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]
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/.
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