Everyone Needs To Know The Real Story of Daniel Boone

**Matt Walsh** (0:00)
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The Shawnee warriors were standing in two parallel lines about five feet apart. They were armed with clubs and tomahawks.
Daniel Boone's task was very simple. He had to run between the two lines, ducking and dodging as best he could, and absorbing whatever blows landed on him. If he fell, the consequences were clear. He would be beaten to death on the spot. If he made it to the end, still standing, the reward was a little less clear. He might be allowed to live or he might not. Boone did not hesitate. He weaved his way through the gauntlet, making it from one end to the other quickly. While sustaining relatively minor injuries, the Shawnee chief, a man called Blackfish, was impressed, so impressed that he decided to let Daniel Boone live, at least for now. He would take Boone as a prisoner, and in keeping with the custom of many Indian tribes, give him a new name, Sheltui, which means big turtle. It was February of 1778 Daniel Boone, the pioneer, trailblazer and eventual folk hero of the American frontier, had been captured by the Shawnee while out collecting salt. In those days and in that part of the country, still in its infancy, getting salt was not as simple as running to the grocery store, and salt itself was not merely a seasoning to make your food taste better. It was a vital survival necessity. Salt was how you preserve meat, and back in Boone's borough, the settlement that Boone founded, they were running dangerously low. So Boone set out with a group of 30 men to the Salt Springs about 60 miles away. It was an arduous task which would take several weeks to complete, and it would leave the settlement, one of only a scattered few in the wilderness of Kentucky, vulnerable to attack, but they had no choice. The Shawnee found Boone and his men while they were out near the Salt Spring. Boone's group was badly outnumbered, had no hope of resistance. Even worse news was that a number of Shawnee wanted to execute all the prisoners outright, and there was news somehow even worse than that.
This same Shawnee party was on its way to Boone's borough, which with Boone and his company captured, was almost entirely defenseless. Boone's wife and children and the wives and children of many of the rest of the men were sitting ducks. But Daniel Boone was crafty when he needed to be. He convinced Blackfish that if they left the settlement alone for the winter, he would personally accompany the Shawnee back to the settlement in the spring and persuade the residents to surrender peacefully. Boone was apparently convincing enough in this ruse that some of his own men thought he had turned traitor. A fact that down the line would lead to a court martial. For now, Blackfish bought Boone's argument, and he was persuaded to let all the men live as prisoners. But first they, or at least Boone, would have to run and survive the gauntlet, which he did. Boone remained in captivity for several months, long enough that the people back in Boonesboro, to include his wife and children, gave him up for dead. But things changed in June of 1778 Boone learned that Blackfish was planning to assemble a war party and descend on Boonesboro. He had apparently abandoned his plans for diplomacy. Boone knew that he had to make a move and make it fast. So he made a run for it. He escaped the Shawnee Village and fled into the wilderness. He would have to make it home in time to warn them of the coming attack, but there was a problem. Home was 160 miles away, 160 miles through the wilderness, a distance that Boone would have to travel mostly on foot after his horse collapsed and died early in the journey. Now it's hard for our modern minds to appreciate a distance of 160 miles, and these days we might drive that length in an afternoon, when you factor in a Starbucks stop and maybe a bathroom break, it should take about three hours, but 160 miles on foot through the forest with Indian warriors hot on your trail and an army of natives on their way to murder your entire family is a different matter entirely. And this must all be done with almost no provisions. Indeed, we know that Boone carried very little, whatever supplies he had could not have amounted to much. One account suggests that during the entire journey, he ate only a single meal and a small piece of dried venison. Whether that account is perfectly accurate or not, the broader reality is not in doubt. Boone was not undertaking a carefully supplied expedition. He was fleeing for his life and for the lives of everybody in the settlement. He had to get there and he had to get there fast. An extraordinary journey lay before him.