 Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacotchtank peoples. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual author lecture with Bob Drury and Tom Claven, co-authors of Blood and Treasure. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs you can view on our YouTube channel. On Thursday, May 13th, at noon, historian Jonathan Zimmerman and Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Signa Wilkinson will present their new book, Free Speech. This brief but bracing book tells the story of free speech in America and makes the case for why we should care about it today. And on Tuesday, May 18th, at 7 p.m., we will host a panel discussion titled, Celebrating the Women's Suffrage Centennial. Our panelists will discuss the centennial of the 19th Amendment in 2020, the events that were planned across the country and what we learned during that turbulent year. In Blood and Treasure, Bob Drury and Tom Claven describe the inevitable conflict along the Trans-Apollachian frontier between Western-moving European colonists and the Native Americans who already live there. Using the story of Daniel Boone in the decades leading up to and through the Revolutionary War, Drury and Claven paint a vivid picture of a bloody struggle that changed the course of the newly emerging nation. In a recent book review in the Wall Street Journal, Peter Cousins called Blood and Treasure the author's finest work to date and said, Drury and Claven excel not only in superb portrayals of Boone and his white frontier contemporaries, but also in the evocation of the Eastern Woodland Indians, their way of life, their heart-wrenching efforts to protect their land from white encroachment. Bob Drury, a New York Times best-selling author and military correspondent, is the author, co-author, or editor of nine books. He has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, Liberia, Bosnia, Northern Ireland and Darfur and has written for numerous publications, including the New York Times, Vanity Fair, Men's Journal and GQ. Bob has been nominated for three national magazine awards and a Pulitzer Prize. Tom Claven was a reporter for the New York Times, served as managing editor at the East Hampton Star and was the editor-in-chief of the Independent Group of Weekly Newspapers and was a columnist and contributing writer at the Express News Group on Long Island. He has written for several prominent magazines, including Smithsonian, Parade, Readers Digest and Golf. He has received awards from the Society of Professional Journalists, the Marine Corps Heritage Foundation and the National Newspaper Association. Tom and Bob have co-authored several books and four of them, Dodge City, The Heart of Everything That Is, Halsey's Typhoon and The Last Stand of Fox Company have been New York Times bestsellers. Now let's hear from Bob Drury and Tom Claven. Thank you for joining us today. Mr. Ferriero, thank you for that lovely introduction. It was wonderful, David, and I'm so heartened that you got the pronunciation of Appalachian, correct? I can't tell you how many times we've been... It's not Appalachian, it's Appalachian. I'd also, before we even begin, I have to thank Doug Swanson for setting this all up at the National Archives and for the two men that make this happen. Brian and Jason in the sound and video booth, we wouldn't be here without you. So thank you all. Thank you all, whoever is out there in YouTube land for tuning in. I guess that's how you do. Am I too old? Tom, do I get tuning in right? Would you tune into YouTube? Works for me. So, I don't know. How about if I start with dispelling a few myths about the man whose name is in our subtitle, Daniel Boone and the Fight for America's First Frontier. First off, Daniel Boone did not die at the Alamo. That was Davy Crockett. You would not believe how many people confused the two, you know? So Boone met his end in San Antonio, Texas in 1836, no, no, no, no, no. Boone lived to the ripe old age of nearly 86, and he died in Missouri. And the second is, and this is another one that is almost universally believed, Daniel Boone did not wear and hated coon skin caps. That again was Davy Crockett. Boone was an average, he was of average height for a man of his era, 5758, but his cousins on his mother's Welsh side were big men, giants almost for the year, for the time, 63, 62, and Boone always considered himself short. He had a complex and he thought that a coon skin cap would make him look even shorter, so he liked a nice tall hunters cap. All right, with that out of the way, we can blame Walt Disney, I suppose, who cast the actor, Best Parker, as both Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett in the Disney television shows of the 50s and 60s. So it's a funny thing. When Tom and I first came up with the germ of an idea for this book, Daniel Boone was so far, he wasn't even on our radar, on our radar, I was going to say so far off our radar, but he was not even on our radar. What we wanted to do, and what we hope we have done, is written a biography of an era, not of an individual, an era when the stirrings of the Atlantic-bound 13 colonies were suddenly looking west, when the concept of manifest destiny was in the air, and although the phrase manifest destiny was not to be coined for another half century, another 50 years, but we wanted to write about this volatile era, and of course we thought that we needed a guide, someone who was going to take us through this era, and what had worked so well in one of our previous books, which David mentioned, the heart of everything that is, Red Cloud was the perfect guide for that era a century later. So naturally we thought an American Indian might do the trick. We looked at Pontiac, the Ottawa Pontiac rebellion, I'm sure you've heard of it. This flame burned bright, but it was doused way too soon for our purposes. Tecumseh came a little bit later than the time frame we wanted to write about. There's some of the lesser indigenous head men, little turtle, black fish, you probably never heard of these corn stalk. They were protagonists, wonderful protagonists, and they're in our book, in and of their own right, but they couldn't carry, they didn't live long enough to carry the entire narrative. We even looked at French men and Brits, I mean the two countries, two European countries were such a overwhelming presence on the North American continent from Canada to west to Fort Detroit, across the old Northwest, Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, South to Kentucky, and the 13 colonies in itself, but there was not a French or an Englishman who lent itself. Yet as we got deeper and deeper into our research, one name just kept appearing, Boone, where there was George Boone, Daniel's grandfather, where there was Squire Boone, Daniel's father, and of course Boone, Boone seemed to be, he was the zealot of the era we wanted to write about, or for younger viewers out there, I guess the farthest gump of the era, and we could, I remember Tom thinking, well Boone's been done, and I remember you telling me we're not doing a biography of Daniel Boone, we're going to use Daniel Boone as the guy to take us through this time frame, and I thought that was such a smart idea, I worried that Boone was overdone, but once again Tom, you kind of hit the nail on the head when you said, there's always more stuff besides what you read in high school, or what Walt Disney put on the screen, do you agree? I think that's very true of Daniel Boone, first of all, even though there have been some books about Daniel Boone, I mean David Mac Farragher is one example of a very good book by Daniel Boone, we didn't think anything had been done recently, and also again we were not writing a biography of Daniel Boone, Daniel Boone was a, he was our guide, he was our pathfinder through the story, as he was through the Cumberland Gap, as he was through the Appalachian Mountains, as he was through Kentucky, as he was through Missouri, and so there's that aspect of it, and I think to me a big part about the book that connects to Boone, but connects to many of the other characters, and connects to, I think the heart of our story, is, well what's the connection between Daniel Boone and Van Morrison? Okay, I have one for you. Years and years and years ago Van Morrison did an album, one of his more successful ones titled A Sense of Wonder, and as I was, you know, we were working on this book, and just in the last few days when I was rereading some portions of it to prepare for this program, I think what the book conveys is the sense of wonder that Daniel Boone had, and that other people have, John Finley, some of the other, Simon Kenton, some of the other people who were the first ones to cross over the mountains, cross through the mountains, and they would come to the Ohio Valley, they would come to what would later become Kentucky and Missouri, and they were seeing land, woodlands and hills and valleys and streams and rivers and game that, no, certainly no white man had seen before, this was the home of Indian tribes, so I'm not going to use the word, they discovered this territory, they did not discover it by any means, but it was a great sense of wonder that they had to see these things and to marvel at them, and I think that's something that is a theme in the book, that as the years go on and we extend our story, not just Daniel Boone, but what's happening on that western side of the Appalachian Mountains and with the Cherokee, with the Shawnee, with the Kickapoo and some of the other tribes, Delaware and some of the other tribes, there's a mutual sense of wonder in that the white settlers and explorers and hunters are seeing things for the first time, including these tribes and this culture, and the Indians, the indigenous people for the first time are seeing the white folks, you know, they're coming through the gap into over the mountains and to some extent their culture because the difference, they have the difference with the white people, the settlers, they're looking for land ownership, the Indians didn't have that same concept of land ownership, they were thinking more about survival because of what the land represented as far as hunting and what they did with the natural resources, which made sure the tribe could live another day. So you have eventually became a clash, but I think initially it was these two peoples who were connecting and countering each other for the first time and filled with wonder about where do they come from, what do they want, what do they do, what's their belief system, all these things. I hope that we conveyed that in the book because I think it's a very important part of the story and as that is sort of like kind of an umbrella, I think and Bob could speak to this, we have so many, to me, the big part of the story is so many interesting characters, whatever their background, white or red, explorer hunters, head men, tribal authority, medicine men, there's so many interesting and colorful characters that, you know, we could have easily, I think the book clocks in at about 400 pages, it could easily have been a 600 page book. Yeah, but then we would have had no readers, unfortunately. But I take your point about the historian Francis Jennings, who was one of my favorite historians, I'll make sure I get this quote right. Europeans did not conquer wilderness to what Tom said about just because in 1850 or actually probably earlier some French explorers discovered, quote marks, the Cumberland Gap elite. The indigenous people had been using the Cumberland Gap for millennia, the Cherokee to run north, they called it the warrior's path, that was part of the warrior's path. When the Cherokees ran north to raid Shawnee villages and when the Shawneys and the Delaware ran south to raid Cherokee and Choctaw, Chickasaw villages, they all used the Cumberland Gap. But Francis Jennings, Europeans did not conquer wilderness, they conquered Indians. They did not discover America, they invaded it. And to Tom's point about Boone being central to this narrative, I briefly mentioned Boone's grandfather, George Boone, when William Penn was trying to treat somewhat fairly with the mostly Delaware, sometimes Shawnee Indians, it was every other colony by the way had a militia to fight Indians. William Penn never stood up with militia. It was George Boone, Daniel Boone's grandfather who stood next to him, he was also a Quaker. When the first stirrings of Western started to ripple through the white, the Euro-American communities on the Atlantic seaboard, it was Squire Boone, Daniel's father who led a wagon train down through the Shenandoah Valley, which was just being populated and into the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. And by the way, the 16-year-old Daniel at the time was already a pathfinder, a forester, a crack shot, and the best hunter. And so he was in charge of procuring gain for the wagon train. And then of course, Boone himself. I mean, you can't write about the Euro without writing about the French and Indian War, which secured the North American continent for the Brits. And you can't write about the French and Indian War without writing about General Edward Braddock's excursion into the deepest heart of Pennsylvania to drive the French from Fort Decay, which was later renamed Fort Pitt, when of course became Pittsburgh. And Braddock's expedition was, well, Braddock's folly, they called it, because his army was wiped out. And who was on that expedition? Daniel Boone was a 20-year-old teamster. He was nearly killed next to the 23-year-old militia colonel, George Washington. Can you imagine what the history of this country would be with that? If Daniel Boone and George Washington had both been killed on that expedition. And then there was Boone through the Cumberland Gap. Now, of course, he did not discover it. He wasn't even the first white man through it. But he was the one that led the party that axed their way through it and widened it for pack horses, not for Conestoga wagons. It was another 30 years before wagons could get through. But he widened it and he settled Kentucky, which leads to, I think, Tom, probably what is surprised too strong a word when I bring up the role that Boone played in the American Revolution on the Western Front is surprised. It surprised the hell out of me. I can tell you that. It certainly surprised me too, because, I mean, I did not know, I mean, a couple of things. One, we certainly had to refresh our memories when we first started incorporating Daniel Boone into this book. When did he live? What was his heyday, for example? But what was the span of his life? Was he alive before, after the American Revolution? There is the confusion with Davey Crocker who came after the American Revolution. And then, I think, so he was part of the American Revolution, but I think also what surprised us is how active the Western Front was. The Western Front here, during the American Revolution, is, I think, to most people, a non-starter. Everything always quiet on the Western Front during the American Revolution, because everything was happening in Virginia and Massachusetts and New York and Pennsylvania and New Jersey, the most famous battles. And of course, the subject of our previous book, Valley Forge, took place in Pennsylvania. And so to discover that you had, you know, during the French Indian War, which was lost by the French, and they were pretty much kicked out of North America, and the British took over, their relationship with the Indians became more prominent. And so, when the American Revolution took place, you had, you know, British leaders like Sir Henry Hamilton, who was the Lieutenant Governor, and he was headquartered in Detroit. The hair buyer. The hair buyer was his nickname because, you know, he basically offered a bounty to the Indians who were allies of the British that, you know, you get paid if you bring scalps. But Henry Hamilton and the British were basically saying to the Indians, fight with us, fight on our behalf, fight in a company with us. And as a result, you'll get your land back. You know, these white people, these white Americans who have been taking away your land, let's defeat them, let's kick them out. And it could be yours once again. Now, by this point in the 1770s, this probably, first of all, was never going to happen anyway. And then as it turned out when the American Revolution ended, and the treaty was signed ending the American Revolution, there was no mention of any protection for the Indians or any consideration or any compensation or anything from the British for having enlisted them as allies. So on the Western frontier, you had these British led Indian armies that were attacking the forts. And we mentioned in the book at one point, there were as many as 10 forts, they were called stations then mostly at the time, 10 stations in Kentucky. And it wasn't too long before there was whittled down to three, because the others had either fallen or been abandoned, been conquered. And so that Daniel Boone was the most famous of the frontiersmen who were leading the American cause, so to speak, which really on the Western frontier, the American cause was survival. If the forts had fallen, we believe it would have opened up the door to George Washington being attacked from behind, having to fight a two front war. But the other, I think, less political, more practical consequence for people like Daniel Boone in his fort called Boonesboro and his comrades and their families is that there would have been no place left for them to go. There was no safe place for them. They would have died. They would have been taken hostage if they were lucky, but most of them would have been killed in a very horrible way. So that Daniel Boone played a prominent role in the American Revolution by really leading the frontier fight against the British and the British led Indian tribes. I remember feeling how lucky we were to be able to discover this, to include this in our book, because we really believed, and I think it's true from the feedback we've gotten, almost no one knows about Daniel Boone in the American Revolution. Turning back that Hamilton's Anglo-Canadian Indian army of Boonesboro, vastly outnumbered of Boonesboro, a week long siege, and Hamilton's army scattered back across Yohau River saving Washington's continental army for having to fight a two-front war, which Washington was not sure he could win a two-front war. That role that Boone played on the western frontier of the American Revolution did come as a surprise to me. What might come as also a surprise, maybe perhaps not a good one for people with delicate stomachs, is that one reviewer, it wasn't Peter Cousins who David Ferriero mentioned in his opening, I can't remember who it was, but he gave us a terrific review, but then asked kind of like a movie rating at the bottom. He said, blood and treasure is not for the faint of heart, and I cannot disagree with him. I mean it was that's the blood and blood and treasure. The treasure was the land. The blood was, well let's face it, the book opens with Daniel Boone's 16-year-old eldest son James. Having just been ambushed, his party was just ambushed by a combined Cherokee Delaware Shawnee war party, James is bleeding out in the shadow of Cumberland Mountain, gut shot, and the Indian who led the ambush was known as Big Jim to the Anglos and the Americans is standing over James Boone plucking his fingernails out, plucking his toenails out before he scalps him and bashes in his head, and the book years and years later ends with Daniel Boone's another son of Daniel Boone, Israel Boone, dying in his father's arms. An Indian's musket ball lodged in his heart and gouts of blood are spewing out of his mouth as he tries to tell his father goodbye, and in between there is a lot of what historian called a whirlwind of blood and carnage in our book, but that's just the way it was. The American people, or I should say the Euro-American people from Cotton Mather preaching from his pulpit, the famous preacher Cotton Mather, preaching from his pulpit in Boston about the the devilish red sons of Satan, to even as luminaries as Thomas Jefferson who once proposed exterminating the tribes between the Atlantic Ocean and Mississippi River, the Indians knew the Americans or the Anglo-Americans and then the Americans wanted their land and they were not about to give it up without a fight. So there was a grand tour of hideous torture and disembowelment and dismemberment and scalping and burning at the stakes, and but I do want to emphasize before I throw it back to Tom, the Butcher's bill for this era, the mid to late 18th century, it went both ways. For every white infant scalped or tied to a tree to use as target practice for for arrows or for every militiamen who was made to dance while his arms were lopped off, or for every continental army officer who was burned at the stake, there was a lot of burning at the stakes to the point where one witness remembers one Colonel, a friend of George Washington's as a matter of fact, he had been flayed, he had been burned, as he was being burned his brains boiled so that that they melted and whistled out of his not, a whistling came out of his nostrils reminiscent of a teacup, but for every Native American atrocity there was also a Euro-American atrocity that we had, there were there were militiamen who would fall on peaceful villages and just kill men, women and children, there was that Pennsylvania delegation that fell on a converted Delaware village, they had converted to the Moravian faith, they would not take up arms, and as they lined up to have their heads mashed in, men, women and children once again, they sang hymns and said prayers, there were the there what began on one of the many Indian wars, Lord Dunwar's war, what began this was when the Virginia militiamen lured some small troop of mingos into a trading post ostensibly to talk peace with them and then murdered them all including the wife of the mingle leader Logan and once again Tom mentioned that Henry Hamilton out in Detroit was paying for scalps, well the lead military officer in the North American continent Jeffrey Amherst was also paying for scalps and well if you could get a scalp doesn't matter where you get it from you could dig up an Indian graveyard in the middle of a tack on a village or you could cut open the wombs of pregnant Indian women rip out the fetuses and scalpa it was it was a it sounds to us I mean David mentioned in his opening I have spent some time in hell holes from Darfur to Afghanistan to to to Iraq to Sarajevo Belfast at least you get a beer at the end of the day at Belfast you couldn't anywhere else but I think if if I were surprised I guess Tom by the role Daniel Boone played in the western front of the American Revolution I was also fairly surprised by the carnage the utter carnage that permeated this period I don't know if you were or not but well I think we had prepared ourselves a little bit for this you know it's sort of a I harken back to when we were working on our book the heart of everything that is which came out in 2013 and and and Bob had mentioned it earlier red cloud is our main character and it basically is the last 10 to 15 years of the plains Indians before they were forced onto reservations and red clouds war in the mid-1860s and certainly it was present in that book so I think I mean I maybe it was a bit surprised that there had been no evolution of violence it had been bad a century earlier more than a century earlier it had been bad then it just it just continued as as the tribes retreated west and as the white settlers and explorers and hunters moved for intruded further west but something that I think is very important to to point out is that you know connected to this is that Daniel Boone many if not almost all of his contemporaries believed that they could commit these atrocities first of all because they in some cases they thought they were getting revenge for what was visited upon them but also because they didn't look at the Indians as humans they were subhumans and so you were you were skinning an animal for example you weren't skinning a human being however what's very important that I think we should point out is that Daniel Boone was not he was a man of his time yes but he was a man out of his time as far as his attitude towards Indians which was good because I think it would have been very difficult for us maybe impractical for us to spend you know all these pages with Daniel Boone and he's he's an insufferable person as far as his relationship with Native Americans you know quite the opposite he first of all as a child his family always lived always lived on the age of their frontier so he was interacting with Native Americans as a child as an adolescent as a teenager he came to admire them he liked those he was fascinated with the way they walk the way they carry themselves their language their jewelry their clothing their survival skills he learned a lot from them that he adapted into his own every day activity when he was her medicine the medicine that they cure ailments and wounds things like that so even their religion I mean he he he is somebody that came from a Quaker family and he said at one point that he had as much respect for the Great Spirit as he did for any Christian God and that's because he was somebody who admired people who were proud people who know how to survive took care of families I think one of the interesting things that that some of the characters find out is the idea that Indians love their families and how they treated their families and and that's is that's not something that subhumans do or why would they care about their families how how do you love if you're a subhuman or a savage and so I I think we we we got it right and we certainly made a great effort that somebody reading Blood and Treasure is going to get a really in-depth portrait from the indigenous point of view Daniel Boone's in the subtitle but so much of what we write about and so many of the anecdotes and so much of the information is from the indigenous point of view so you know some of these characters like a few we mentioned before like cornstalk and hanging maw and dragging canoe and blackfish uh and and the young Tecumseh and uh and and so we we want people to really feel like you are their quality they've just made a trip to the edge of the frontier in the 1760s and 1770s he was a he was a different man uh as Tom I think Tom put it best out of his time yet in his time uh you know for I mean Cotton Mather who I mentioned before probably would have excommunicated well even though Cotton Mather wasn't a Quaker he was the uh there was a word with the Quakers kicked the out time I can't remember it but uh this is associated I can't remember what the word was but the Quakers would have no truck with Daniel Boone's empathy for the Indians Great Spirit uh that's as Tom mentioned I think that's what really drew us to this man this Pathfinder as a guide the fact that he wasn't repellent he wasn't repugnant he really tried to understand the Indians point of view now at one point he was captured and he was adopted into the Shawnee tribe and he tried to convince them now this greats on our 21st century years but he tried to convince them listen the long knives are going to wipe you out unless you become more white that's a quote an unquote who is for to Daniel Boone's first biographer that sounds what do you mean more white that sounds so uh off color to us if not profane perhaps but it showed that boom the man of his time his heart was in the right place which made him a man out of his time and what I think that Tom Tom when we talked early on about Tom's like there's more to boon than most people know there's more to boon than the dignification of boon or the what we learn in history and I think there are two stories that kind of illustrate that one and one went down and boon family lore as old dental surprise dental would go on these long hunts uh long hunters their heyday was only a decade a decade and a half long but at the time they were as they were as mythical as the mythical johnny apple seed or pawbungan and they would disappear into the into the forest beyond the frontier for 12 16 maybe two years and they'd come out with their pack horses laden with deer skins and beaver furs beaver pelts and at one point boon was off on another indian war this one called the Cherokee war he was part of the North Carolina militia and on the way back after they had defeated Cherokee he asked his commanding officer do you mind if I hunt he was in eastern Tennessee and he didn't know the territory and so he hunted and all told he was gone for like 16 months now daniel moon was a fairly he was a lettered man as one biographer described not a literate man but a littered man he always carried a copy of uh swifts gulliver's travels wherever he went so anyway he was gone for 16 months and he could do his arithmetic and we got home when he got home back to uh the the yadkin valley in uh in north Carolina his wife rebecca was nursing a baby girl so daniel was like nine months i've been gone 16 you know and so they talked and rebecca said listen daniel i thought you were dead i'm a widow on the frontier i thought i was a widow on the frontier with two other children two young children and your brother netty who by the way netty was taken for daniel's twin they look so much alike your younger brother netty gave me comfort he gave me suker and one thing led to another and i'm sorry but i thought you were dead and so daniel confessed to his wife that he had had dalliances with indian maidens as he put it and finally he looked at his wife and he looked at the baby girl and he said netty huh so much the better it's all in the family and that's this was unheard of at the uh at the time among civilized white people so to speak and the other story i just want to tell real quick before i take it back to time when boon was leading that party that was hacking its way or laying the trail uh before through and after the cumberland gap a young irishman was part of the ax party and the only there were two women in the party one was a black slave the other was daniel's uh daughter susanna susie and susie was how shall we properly say we are talking at the national archives let's just say she was a fun loving woman and so this young irishman who was part of the ax party came up to daniel boon he had fallen in love with susie boon he asked for her hand in marriage now as politically as a father could daniel try to dissuade this young irishman william haze was his name trying to convince haze that perhaps susie was not a one-man kind of woman if you know what i mean and but haze would not be dissuaded he married susie boon and several weeks later haze reappears and he talks to daniel pulls daniel boon aside he said i i can't kind of get susie to quit her this is a quote her frolic in ways and daniel just looked at him and smiled and said you know did what did i what did i warn you about i mean trot father trot mother did you expect a pace and colt and the fact that we can humanize daniel boon in that kind of sense i think even makes him a better guy through blood and treasure that we probably could have expected right top i think so also that he had you mentioned this earlier in our talk he had such a long life uh you know if daniel boon had died which i mean the lifespan for for an american male probably in the mid 1700s and 1770s was could have been 45 years old if not less and he lived to be almost 86 uh that he had such a long life in that he covered so much territory literally covered so much territory but also so much time he experienced so many things i mean we even have him when we later in the book when we follow boon the rest of boon's life um you know he went on his last long hunt when he went is in his mid 70s along with his um one of his best friends simon kenton and a few others and according to several sources he made it as far west as the yellowstone river and and before he turned turned and came back and so what i think the tightrope we walked i hope we did it successfully is daniel boon was a legend he was a legend in his own time he's a larger than life figure uh he's he's the kind of person that tall stories were you know clung to uh but i think we we we did use the word humanize him i think we humanized him a great deal he was a family man he and his wife rebecca were married for 56 years they had a whole parcel of kids he loved his children uh they they he he had a you know as his family expanded his children there is in law his sons in law his daughter's in law so i think we're seeing daniel boon a legend but i think we're seeing daniel boon the family man and daniel boon the the explorer and daniel boon the some the person who in a lot of ways represented i go back to that sense of wonder that people were having in the 1770s when they were not discovering but they were experiencing a new land yeah uh uh do we have questions i i believe the youtube chat box if there's questions uh what kind of records did you oh you can read that tom can't you i want to what kind of records did you use to which probably oh damn excuse oh i'll be right i spilled coffee up tom take that question uh i'll take yes i will take that question uh one of the things that that we were very fortunate about is that daniel boon lived at a time well lived long enough that people in his later years were interested in finding out about the real daniel boon and so there were people that went to i guess the word is interview him they went to talk to him they encouraged him to reminisce about some of his adventures which he did and and not only did he have a long life but he had a sharp mind until his you know his last very very very last years so he had memories that he could convey uh we have to pay a special thanks to uh lineman draper lineman draper was uh came after boon so he never had a chance to sit down with boon himself but he uh interviewed members of boon's family his sons and daughters people who knew boon who was still alive when lineman draper came along he was going to dedicate himself and he did dedicate himself to collecting all this information and writing the massive authoritative biography of daniel boon and he claimed that he covered something like 50 000 miles on horseback all over to place to interview people and track down records and documents and letters and things like that and it's kind of poignant because uh the time finally came with draper said okay i'm ready you know after years and years of doing this he said i'm ready and he sits down starts writing his biography and he gets to a certain point in the biography and he stops and he can't write anymore i mean this i guess what to use a contemporary phrase but this massive case of writer's block he had all his material i mean pages and pages and pages of material and he just couldn't do it year after year went by so uh you know what came of that was that draper was the uh the i believe the chief historian or director of the wisconsin historical society so he ended up giving up after a time he couldn't just wasn't going to do it and he presented all his papers and his archives and everything to the wisconsin historical society so that that's a great archive uh to for our daniel boone material many of it contemporaneous so that was very important for us to be able to be have access to that and it was not by far not the only thing is a many other sources that we use but i think journals diaries but you're right lineman draper was the man the ultimate authoritative aspect of the book i think is thanks to lineman draper yeah tom do you think we could have written this book with that lineman draper well i think yes but i don't think we'd be as proud of it as we are because we really do i i certainly think that that people can read this book and and feel confident that we did no stone was left unturned and to get accurate information and lineman draper was a big stone i see we have a did boone and crocket ever meet no not that we know nothing anyone knows a crocket was a bit younger than boone i would i forget how generational generations go but i'm not sure you know what he was he was the next generation after daniel boone and he was also tennessee and if you have ever been to the cumberland gap is that the very most northeastern part of tennessee where virginia the western part not west virginia the western part of virginia and then you go over the gap and you're in kentucky i i did the gap i followed daniel boone's trail from pennsylvania to the yakin valley in north carolina and through the gap and up into boones borough and what is now daniel boone national forest and uh so no crocket was a western tennessee man and and boone uh if you're looking at a map i'll use my hand boone is crockets down here and boone is up here so i better pull him back so no that's a long winded answer your question today over me uh related to daniel morgan yes indeed they were cousins uh and uh and daniel morgan is um you know it's just one of those funny things daniel morgan was a character in our previous book valley forge because he and his his man his frontiersman his sharpshooter's were part of some of the military actions that george washington and the continental army participated in they saved they saved washington's bacon at brandy one creek and holding off and uh and late and late in the american revolution daniel morgan is credited with leading the american forces or the bulk of the american forces in the battle of calpins which was a very important victory in the southern theater of the american revolution late the revolution uh but but uh so to re-encounter daniel morgan as a cousin of daniel boone and some of their adventures together in long haunts and military exploits i mean if i remember correctly i think daniel morgan was part of that the braddock feet and was badly wounded but recovered uh got through the jaw shot through the jaw and he was also uh when i mentioned before that boone's cousins on his welsh mother's side on his maternal side morgan was six four three i mean he was pretty era that was a giant of a man and he was known in the backwoods they call them ordinaries which were these rough and tumble taverns where everything from horse racing to cock fighting to uh to pistol shoot and also wrestling not wrestling wrestling and daniel morgan was allegedly there's no way to prove this he was allegedly an undefeated raster in his youth as he went from ordinary to ordinary which means went from tavern to tavern challenging any commerce to a wrestling match for drinks of course for that cheap corn liquor they served out there tom we have to get together sometime and drink some of that cheap corn liquor i'm not in any hurry i don't know what that would do i'm not daniel young daniel morgan that's for sure well listen tom i don't think we have any more questions so let me just finish up okay you know tom and i are both very aware that the four most important words in uh any public speakers vocabulary are and so in conclusion so and so in conclusion uh not long ago a visiting lecture actually he was a general this was before our relationship with china so deteriorated he was a general in the chinese people's army and he's surprised that an audience of american officers at the us army command and general uh staff college by just kind of happen happen stansley mentioning uh well of course the longest war in recorded history was the war for by the united states and the american officers were like what is this guy talking about i mean yes we've been in afghanistan i mean this was maybe six years ago so we would have been in afghanistan for 14 years and uh but that doesn't come close to europe's 30 years war much less it's violent 100 years ago and in the next breath the chinese officer mentioned he was talking about uh the united states is the euro american 300 year war against the north american continents indigenous people and the officers in attendance were from somewhere astounded some were dumbfounded none really took it well including a historian uh who taught at west point of time peter maslowski and i like peter maslowski's writing later maslowski came around to agree with the chinese general's uh statement and he said yes in fact we did fight a 300 year war against the amer against the native americans for their land and if you want to see how this maybe came out all you have to do is today in 2021 of the 330 million on americans 46 million of them can trace their lineage their ancestorship to americans who passed through the cumberland gap which daniel boone opened up and if you want to come really full circle to that whole thing then we'll go back to what i said in the beginning how our book opens with james boone being bleeding out and being tortured by the war party led by the the inter intertribal war party led by the shawnee indian big jim later in boone's life he's in his mid 50s he takes part in one more indian war they crossed the Ohio river the north carolina pennsylvania and virginia militia and they descend on this indian town shawnee town and as they're charging boone hears dogs banging off in the distance to his left he knows what that means there's probably indian warriors over there so he takes a flutune left he turns left and they start chasing they come to a meadow where he sees in fact a party of indian warriors fleeing as they're pounding after them on their horses one indian stops kneels shoulders his kentucky long rifle and blows out of the saddle of the militia man next to boone boone pulls up he rains up and he looks and it is in fact big jim the shawnee who had killed his son james low those years ago boone is stunned big jim and they recognize each other and big jim is frantically trying to reload and as he's reloading boone is standing there he draws his sword and he looks and he looks and what happens next i don't know tom should i tell him or should i tell him that they want to know what happens next they better read the damn book what do you think oh i always vote for they've got to better read the damn book actually i vote for buy the damn book and then read better oh goodness well this has been i thank you all tom we thank you all you got to you got anything to end with well i thought i would read the first 30 pages of the book did we promise to do that no we did yes i forgot yeah no but i want to thank everybody i want to thank the national archives uh it was an honor to have a chance to give a talk there uh when the heart of everything that is came out and it's an honor the only taint on it of course is we're not there in person and we hope that opportunity again but at least we have this this avenue to to talk to people and we're really grateful for it and i'm sorry for spilling my coffee i feel all wet here but i'm sorry for ducking out on you but i got back as fast as i could so that's it people thank you and good night thank you