Daniel Boone escorting settlers through the Cumberland Gap, 1851-52 by George Caleb Bingham (1811-79)
On September 26, 1820, Daniel Boone, one of the most well-known figures of the Appalachian frontier, died at the age of 85 in Missouri. His life was part history and part legend, but the story of his death and the contested fate of his remains is one of the most intriguing chapters of all.
Daniel Boone was born in 1734 in Berks County, Pennsylvania, the sixth of eleven children in a Quaker family. He grew up on the edge of the Pennsylvania frontier, where he learned to hunt from both European settlers and Native Americans. By his mid-teens, he was already known locally as one of the region’s finest hunters.
Boone served as a militia member in the French and Indian War, married Rebecca Bryan in 1756, and supported his growing family through hunting and trapping. As pressure from settlers pushed deeper into contested lands, Boone led the way for settlers eager to move west into Kentucky. In 1775 he helped blaze the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap and established Boonesborough, one of the first non-native settlements west of the Appalachians.
During the Revolutionary War, Boone was both a defender of the frontier and a captive of the Shawnee, who adopted him into their tribe before his dramatic escape. His exploits, including the rescue of his daughter Jemima from a Shawnee raiding party in 1776, cemented his reputation. By the 1780s and 1790s he was a household name, celebrated as a living symbol of the American wilderness.
Boone’s later years were marked by financial troubles and land disputes in Kentucky. In 1799, he relocated with his family to what’s now St. Charles County, Missouri, then part of Spanish Louisiana. The Spanish government welcomed him, appointing him as a local official and militia leader. After the United States bought that territory in the Louisiana Purchase, Boone lived quietly but remained a respected figure. Even in his seventies, he continued to join long hunting expeditions, often venturing hundreds of miles along the Missouri River.
Boone died on September 26, 1820, at the home of his son Nathan on Femme Osage Creek. He was buried beside his wife Rebecca, who had died in 1813. Their graves were located near the settlement of Tuque Creek, close to present-day Marthasville, Missouri.
In 1845, Kentucky, eager to reclaim its most famous pioneer, sent representatives to Missouri to exhume Boone and Rebecca’s remains. They were reinterred with ceremony in the Kentucky state capital at Frankfort Cemetery, where a grand monument still stands. The move, however, sparked deep resentment in Missouri. Missourians insisted Boone belonged in their state, where he spent his final years.
Over time, a legend grew: Kentucky may have the wrong remains. Some Missourians claimed Boone’s Missouri relatives intentionally allowed the mistake, letting outsiders remove the remains of someone else, possibly an enslaved person buried nearby.
Today, both Kentucky and Missouri claim to hold Daniel Boone’s final resting place.
