Nathan Boone (1781-1856)

Nathan Boone was the tenth and youngest child of Daniel and Rebecca Boone. He was born on March 2, 1781 at Boone’s Station, Kentucky and died on October 16, 1856 in Green County, Missouri.[1] He lived 75 years, 7 months, and 14 days. 

When Nathan was born, his father was away serving in the Virginia legislature (Kentucky at that time was part of Virginia). In fact, Daniel Boone was still in Charlottesville when on June 4th the city was taken by the British, and he was taken into custody for a couple days by Colonel Tarleton. When Daniel returned home to Boone's Station, he found that not only had his wife given birth, but so had his daughters Susannah and Jemima. Thus, they decided to see if Daniel could discern which was his child. He “was presented successively with the grandchildren, which he said were not his, but quickly recognized the right one.”[2]

Nathan was eight years old when the family moved in 1789 to Point Pleasant in present-day West Virginia. When he was ten years old, he traveled with his father and mother to Richmond, Virginia while his father served in the legislature for a few months.[3] When he was about 13 years old, he went to stay with the Hays and Callaways, his sisters' families, in Kentucky. There he attended a school run by a Baptist clergyman, Rev. John Rice.[4] After a year or two he returned to his parents in Point Pleasant. 

Nathan learned to hunt at an early age. On a hunt just north of the Ohio River in the fall of 1794, Nathan killed his first several deer (he had already hunted squirrels and birds). He and his father narrowly escaped hostile Indians on the fifth night of the hunt.[5] In 1795, Nathan moved with his parents back to Kentucky, settling on Brushy Fork near present-day Carlisle, KY. He went on hunts that became longer and longer, in search of buffalo, deer, and bear. In 1798 he settled on his own place near the mouth of the Little Sandy River in northeastern Kentucky, and his parents moved to his place later that year.[6]

When the Boones left for Spanish Louisiana (Missouri) in 1799, eighteen-year-old Nathan stopped to get a marriage license and then headed back 75 miles to the Van Bibber home and married sixteen-year-old Olive Van Bibber on September 26th, 1799.[7] A week later, the two teenagers traveled mostly by themselves to the Femme Osage settlement, about 25 miles upriver from St. Charles (MO), acquiring 680 acres for a horse, bridle, and saddle.[8] The couple went on to have fourteen children: eleven girls and three boys.[9] On this land, they would build a log house, and then a “commodious stone building,” in which his father would die in 1820.[10] This stone house can still be visited today. Daniel Boone lived with Nathan from 1804 until 1813, and then for most of the time from 1816 to 1820.[11]

Nathan continued to hunt deer and trap beaver during these years. For example, he and a friend trapped 800 beaver skins in 1802 and sold them for $2.50 each.[12] He and his brother, Daniel Morgan Boone, also operated Boone’s Lick from 1806 to 1810, making about 25 or 30 bushels of salt per day.[13] This led to the development of the Booneslick Trail from St. Charles to Boone's Lick.[14] In 1808, Nathan guided William Clark and his men along that route and assisted with the establishment of Fort Osage. During the War of 1812, Nathan served as a captain of a company of rangers, scouting and fighting in Missouri and Illinois.[15] In the post-war years, Nathan was busy managing his farm and a horse-run mill in St. Charles, producing government surveys nearby and abroad,[16] and serving in the 1820 Missouri Constitutional Convention.[17] He also began to accumulate more slaves, from one in 1817 to nine in 1830.[18] 

In the June of 1832 he began to muster a company of rangers from St. Charles County, of which he was the captain, for the Blackhawk War.[19] His company was formed too late to fight in that war, but they were sent to Fort Gibson in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma).[20] When their enlistments were up, Nathan accepted a commission as a captain in the U.S. Dragoons, in which he would serve until 1853, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.[21] Most of this service focused on keeping the peace among various native tribes, and it took Nathan to what is now Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas, Iowa, Minnesota, and Texas.[22] His skills and experiences had prepared him well for this work, which included expeditions in the wilderness and surveying boundaries. He was also described by one of his soldiers as a “good, Christian man” who would kneel in prayer on his buffalo robe in his tent.[23] In 1837 he sold his property along the Femme Osage for $6,120 and moved his family to Ash Grove, Missouri, closer to where he was working.[24] This home can also be visited today. Nathan formerly retired from the military in 1853 at the age of 72 and passed away in 1856. His wife, Olive, died two years later in 1858.

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[1] Ella Hazel Spraker, The Boone Family (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Pub., 1993 [1922]), 126.
[2] My Father, Daniel Boone: The Draper Interviews with Nathan Boone, ed. Neal O. Hammon (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 73. When the British took Charlottesville, Daniel Boone had remained behind with Jack Jouett to load up on wagons some of the public records. As they walked away from the British, Jouett slipped up by calling Daniel Boone "Captain Boone." This caused the British to take him into custody.
[3] My Father, Daniel Boone, 89-90, 158.
[4] My Father, Daniel Boone, 97. 
[5] My Father, Daniel Boone, 98-99.

[6] My Father, Daniel Boone, 101-104.
[7] My Father, Daniel Boone, 111-112.
[8] Spraker, 127; My Father, Daniel Boone, 112-113, 121. 

[9] R. Douglas Hurt, Nathan Boone and the American Frontier (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 218.
[10] My Father, Daniel Boone, 125, 138-139.
[11] My Father, Daniel Boone, 119, 138; Robert Morgan, Boone: A Biography (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2007), 432.
[12] My Father, Daniel Boone, 120. Thus, each of them got $1,000 in a day where an average day's wage was around a dollar.
[13] My Father, Daniel Boone, 126-127.
[14] Spraker, 126.
[15] Spraker, 127; My Father, Daniel Boone, 129-133. 

[16] Hurt, 111-112, 129.
[17] Spraker, 126. Hurt, 113-118.
[18] Dakota Russell, “African-American Slavery and Freedom on the Nathan Boone Farm,” (Ash Grove, MO: Nathan Boone Homestead State Historic Site, 2007), 4. The number of slaves would fluctuate over the years between one and thirteen.
[19] Hurt, 135.
[20] Hurt, 138-139.
[21] Hurt, 142, 147. Spraker, 127.
[22] For more information on this aspect of his life, see Hurt, 140-216. A briefer overview can be found at "Boone, Nathan 1781-1856" in the online Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture. 
[23] Gen. Abraham Buford, “Religion and the Turf” Wallace’s Monthly vol. VIII, num. 5, June 1882, 331 (available online at Google books). Buford wrote, "My first captain in the dragoon service was Nathan Boone, who was a son of Daniel Boone. Captain Nathan Boone was a good, Christian man. I have often seen him kneel in his tent on his buffalo robe and pray fervently, at which I, a young dashing dragoon, would laugh in derision at what I thought was the weakness of the old man. I now rejoice in the fact that I have lived to see the day when I am convinced that the weakness was on my part and not that of the old Christian pioneer." 
[24] Hurt, 185.

William Boone (1775)

William Boone was the ninth child of Daniel and Rebecca Boone. He was born in North Carolina on June 20, 1775 and died in infancy.[1]

When Daniel Boone set out to blaze the Wilderness Road and establish Fort Boonesborough in Kentucky in early 1775, his wife remained at home in North Carolina with most of the children, expecting their ninth child. After establishing the fort, he returned to his family around the time William was born. Sadly, William died shortly afterwards. Daniel then took the rest of the family to Kentucky in August, arriving at the fort on September 8th.

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[1] Ella Hazel Spraker, The Boone Family (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Pub., 1993 [1922]), 65. Spraker cites Daniel Boone's Bible Record. 

Jesse Boone (1773-1820)

Jesse Bryan Boone was the eighth child of Daniel and Rebecca Boone. He was born on May 23, 1773 in North Carolina and he died on December 22, 1820 in Montgomery County, Missouri.[1] He lived 47 years, 6 months, and 29 days. 

Jesse was a baby when the Boones first attempted to move to Kentucky in 1773 and was two years old when they settled at Fort Boonesborough in 1775. He grew up on the Kentucky frontier and then moved with the family in 1789 to Point Pleasant (now in West Virginia). During the summer of 1790, 17-year-old Jesse traveled in a canoe with six armed friends from Point Pleasant to what is now Charleston, West Virginia to acquire a marriage license.[2] On their journey, they almost encountered a band of Shawnee warriors who attacked Coal Fort an hour or so after they passed by (the fort, also known as Fort Tackett, was attacked and burned on August 26, 1790). Having acquired the marriage license, Jesse married 18-year-old Chloe Van Bibber (1772-1822), a daughter of John Van Bibber (her cousin Olive later married Jesse's brother Nathan). Jesse and Chloe went on to have nine children. During the early 1790s Jesse fought a couple times as Indians attacked him and other men working in the common fields outside of Point Pleasant.[3] The smallpox swept through Point Pleasant while he was living there in 1793 and his infant firstborn child named Jemima died from it.[4] 

In 1797, Jesse and his family followed other Boones to the area near present-day Carlisle, Kentucky, and then again in 1799 to the Little Sandy River near Greenup, Kentucky. In the fall of 1797, he and his brother Nathan and brother-in-law Flanders went hunting together in eastern Kentucky and they killed 156 bears, selling the meat, oil, and skins. After moving to Greenup, Jesse became the inspector of the saltworks on the Little Sandy River and the Justice of the Kentucky County Court for Greenup.[5] During the War of 1812, he was the aide to General Joseph Desha on General Harrison's 1813 campaign to Canada and fought at the battle of the Thames, an American victory in which Tecumseh was killed.[6] Lilburn Boggs, who married Jesse's daughter Panthea in 1823, later recounted,

he was at the Battle of the Thames. This I know personally as I was myself there at the same time & met with him frequently. I was then about 17 or 18 years of age, he joined our Company & requested permission to fight in our ranks at the “skirmish” (the day before the main battle) at the bridge across the Thames[.] his own Brigade was in the rear that day but hearing the firing upfront he got permission to leave & joined the troops in front[.] our boys were delighted to have him join our company & he was joyfully welcomed.[7]

Jesse moved from Greenup, Kentucky to Montgomery County, Missouri (near Loutre Lick and present-day Mineola) in the spring of 1818.[8] He was elected in 1820 to be the representative of Montgomery County in the first session of Missouri's House of Representatives.[9] He was serving there as it met in St. Louis when his father died on September 26, 1820. Jesse himself "was taken sick during the session and died a few days after the adjournment, the corps was taken to his home in Montgomery Co & burried the day after Christmas."[10] 

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[1] Ella Hazel Spraker, The Boone Family (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Pub., 1993 [1922]), 125; and Draper Manuscript, Volume 23, Letter 27, Lilburn W. Boggs to Lyman Draper (January 18, 1857). 

[2] My Father, Daniel Boone: The Draper Interviews with Nathan Boone, ed. Neal O. Hammon (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 90-91.

[3] My Father, Daniel Boone, 95-96.

[4] Boggs (see citation above). He notes that "(it was a girl and named Jemima on the record it is printed 'Jeremiah' a mistake of the printer)".

[5] My Father, Daniel Boone, 102, 104-105. See also, Draper Manuscript 6S13-16, quoted in Spraker, 125. 

[6] My Father, Daniel Boone, 105; and Boggs. 

[7] Boggs.

[8] My Father, Daniel Boone, 93; and Boggs. 

[9] Spraker, 125. 

[10] Boggs.

Daniel Morgan Boone (1769-1839)

Daniel Morgan Boone was the seventh child of Daniel and Rebecca Boone. He was born on December 23, 1769 in North Carolina and died on July 13, 1839 in Jackson County, Missouri.[1] He lived 71 years, 1 month, 19 days. His middle name was the maiden name of his grandmother (Daniel Boone's mother), Sarah (Morgan) Boone.

He was born near the head of the Yadkin River in North Carolina (about 12 miles west of present-day Wilkesboro, NC), 7.5 months after his father set out on his first and longest long hunt in Kentucky.[2] He was five years old when they settled in Kentucky. When he was 21 years old in 1791, he and his younger brother Jesse were left in charge of their father’s business in Point Pleasant (present-day West Virginia) while the rest of the family accompanied Daniel Boone as he went to Richmond for his service in the Virginia legislature.[3] The next year, while he was hunting with his father a mile north of the Ohio River, he was shot at by hostile Indians and chased for a half a mile.[4] He hunted south of the Ohio River after that. 

Around 1795 he went exploring and hunting down the Mississippi River and the upper waters of the Tombigbee River (in the present-day states of Mississippi and Alabama). He did not like that country, but he heard about Missouri during the trip.[5] At the time, Missouri was Spanish territory, part of Upper Louisiana. He traveled there in 1797 and scouted out the Femme Osage valley, discussing the idea of a settlement in that region led by his father with Lieutenant Governor Zenon Trudeau. In 1798 he returned to Kentucky and went out to Missouri again with his nephew, Philip Goe, Jr., and three slaves. “He built a good house and left his Negroes to spend the winter in clearing land and preparing for the spring crop.”[6] He brought the main party from Kentucky to Missouri in the fall of 1799. His parents and his brother Nathan and Nathan's wife Olive would all stay with him that first winter.[7] His parents would live with him until about 1804.[8] His house was near present-day Matson, Missouri (his property included the land on which Matson stands). 

On March 2, 1800, Daniel Morgan Boone married Sarah Griffin Lewis (Jan. 29, 1786 - June 19, 1850) at St. Charles Borromeo Church. Sarah and her family had come from Virginia, settling in the Bon Homme settlement around 1795 (present-day Chesterfield). The church record of the wedding has been preserved, recording that Daniel professed "the Presbyterian Religion" and Sarah professed "the Protestant Religion" and that they had their parents' consent.[9] Five years later, the couple took in five of his nieces and nephews, raising them after the death of their mother, Rebecca (Boone) Goe. The following year, Sarah gave birth to the first of their twelve children.

Over the years, Daniel Morgan Boone was a hunter, trapper, land and road surveyor, salt maker, colonel of the militia,[10] captain of a company of rangers in the War of 1812,[11] sawmiller, and federal farmer. A fort was built around his house during the War of 1812, and settlers in the area would take refuge there in times of alarm.[12] He promoted the settlement of the town of Missouriton on his father’s old property along the Missouri River, and by 1818 had a horse-powered sawmill in that town. In 1819 he sold his land and moved to land near Loutre Lick in Montgomery County, MO. In 1820 he moved his family to the other side of the Missouri River and became involved in the pine logging business, owning and managing sawmills on the Piney Forks of the Gasconade River in the Ozarks. Four slaves, including Derry, worked under Daniel Morgan in this venture.[13] 

In 1827, Daniel Morgan Boone moved his family to Kansas, where he worked for the federal government from 1827 to 1831 as an agriculturalist among the Kaw tribe, teaching them how to farm. His son later wrote, he "was appointed, in 1827, farmer of the Kansas Indians, by General Clark, superintendent of Indian affairs. The Kansas Indians were then located at the mouth of the Big Blue, in Kansas. My father settled seven miles west of where Lawrence now stands, on the north bank of the Kaw river..."[14] His youngest son, Napoleon, is said to be the "first white child born in Kansas."[15] He then moved to Jackson County, Missouri and died of cholera at the age of 69 in 1839.[16]

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[1] Ella Hazel Spraker, The Boone Family (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Pub., 1993 [1922]), 123.

[2] Lyman Draper, The Life of Daniel Boone (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1998), 208.

[3] My Father, Daniel Boone: The Draper Interviews with Nathan Boone, ed. Neal O. Hammon (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 89-90.

[4] My Father, Daniel Boone, 96.

[5] My Father, Daniel Boone, 107.

[6] My Father, Daniel Boone, 108. 

[7] My Father, Daniel Boone, 113.

[8] Statement to the Federal Land Commission, quoted in John Bakeless, Daniel Boone, Master of the Wilderness (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1989 [1939]), 377

[9] Quoted in Spraker, 123-124 and in Bakeless, 369-370.

[10] Wm. S. Bryan and Robert Rose, A History of the Pioneer Families of Missouri (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Pub., 1977 [1876]), 7. See My Father, Daniel Boone for more information on his hunts.

[11] R. Douglas Hurt, Nathan Boone and the American Frontier (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1998), 90.

[12] My Father, Daniel Boone, 133. Nathan adds, "Twice my father, mother, and my family fled there in the dead of night. There were Indian alarms from 1811 until into 1815." 

[13] For much of this paragraph see: Lynn Morrow, “Daniel Morgan Boone’s Missing Years: Sending Ozarks Pine to St. Louis” (Southeast Missouri State University Press) Semopress.com. Accessed July 6, 2026. https://web.archive.org/web/20230320215555/http://www.semopress.com/daniel-morgan-boones-missing-years-sending-ozarks-pine-to-st-louis/.

[14] A letter by Daniel Boone III, 1879 in Collections of the Kansas State Historical Society, Volume 8 (Topeka, KS: Geo. A. Clark, State Printer, 1904), 433-434. See also the chapter on Jefferson County’s early history in William G. Cutler, History of the State of Kansas, Kancoll.org. Accessed July 6, 2026. https://www.kancoll.org/books/cutler/jefferson/jefferson-co-p2.html#EARLY_HISTORY

[15] A letter quoted in Cutler, History of the State of Kansas (see above). 

[16] Carlynn Trout and Kimberly Harper, “Daniel Boone 1769-1839” State Historical Society of Missouri. Shsmo.org, Accessed July 6, 2026. https://web.archive.org/web/20170310101623/http://shsmo.org/historicmissourians/name/b/boonedm/.

Rebecca (Boone) Goe (1768-1805)

Rebecca (Boone) Goe was the sixth child of Daniel and Rebecca Boone. She was born on May 26, 1768 in North Carolina and died on July 14, 1805 in Clark County, Kentucky.[1] She lived 37 years, 1 month, and 18 days.

Rebecca married Philip Goe (1767-1805) around 1785.[2] When Daniel Boone traveled to Philadelphia in 1788 with a load of ginseng, he "left his son-in-law Philip Goe to operate his warehouse and run the business at Limestone" (Maysville, KY).[3] In general, though, Philip seems to have been rather unreliable. A relative later reported that Daniel said that he had provided Philip with “enough for a comfortable start three or four times, but that he would drink and run it out.”[4] 

When Daniel Boone and most of his family headed west in 1799, Philip Goe purchased the Brushy Creek farm where Daniel Boone had been living since 1795 (near present day Carlisle, KY), and Philip and his wife and seven children lived there until 1805. That year Philip “drank himself to death” in March and then Rebecca died at her sister Levina's house in July, being “weakly” and suffering from “consumption.”[5] Her brother, Daniel Morgan Boone, came out to Kentucky and brought back the oldest six children to Missouri, five of whom lived with him and his wife.[6]

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[1] Ella Hazel Spraker, The Boone Family (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Pub., 1993 [1922]), 122.

[2] John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Co., 1992), 236

[3] My Father, Daniel Boone: The Draper Interviews with Nathan Boone, ed. Neal O. Hammon (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 82.

[4] Delinda Boone Craig, DM 30C73-74, quoted in Faragher, 236. 

[5] Delinda Boone Craig, DM 30C73-74, quoted in Faragher, 287-288; Spraker, 122; Letter from D.C. Daniel to Lyman Draper (Dec 16t,​ 1853). 

[6] Spraker, 123.