Did Daniel Boone dislike dogs 1927
DID DANIEL BOONE DISLIKE DOGS?
WHEN the career of that great Indian fighter, hunter, and frontiersman is considered “in the light of all that history, tradition, and border romance have had to say about him,” the question of his attitude toward dogs may be of small importance, remarks the New York Sun in an editorial which goes on to remark that the question nevertheless “has rent parts of North Carolina, especially around about Holmans Ford on the Yadkin, and it is interesting Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri.” As we read on:
Dr. Archibald Henderson, “hard-headed professor of mathematics” at the University of North Carolina, seems to have raised the issue and stirred up doubts, and the News and Observer of Raleigh says Dr. Henderson “ought to know better than to knock down legends of Daniel Boone.”
When a person leaves North Carolina, he has a reason. “If it hadn’t been for the barking of dogs Daniel Boone would have continued to live at Holmans Ford in Yadkin county.” But that is not the way “the hard-headed professor of mathematics” puts the matter. He declares that Boone was not a solitary nomad answering the lure of the wilderness and the call of the wild. On the contrary, he was “the skilled agent of a bold, creative mind, the employee of a group of North Carolina gentlemen organized in a colossal commercial enterprise for opening the way to the West and the colonization of the territory for speculative purposes.”
The doctor takes little stock in the story of Boone building on his own initiative the famous trail through the Cumberland Gap and into the Transylvania section of the mountain land. He says that Boone and thirty axmen were hired by the land company to widen and clearly mark an old Indian trail, and that this path came to be called “Boone’s Wilderness Trail.” What was known as Boone’s Fort was built by Boone and other pioneers for the land company. And then as if to pile Pelion on Ossa, he says that Boonesborough was not “even the first permanent settlement in Kentucky,” James Harrod and his party having founded Harrodsburg previously.
The legends of North Carolina and Kentucky say that long before Boone went with the land company he had roamed through the Kentucky wilderness, that he had hairbreadth escapes from Indians and that his one desire was to find a stopping-place where he could sleep at night in peace. But his troubles were not barking dogs alone but land squatters. Dr. Henderson gives to Boone his full measure of fame as an adventurer, pioneer, and Indian fighter, but he refuses to accept as trustworthy the fulsome so-called “autobiography” by John Filson.
Boone was ever seeking a place where he would not be disturbed. Every time he moved, however, he would hear the barking of a dog and he would know that some settler was not many miles away.
Source: The Literary Digest for October 15, 1927
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