just read you one very short paragraph From this biography of Daniel Boone It's the beginning of a chapter called Kentucky was the key I like that key Kentucky was the key It's easy to forget in the 21st century the significance for the English-speaking eastern communities of the settling and holding of Kentucky The bluegrass region was valuable in itself almost beyond description as a place to claim and build farms and towns and future cities and Great wealth Explorers and speculators and leaders of the time understood that a foothold in Kentucky Served as a buffer against the Indians against the British to the north and perhaps the Spanish to the west and south But even more than that a settled Kentucky promised to open the whole Ohio valley to settlement Some Indians seemed to grasp this threat implicitly and fought with tenacity courage and imagination the forks and stations The farmers and surveyors in the great meadow They seemed to perceive from the first that once their buffalo hunting grounds in the bluegrass Reclaimed and cleared the land north of the Ohio would be next Other native leaders such as corn stalk of the Shawnees were willing at first to accommodate the English settlers and did not foresee An inexorable tidal wave of westward expansion for the whites Nothing could have been more exhilarating more intoxicating than the taking and keeping of the land across the barrier of mountains For once that hurdle was finally surpassed after 150 years of hesitating and yearning in the east the great river valleys of the central Continent would be within reach Philson described Kentucky as the best tract of land in North America and probably in the world The Ohio Valley was more beautiful and contain more land than anyone had mapped or measured and beyond lay the Illinois country The fertile Mississippi Valley stretching almost a candidate in the north and New Orleans in the south and beyond the Mississippi Reports were heard of an even bigger river valley the Missouri They reached far into a mythical west and whispered rumors of mountains so high their tips Sparkled with snow in July Whatever lay beyond in the sunlit pastures and hills of coming years Kentucky was the key the first west Kentucky was the threshold the beach head to who knew what play lands and empires of the future farther West as I said earlier the fame of Boone drove more and more settlers following him when he finally got into Kentucky and I guess he brought more than 200 people with him in 1779 including Abraham Lincoln's grandfather Abraham Lincoln There were three marriages between the Lincoln's and the Boone's very closely related so the president Abraham Lincoln was related by blood to Daniel Boone and One of Boone's closest friends in Lexington, Kentucky was was Levi Todd. It was the grandfather of Mary Todd Lincoln all kinds of connections between these people But Boone lost everything in Kentucky and most of the other Frontiersmen did as the population grew and grew and there were lawsuits over land boundaries and often scholars Including some very distinguished ones say Boone lost his land because he was an incompetent surveyor. I Jug up his survey notes and his plaits You can go to the land office. He was as good as surveyor as anybody He didn't shoot the celestial meridian that is the North Star But he used the compass and if you're doing long long lines It's better to to set your calling to the North Star But he could do the calculations the problem was there were no good maps of Kentucky So the land office didn't know where these these tracks were so they were overlapped and Boone didn't like trouble He wouldn't fight in court and if somebody sued him He'd just given the land and not only that he would loan money to people He was like an Indian or a hunter. He would share whatever he had With people if somebody needed money and he had it he would give it to them He gave his children and his friends land and as a result in a very aggressive world Farms worked by slaves in Kentucky in the late 18th century. He lost everything and Toward the end of his life Was offered a tract of land in Missouri by the Spanish governor and Said if I had a choice Between putting my head on the block and having it chopped off are returning to Kentucky I would take the former he was bitter about what had happened to Kentucky It had turned into a world very different from the wilderness. He had sought remember that combination He always sought the wilderness and his family here by in fact I say of the book that a wilderness without Indians was a contradiction in terms because as soon as the Indians were driven out The settlers would pour in chop down the trees killed the game. There was no longer a wilderness and In this way the story of Daniel Boone is the story of this country What I call a conflict of loyalties. We love nature. We love the wilderness We don't destroy it because we hate it. We love it, but it's in conflict with our desires for progress and development and That's where Theodore Roosevelt comes in. This was a great dilemma And it was Theodore Roosevelt who finally Figured out how to address this contradiction in American culture Through conservation and reclamation It's it's one of the many reasons Theodore Roosevelt is so important in American history He's also the man who saw that the pan-well canal would be there he he negotiated the treaty between Japan and Russia and He was lucky to have a secretary of state Who was a great man of genius also John Hay who helped him negotiate those treaties? You know John Hay was Lincoln Secretary's assistant secretary and with Nikolai wrote the great biography of Lincoln He's one of the great men of American history. Hardly anybody knows who John Hay was but Roosevelt inherited him from McKinley. He was McKinley Secretary of State and You just can't think of a greater diplomat really than Then John Hay and he negotiated a lot of that for with Theodore Roosevelt I want to read you one more short passage from the biography and Then talk a little bit more about Theodore Roosevelt In his old age Boone moved to Missouri Which was Spanish and then French territory? And I must say one of the high points of my research on this book was going to the Missouri Historical Society in St. Louis and filling out a form and being given two boxes of documents Called the Boone family file and he opened up the first one And there's this brown very old piece of paper with purple ink on it from the governor de la Choux Monsieur Daniel Burns Giving him his tract of land in St. Charles County on the Femme massage Creek And it's just you know, you're holding the original. I mean you really literally touch history looking at those documents all in French It was French territory Boone was given a great tract of land there when the Americans bought Louisiana 1803-1804 They stripped him of his land there again Because he hadn't cleared any any parcel of it and he hadn't built a house on his very old man, but But he loved The reason was it was still wilderness There was still Indians there his Shawnee family had moved out there He hunted with the Shawnee family and with other Indians he could paddle up the Missouri River He could paddle up the tributaries into Kansas and Iowa and once Apparently went as far as the Yellowstone on a hunting and trapping expedition Yep, and he dreamed of the Pacific it was always the West the West the West he was too old to go there but he Said that he would watch people go up to Missouri who were going all the way up and look longingly at the West We don't know where he was when Lewis and Clark went up the river and then the spring of 1804 My own theory is that he was away on a hunting trip and was not at home That's why they don't mention him. He wasn't there But his favorite hunting companion Was an African-American named Derry Coburn And he and Coburn hunted together so much that they didn't need to speak They could communicate to each other. They understood each other Now he had a long history of hunting with African-Americans The man who showed him the trails into the Western waters and the Blybridge Mountains of North Carolina was a slave herder named Burl Right where Appalachian State University is boom North Carolina There was a cabin there and Burl herded cattle and sheep for his owner And he knew the trails the Indian trails the Buffalo trails into the Western waters And it was Burl who guided Boone and Nathaniel gist into the waters of the Wattoga and the New River As Boone was seeking to go further and further west it was Uncle Monk Esteele in Kentucky Who they say taught Boone to make gunpowder very important on the frontier to be able to make gunpowder He was also by the way a gunsmith He could make rifles and he could repair them which made him seem like a magician to the Indians He could repair their guns, but Coburn and Boone hunted up the Missouri and its tributaries for years He lived to be very old when he was about 80 years old He and Coburn Were hunting deep in the woods and he was stricken with something We don't know exactly what it was. Maybe a heart attack. Maybe a stroke and Coburn went back To get his son Nathan Who assumed his father had died and Ordered a coffin to be made as he went to get the body But Boone had not died In fact, he had rallied and was able to return with Nathan And when he saw the coffin Nathan had ordered Boone was not at all pleased Made of plain boards. It was too rough and uncouth For all of his modesty and good manners Boone had a sense of style and dignity The plain coffin was used for a relative and Boone ordered a fine coffin made for himself to match the one he had commissioned for Rebecca in 1813 Soon after this event he gave directions to a cabinet maker in the settlement to prepare a coffin of black walnut for himself Which was done accordingly and it was kept in his dwelling for years John Mason Peck But right but according to Peck Boone later decided the walnut coffin was not good enough either He gave that coffin for someone else's burial and ordered an even better one for himself Quote another of cherry was prepared and placed under his bed where it continued until it received his mortal remains That cherry coffin was a handsome piece of work And the old man took pleasure in showing it off It is with Corbin sister of Daniel Morgan Boone's wife Sarah Later told Draper the coffin appeared marvelously beautiful The fame of it spread among the simple-minded settlers and it had exceedingly numerous visitors Later the coffin was stored in Nathan's new stone house But from time to time Boone would take it out to admire and study His granddaughter Dylinda later remembered that he would rub and polish it up and coolly whistle while doing it Others said he would lie down in the coffin to show how well it fit him and Sometimes he would take a nap in it scaring the children I found that story in the book called the pioneers of Missouri Published in 1840. It's just full of great anecdotes like that Part of the fun of doing history is you never know where you're gonna find things right sometimes in the most unexpected Places and speaking of Theodore Roosevelt. I was sitting in the barber chair two weeks ago the barber who loves to talk said Do you know who is the only? President in our history who never used the word I in his inaugural address And I said no He said Theodore Roosevelt about that I mean, I don't think a Roosevelt is a modest person But I do think he was so passionate about his issues and causes that it really wasn't egotism I mean, it was it was the issue that was important to him Much more than himself personally there was there was a selflessness about him Which I also associate with Daniel Bowen the many differences between the men and many similarities I think in in their their passion to help others in their great Curiosity to explore and to know to find out to connect with But you can see in in Roosevelt's Writing about the frontier that he is also very much a man of his time He doesn't have the kind of interest say in in American Indian culture that we do but he's not alone in that I mean that would be true the man who's often described as the greatest biographer of Boone who's Baclus John Baclus Hardly mentions Indians this book was published in 1930s except as those savages on the frontier We had no interest really in the Indian culture that Boone was in contact with Including the Shawnee culture so history changes and the past changes as time Changes and we look back and I was sitting on a panel with a historian Michael Wallace and Tulsa two weeks ago and somebody said Do you consider your biography of Billy the kid the definitive one and he said there's no such thing as a definitive book of History that it keeps growing and then I said no We wouldn't even want a definitive book because we want to keep discovering the evolution of history as part of its fascination It's never over It's back then, but it's still alive as we investigate it I thought I would read to you a very short passage of Theodore Roosevelt writing about Daniel Boone to give you Some sense of this this difference In chapter three of the winning of the West Roosevelt wrote Finally, however Among these long hunters one arose whose wanderings were to bear fruit Who is destined to lead through the wilderness the first body of settlers that ever established a community on the far west completely cut off from the seaboard colonies With Boone hunting and exploration were passions and the lonely life of the wilderness With its bold while freedom the only existence for which you really care His thoughtful quiet pleasant face was the face of a man who never blustered or bullied Who would neither inflict nor suffer any wrong and who had a limitless fund of fortitude Endurance and indomitable resolution on which to draw unfortunate proved adverse his self-command and patience his daring Restless love of adventure and in time of danger his absolute trust in his own powers and resources All combined to render him peculiarly fitted to follow the career of which he was so fond That's pretty good in that He understood what a peaceable person was you've been raised by Quakers and He always sought to avoid trouble if he possibly could and often lost out in business dealings because of it But I think I think Roosevelt picked up on that he was a remarkably modest person actually and It's interesting that he became such a leader when the arrows were flying the bullets were flying when there was trouble Everybody turned to Daniel Boone Even though there were men Who outranked him present and this made some people very jealous of him Richard Callaway Actually charged him with treason because he was so friendly with Indians and He liked people one of the things I discovered about moon But no other historian and repeating attention to it was he was a Freemason and that was a part of the revolutionary spirit of the 18th century Washington was a Freemason Lafayette was a Freemason von Steuben was a Freemason Nathaniel Green was a Freemason It was a very important thing a sense of brotherhood that transcended class ethnicity And included people from other races even there were African-Americans who were initiated in lodges and American Indians the great Mohawk chief Joseph Brandt was a Freemason for instance On the night of December 16th 1773 the Masonic Lodge in Boston is empty But there's some guys dressed up as Indians tossing tea and the Boston Harbor So there was that connection between the revolution and Freemason Well, I wanted to save some time for questions I'll be happy to to answer questions if you have them often People have have lots of questions about these historical figures Thank you, and please just raise your hand speak boldly and then please repeat the questions because we're taping this So who has the first question for Robert Morgan? Yes here? My sense is that he he got What was well known at that time but did not dig for instance into the Draper collection and Wisconsin Scholars such as Draper resented Roosevelt possibly because he wasn't an academic or something, but he they didn't think he dug very deeply into the documents There's an ocean of documents about moon and the first historian to draw on them was Ruben Gold Thwaites who was an associate of Draper at that the Wisconsin Historical Society Lyman Draper spent his life Collecting documents in the Ohio Valley interviewing pioneers and their children and their friends and people say he vacuumed up He begged borrowed bought some people say stole everything practically, and it is an amazing collection of letters Notebooks The account books of Daniel Bowden I mean I've confirmed several of my surmises about them by going to those account books that Draper got So I would say Roosevelt was was good But he was working mostly with what was pretty well known at that time He was not digging into those survey notes and plats and account books The question was how deep did Roosevelt? Study the document base and how accurate was his portrait, so we're going to repeat the questions just so everyone can hear go ahead Why not a more traditional Native American burial ritual since he was so close to Indians? Because the burial was in the in the charge of his family there and his daughter Jemima and Nathan and his grandson-in-law James Craig who's a Baptist preached the funeral and I wondered about that I could not find any any note on it or any indication that they let his Indian relatives know The the Shawnees had become ranchers and and live pretty much like white people there and had driven out the Osages and the other local Indians also But I could not find any reference to that his son Nathan says he had no military or Masonic honors because there was not a lodge nearby It would have been appropriate for his Shawnee family to have been involved, but I don't think they even let them now The You know of course the great controversy about Boone's burial is where is he buried? It's a question I've been asked most often. He was buried on on a little hill overlooking Charette Creek and over the bottom lands toward the Missouri beside his wife Rebecca in 1820 when he died and in 1840s a delegation came from Kentucky to dig up the bodies and bring them back to To Kentucky to put under that monument across the hill in the cemetery at Frankfurt the family and the Citizens of Missouri were so outraged they said and say to this day they got the wrong bodies and that Daniel and Rebecca is still buried on Charette Creek short of Digging up the remains and doing DNA tests. I don't know any Way to resolve this, but I'm careful what I say in Missouri or Kentucky Very passionate stuff John Worcester Yeah, why did the Spanish and the French want Boone as a settler and what did he think about these land transfers the Louisiana Territory comes back to the US in 183 That is a very good question and one of the answers is that the Spanish and then the French We're very much afraid that the British would invade out of Canada and come down the Mississippi River To take New Orleans everybody wanted New Orleans whoever control New Orleans control the interior of the continent and Their best bet they figured since they could not maintain a very big army there was to get Americans To settle in Missouri upper Louisiana to form a buffer because who had defeated the British in the revolution But it's the same thing the Mexican government brought in all those anglos into Texas Not realizing if you got enough Americans into Missouri was almost certain going to become but I think that was the main reason They wanted settlers also as a buffer against the hostile Indians in the Missouri Valley there the Kansas and the Osages But they figured that Boone was so popular and they figured rightly that wherever he went Thousands of other Yankees would pour in What was the second part of your question Well, the question is what do you think of the Louisiana purchase? I know he wanted to leave the United States when he did that he was disgusted with the way things had gone He did not think it was the country that he had he had desired and Look what happened once the the United States took over Louisiana they stripped him of his land stripped him of his title He was the syndique of the area. He was the administrator like the like the justice of the peace and was treated with great respect by the Spanish and the French mostly the French and the Indians Other questions Seeing somebody back there. Yes You know, when did Boone leave reality into mythology? Well, it began to happen in his own lifetime when a man named John Filson came to Kentucky in 1783 He decided to write a book about Kentucky to advertise land He was a real estate person He had invested land in Kentucky and he found that the best informant was Daniel Boone Living on Marble Creek to south of Lexington at that time He was so charmed by Boone everybody was charmed by Boone that he Appended it to that little book the discovery and settlement of Kentucky the adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone Proports to be an autobiography and My opinion is it's a collaboration and it is a classic work. It's it's really a kind of masterpiece Model to some extent on Robinson Crusoe in my opinion extremely romantic. It begins curiosity is natural to the soul of man and Boone says in 1769 I went in quest of the country of Kentucky He saw this as a quest a very romantic thing. So Boone helped create the legend The romantics pushed it even further this little book Impressed the French and the British as well as people in North America. Jefferson read it in Paris the French intellectuals who European intellectuals starting the romantic movement Cast Boone as the great natural man the man of the wilderness the man who could get along with the Indians and Then in the 19th century biographers such as Timothy Flint and John Mason Peck continued this So that Boone became the icon Of what was best in America the person who could live who could go into the wild and Live and he could get along with the Indians who'd learn from the Indians and This is a very important thing I mean if you came to this continent as an indentured servant as a peasant you had never been allowed to hunt You could be hanged in England for killing a deer that belonged to the royalty the nobility You'd never worn furs and you were suddenly in a place where there was unlimited Hunting and furs who would teach you that The Indians over there you were you were trading with the Indians fighting with the Indians Sleeping with the Indians the intermarrying was was very quickly and the Indians practiced the kind of democracy And I suspect some of that rubbed off Time for just a couple more Yes, I think he was away hunting and was not at home Otherwise, they would have stopped to see him and probably recorded it. We don't really know I have no proof of that but since he was away with dairy coburn hunting a lot of the time He'd be gone for weeks and even months hunting. I suspect that's what it was. See he did his deer hunting in the summertime and his fur trapping in the wintertime and He probably had gone off to start his deer hunt when they came through there By the way, a deer hide in those days was worth a Spanish dollar So a dollar came to be called a buck in the 18th century Do one more and then I have a question or two more go ahead here to what extent it boon learn native languages He spoke Indian in several senses and we know he knew enough Cherokee to understand the Cherokees Because he negotiated with them with the great chief of the cooler cooler and O'Connor stota at Wattarga and at other times and he certainly knew some Shawnee also He'd lived with them and I'll give you an example of proof that he could talk Shawnee that in I think it's in 1786 George Rogers Clark had ordered an attack on the Shawnee towns on the little Miami River north of Cincinnati and Boone was a part of that as a scout or something and They take the village of Piqua one of the capital towns and they captured the great chief Malanta who was very old and The woman chief there was always a woman chief few people know that the war chief political chief and a woman chief The woman was in charge of the woman things the the agriculture the ceremonies the children that sort of thing Okay, they have these prisoners including not a lima the the sister of the great chief cornstalk and They're chatting Boone is always telling jokes He was called wide mouth by the Cherokees because his mouth was always open laughing and telling jokes and stories and They're smoking the pipe and talking about the old days and chiller coffee and Humigarra is very angry because he's been accused of creating the debacle of the battle of Blue Licks for so many Kentuckians were killed and he runs up And he shouts to Malanta was you at the Blue Licks Malanta doesn't know a word of English now Boone has been staying there talking and telling jokes doing and Malanta has no idea what Hugh McGarry has said. He's trying to be friendly. He reaches out his hand. He's nodding and McGarry takes an axe and says I will show you Blue Licks play and splits his head open and then he turns to kill non-halema and Boone and Simon Kenton Grab him but clearly Boone was down there talking to Malanta talking about the old days Malanta doesn't know a word of English. So this proves that and how about sign Indian sign? There were Various lingua franca's and sign language they could use also Let's do one more. Yeah, Roosevelt's deep curiosity about nature. Do you find the same thing in Boone? exactly Boone was interested in the wild in The wilderness in the Indians he had an enormous respect for people different from him He had a he had a kind of Tolerance that was unusual really in any time, but but certainly in his time and I Did not talk about the passage in my book where he spends two years Alone in the wilderness of Kentucky 1769 1771 and my opinion is he did that because he couldn't tear himself away from this 16 wilderness he was studying the animals he was studying the mammoth bounds he was studying the caves the springs the salt springs and He just could not bear to go back to the adkin until he had explored the whole thing So he was a naturalist in that sense and that's another thing He shares with Theodore Roosevelt's tremendous curiosity about the world and particularly the natural world and the Indian World and when you read Thoreau Particularly writing about the wild the wilderness and solitude. It's like he's writing down what Boone had lived a hundred years before you know in in Wildness is the salvation of the world the preservation of the world that sort of thing The great romantics caught this and of course those were the people that Theodore Roosevelt had read at Harvard And the students of them so it is a great lineage of this American Romanticism and the love of nature and the wilderness It's a great element in Theodore Roosevelt's personality It's hard to think of anybody more complex than Theodore Roosevelt except for Jefferson Now Jefferson had that kind of mind this great scientific Curiosity and the love of everything from commerce to languages to horticulture You name it Jefferson and and then Roosevelt Was into it and knew quite a bit about it. Let me ask you one last question before we take our break You I as a one of the organizers of an event like this. I'm always watching listening to each lecture to hear what Contributes to the ongoing question that we're trying to resolve and one of them is how to place Roosevelt in the history of the Conservation movement and you said something I thought just extraordinarily useful in the phrase conflict of loyalties and You if I've got it right you were saying that this conflict really has two elements one is that We all know as Americans that wilderness is really somehow the core of our national experience and yet Our ongoing behavior is always a challenge to the existence of that wilderness and it's embodied in Boone and That wilderness means wilderness people native Americans and we've had a very edgy relationship with those wilderness peoples And then you said Roosevelt Finally figured out how to address this problem. Can you just reflect a little more on that? Well, I think it's part of the genius of Theodore Roosevelt I mean he really thought about he understood these problems and these deep contradictions in our culture and He always wanted to do something about it if he saw there was a need to have a canal He would do something about it and he saw all that our Natural resources our land our water and the great beauties of this country were Really endangered and he set out to do something about it and it's incredible if you go down the list of Things he did well president. He's only president what seven years, but but all these parks and monuments I mean so much of what we have is What Roosevelt just did in that time and and can you imagine the country without that? What if you know all these wonderful wilderness areas national forest monuments had been? spoiled and not made public land and not managed Roosevelt understood that land had to be Managed you couldn't leave it just pristine wilderness and he believed that forests should be harvested But wisely and carefully and that the resources should be used so That's exactly what I'm saying is that he found a pretty good solution to this great dilemma that Daniel Boone Had lived essentially this contradiction between the love of the wild and the love of development and progress and the future of civilization and that that phrase Conflict of loyalties just perfectly sets up our afternoon discussion about the future of the Little Missouri River Valley here in the North Dakota Badlands, thank you, Robert Morgan. We're gonna take a 15 minute break