Boone and Crockett Never Met, and Both Hunted Past Any Help

In December 1887, Theodore Roosevelt hosted a dinner in New York and founded a club for big-game hunters. He named it for two men who never met each other.

Daniel Boone died in Missouri in 1820. Davy Crockett was thirty-four and living in Tennessee. They never crossed paths, never traded a letter, and never shared a campfire. Roosevelt put their names together anyway, because each had hunted in country where nobody was coming to help.

That's what "wild" meant. No map, no road, no doctor, no telegraph. If it went wrong, it went wrong alone.

Two years in the woods

Boone left his North Carolina farm in May 1769 with John Findley and a few other men. They crossed the mountains through the Cumberland Gap and into Kentucky, hunting deer for hides. Hides were money on the frontier.

He stayed gone for about two years. His wife, Rebecca, ran the household and raised the children with no word of when he'd be back.

Late that first year, a Shawnee party caught Boone and his brother-in-law John Stewart and took their furs and horses. Boone got loose after about a week. The Shawnee had told them plainly to go home and not come back, since this was Indian hunting ground.

Here's the first thing the postcard version of the frontier leaves out. The wilderness wasn't empty. Shawnee, Cherokee and other nations hunted Kentucky, and they had every reason to treat white hunters as trespassers. Boone's story is hard to tell honestly without that fact, and it makes him more interesting, not less.

What it cost

In October 1773, Boone tried to move his family to Kentucky. A war party attacked the stragglers and killed his oldest son, James, who was sixteen. The settlers turned back.

Most men would have quit. Boone went back in 1775, hired by Richard Henderson's Transylvania Company to mark a road through the Cumberland Gap. It became the Wilderness Road, and thousands of settlers later used it. He founded Boonesborough at the end of it.

The next year, Shawnee and Cherokee warriors captured his daughter Jemima and two other girls near the fort. Boone and a rescue party caught up with the kidnappers within days and got all three girls back.

In February 1778, Shawnee warriors captured Boone himself while he was out making salt with a group of men. Chief Blackfish adopted him and gave him the name Sheltowee, "Big Turtle." Boone lived among them for months. When he learned an attack on Boonesborough was coming, he slipped away in June and covered about 160 miles in roughly four days to warn the fort. It held through a siege of about ten days that September.

And then his own side questioned him. Some settlers suspected a man who'd lived so comfortably with the Shawnee. He was court-martialed, cleared, and promoted to major.

The ending is the part nobody puts on a lunch box. Boone lost nearly every acre he'd claimed, because his land titles were tangled and the lawyers were better than the surveyors. He left Kentucky around 1799 for Spanish Missouri. He was still hunting in his eighties. If you want the full measure of the man, a leader who put the fort first, Washington slept in a tent until his men had roofs. Boone and Washington had both been at Braddock's disaster in 1755, Washington as an officer and Boone as a teamster. Boone walked out of it and kept walking for sixty-five years.

The other frontier

Crockett's wilderness came a generation later and further west, but it was still wild enough. He was born in 1786 in East Tennessee. At twelve, he ran away rather than face his father's belt over a schoolyard fight. He spent a couple of years working for drovers and farmers far from home before he came back.

He learned the woods the way Boone had, by being in them. In 1821, a flood wrecked his mills and left him in debt. He moved his family west to the Obion River country, rough ground thick with canebrake and bears. He paid what he owed.

By his own count, he killed 105 bears in a single season. Treat that number carefully. It comes from his Narrative, published in 1834 with help from a fellow congressman, Thomas Chilton, and Crockett wasn't above polishing a story. But the hunting was real, and so was the hunger it fed. Bear meat fed families and bear fat was cooking oil. A man who couldn't shoot straight didn't eat, and neither did his kids.

The hard parts

Crockett served under Andrew Jackson in the Creek War of 1813 and 1814, and he later wrote candidly about the brutality he saw. Years later, in Congress, he voted against Jackson's Indian Removal Act in 1830. It cost him Jackson's favor and, eventually, his seat.

He lost reelection in 1835 and left for Texas. He died at the Alamo on March 6, 1836. Historians still argue over how. Some accounts say he fought to the last, and others say he was captured and executed. The record is thinner than the legend, and a sourced history should say so.

The part Roosevelt saw

Neither man hunted for sport. They hunted to eat, to pay debts, and to get their families through winter. The word "sportsman" was a later idea.

Roosevelt's contribution was the next step. By 1887, the buffalo were nearly gone, and market hunters had stripped game from huge parts of the country. He and the other founders of the Boone and Crockett Club, including George Bird Grinnell, argued that a hunter owed something back. They pushed for fair chase, for sensible limits, and for protecting wild country such as Yellowstone. The club's name still sits on the record book for North American big game.

Boone and Crockett supplied the character. Roosevelt supplied the rules that kept the game alive for the next hunter.

If you want to hear these two in their own voices, read Crockett's Narrative, which is short and free online. Read it as a politician's book with a bear hunter inside it. Then go out in November, pack more than you think you need, and tell somebody where you're going. They'd have wanted to know somebody would notice.