While I was stuck in Crawl Space Gallery, I read this book "Daniel Boone: An American Life" by Michael A. Lofaro. My main objective was to get into pioneer character while I was holed away as a metaphorical frontiersman making a home for my family. These ideas stuck with me for sure:
*Kentucky was the promised land! In it were bear, elk, moose, and loads of bison.
*Boone was INSANELY courageous. Imagine leaving your family for months on end with a lightly packed horse or 2 and a couple pals to go into uncharted land where people lived who would mercilessly kill you because you were on 'their property'. All the while surviving the cold of winter in make-shift cabin or lean-to so you could hunt hundreds of big game animals for pelts. Can you smell the dirt, blood, and guts?
* We have a violent and bloody history (we know this but isn't the reminder important?). Both in interaction with American Indians and with 'the resources' of our land 2oo years ago, namely big game animals.
*Boone was captured by Indians a number of times - once he was adopted and lived happily with the tribe so long people thought we was a traitor.
* While living in Kentucky Daniel Boone wanted to move to Missouri (new promised land) so he fell a poplar tree and made a 60 feet x 5 feet canoe to export all of his family in. That's really big!
* The Boy Scout's were modeled in spirit after Daniel Boone by its founder Dan Beard who regarded Boone "the greatest of all Scouts".
*The council my Boy Scout troop was in was called Buffalo Trace as it was in the northern portion of that migratory trail that Daniel Boone so blissfully hunted in Kentucky.
At the close of the book the author hits a few points regarding Boone's conflicted motivations as he was at once a true man of nature and a hunter, but as well a diplomatic civilian who help to establish many frontier towns that would become cities.
"Boone also mirrored one very central American concern- the conflict of civilization and the wilderness. Which was the ideal state?....These contradictory impulses are still with us. Farms and forests, factories and parks, energy economics and ecology- all are pairs of opposites that are integral though unreconciled parts of the American self-image that Boone represents."
It is fascinating to me that the life Boone lived a few hundred years ago was at once vastly different than ours yet in so many ways an extension of America's current psychological and intellectual make-up
I used to get Boy's Life... I think I ordered a pair of x-ray glasses from the back of the magazine. I don't think they ever came. Fuckers.
I just realized a couple months ago how bloody our nation's history is also. Was reading Jon Krakauer's Under the Banner of Heaven and almost got sick at the reporting of animosity and violence among Mormons, Indians, and other Americans in the past 200 years even. Wow.
I miss how much we studied Boone and Crockett, et al, at Lutheran elementary.