Old Dan'el lived long enough to become America's first frontier hero. . .a legend in his own time. Faragher unravels the legend, sets the record straight and explains how American mythmaking works.

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History for 1993

In the first and most reliable biography of Daniel Boone in more than fifty years, award-winning historian Faragher brilliantly portrays America’s famous frontier hero. Drawing from popular narrative, the public record, scraps of documentation from Boone’s own hand, and a treasure of reminiscence gathered by nineteenth-century antiquarians, Faragher uses the methods of new social history to create a portrait of the man and the times he helped shape. Blending themes from a much vitalized Western and frontier history with the words and ideas of ordinary people, Faragher has produced a book that will stand as the definitive life of Daniel Boone for decades to come, and one that illuminates the frontier world of Boone like no other.

John Mack Faragher is the Arthur Unobskey Professor of American History at Yale University. He is the author of Women and Men on the Overland Trail, for which he received the Frederick Jackson Turner Award, and the acclaimed Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie.

Published: 19931115 Pages: 448