Free The Dangerous Book of Heroes by Conn Iggulden

again delayed the assault by arranging a parley with Blackfish. During the negotiations in a meadow, fighting broke out. Boone and the settlers retreated inside, and the siege of Boonesborough began. It lasted ten days before the Shawnee withdrew, a siege not being their type of warfare.
    Daniel Boone was charged by two officers of the patriot Kentucke militia of collaborating with the Loyalist Shawnee during his time with them. He was court-martialed in Boonesborough itself.
    It is possible Boone collaborated with the British—although all his other actions belie it and there is no British record of it—but almost certainly he was trying to stop needless bloodshed at Boonesborough. He was brought up with Native Americans, he liked them, and in their turn they admired him. A Shawnee victory over Boonesborough was not going to decide the outcome of the war.
    Boone was acquitted and promoted to major, but he left to gather his family in North Carolina and never returned to Boonesborough. Instead, he established a new settlement, called Boone’s Station, nearby. His court-martial had left a bitter taste, and he rarely spoke of it.
    He joined General Clark’s 1780 invasion of the Ohio country as its guide, taking part in the fighting at Pickaway (Piqua). In the division of the Kentucke territory that November, he was made lieutenant colonel in the Fayette militia and the following year was elected representative to the Virginia assembly. On his way to attendthe assembly, he was captured by British dragoons near Charlottesville. Assumed to be a civilian legislator, he was given parole after only a few days.
    If Boone had been a Loyalist, he would by then have been known as a traitor to Britain. For he’d left Fort Detroit to warn Boonesborough of a Loyalist attack, campaigned with Clark, and fought at Pickaway. It’s very unlikely he would have been released from Charlottesville.
    In 1782 he fought the Shawnee in almost the last skirmish of the war, the battle of Blue Licks, where his son Israel was killed. He served once again as guide to Clark’s second expedition into the Ohio country at the end of the year. By September 1783, when the United States of America was formally recognized as an independent nation, Daniel Boone was already a famous American.
    The following year, at age fifty, he became a legend with the publication of The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke by John Filson. This history includes a large appendix titled “The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone.” It sold successfully on both sides of the Atlantic, so that Boone became famous in the land of his father as well as his own. Filson interviewed Boone for the facts of his life but invented most of his speech. Filson, like later Hollywood portrayers of Boone, did not let truth stop him from embellishing a good story. He also omitted Boone’s court-martial.
    In 1785 a condensed version of Filson’s account, The Adventures of Colonel Boone, was published. That, too, sold well. Through no desire of his own, Daniel Boone had become the world’s archetypal frontiersman. He was the backwoodsman able to survive in the wilderness, living in harmony with nature and with the mutual respect of Native Americans.
    After the Revolutionary War, Boone resettled his family at the river port of Limestone (Maysville) while he worked as a surveyor along the Ohio River. He bought a tavern, speculated unsuccessfully in land, and was again elected to the Virginia state assembly. In the northwest, though, war continued as Native American nations fought on until 1794 against U.S. expansion across the proclamation border.Boone took part in one 1786 expedition, his last military action. After it he negotiated a Shawnee-American prisoner exchange.
    He moved farther upriver to Point Pleasant in 1788, opened a trading post, and returned to hunting and trapping. After being appointed lieutenant colonel of the Kanawha militia, he