James Boone (1757-1773)

James Boone was the oldest child of Daniel and Rebecca Boone. He was born on May 3, 1757 in North Carolina and died on October 10, 1773 in the Clinch Mountains of Virginia.[1] He lived 16 years, 5 months, 7 days.

James learned the ways of the frontier from his boyhood in North Carolina and Virginia. James' younger brother Nathan later said of their father Daniel Boone,

sometimes on his shorter trips, he would take his oldest son, James, out with him. He began taking James on hunts when he was seven or eight years old; and sometimes during a cold, snowy spell, Father would have difficulty in keeping little James comfortable warm and could do so only by hugging him up to him.[2]

James was killed on the Boone family’s first attempt to enter Kentucky in 1773. They were traveling through the Clinch Mountains of Virginia on their way to the Cumberland Gap. James, along with seven others, mostly young men like himself, were attacked by Indians while they camped in Powell's Valley on the northern bank of Wallen’s Creek, three miles away from the main camp.[3] They were catching up after getting additional supplies. Two of them were killed instantly, two were wounded and fled, one was taken captive, and one hid under some driftwood and watched what happened to James Boone and Henry Russell. Olive Boone later recounted, 

In the attack James Boone was wounded through both hips, which were broken. I think young Russell was wounded in the same manner. When the Indians tortured James Boone, they pulled out his toenails and fingernails. He first begged Big Jim to spare him and finally, when being tortured, to kill him at once and put him out of his misery. Young Russell was tortured in the same way. Finally they were both severely stabbed all to pieces and probably tomahawked, which put them out of their misery.[4]

Big Jim had been befriended and shown hospitality by the Boones earlier in North Carolina. He was later killed in battle with Daniel Boone and others in 1786.[5]

When James was killed, the Boones and their friends turned back from their journey to Kentucky. The Boones lived in Virginia for a time. Daniel Boone returned to the site of the massacre on a hunting trip the following year to more securely bury James and Henry Russell, preventing the wolves from disturbing the graves. When a storm arose just after he finished, "Boone felt more dejected, as he used afterwards to relate, than he ever did in all his life ... He could never in after years speak of this affecting incident, even to his own family, without having his feelings deeply stirred within him."[6] This massacre in Powell's Valley was one of the events that culminated in Lord Dunmore's War between the Shawnee and the colony of Virginia in 1774. Daniel Boone served in that war as a scout and officer in the Virginia militia. After that war concluded, the Boones successfully moved to Kentucky in 1775.

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[1] Ella Hazel Spraker, The Boone Family (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Pub., 1993 [1922]), 65.

[2] My Father, Daniel Boone:The Draper Interviews with Nathan Boone, ed. Neal O. Hammon (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 20.

[3] John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Co., 1992), 92-93.

[4] My Father, Daniel Boone, p. 41.

[5] My Father, Daniel Boone, p. 81.

[6] Lyman Draper, The Life of Daniel Boone (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1998), 304-305

Fort Boonesborough and the Transylvania Colony

Last spring (2025) was not only the 250th anniversary of the beginning of the American Revolution, but it was also the 250th anniversary of the founding of Fort Boonesborough and the colony of Transylvania in Kentucky. 

Richard Henderson, who had worked as a lawyer and judge, came up with a plan to begin the 14th colony in what is now Kentucky. The Iroquois had ceded their claims to the land south of the Ohio River to the British in the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, and the Shawnee had ceded their claims to that land after Lord Dunmore’s War in the 1774 Treaty of Camp Charlotte. And so on March 17, 1775, at Sycamore Shoals (present day Tennessee), Henderson and his Transylvania Company concluded treaty negotiations with the Cherokee and purchased the land from them. At the same time, Daniel Boone, working with Henderson, led a party to blaze the wilderness trail through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky. Henderson caught up with Boone along the Kentucky River around April 20th. The settlers began surveying and allotting the land. On April 29th, construction began on Fort Boonesborough.

On May 8th, in response to some disputes with and among other parties of settlers, a plan for government was proposed that was agreeable to the several groups. On May 23rd, eighteen delegates from four settlements assembled at Boonesborough to form the House of Delegates. On May 24-27, the first legislative assembly of the colony was held under a very large elm tree.

The assembly adopted a committee’s recommendation to name the colony Transylvania (which means “beyond the forest”). Daniel Boone served as a delegate and proposed bills for “Preserving Game &c” and “Improving the breed of Horses.” His brother, Squire Boone, proposed a bill to “Preserve the Range.” Rev. John Lythe had opened the meeting in prayer. He was a minister of the Church of England, possibly the one who had baptized Daniel Boone and his family a few years earlier. He also served as a delegate and proposed a bill “to Prevent Profane Swearing and Sabbath Breaking.” These and other laws (a total of nine) were passed on the third reading by that assembly. A functioning government was established with courts, laws, and militia. The assembly also produced a compact between the proprietors (members of the company) and the people (who were represented by their delegates). You can read the minutes of the assembly here. 

On the following day, Sunday, May 28th, divine service was led by Rev. Lythe before the delegates returned home. On the next day, May 29th, a letter arrived at Boonesborough with an “account of the battle of Boston” (i.e. the battles of Lexington and Concord). 

While Henderson thought the legality of this colony would stand, it was disputed by the governors of North Carolina and Virginia, both of which claimed the lands west of them. Transylvania sought recognition by the Continental Congress, but it did not receive that recognition and was soon incorporated into Virginia.

The Baptism and Faith of Daniel Boone

Daniel Boone’s religious beliefs have been an object of interest to most Boone biographers, but there is one important event that has been generally overlooked - his baptism.

Daniel Boone had been raised as a Quaker until his mid-teens when his family left Pennsylvania. Many of his family members became Baptist, but he remained unbaptized while in North Carolina. His wife Rebecca also came from a family that originally was Quaker, although the grandparents who helped to raise her hosted Presbyterian services at their home in Virginia.

In 1772, Daniel Boone and his family took a significant step in their relationship with God. Even though as an old man he later said, “I always loved God ever since I could recollect,”[1] it was at this point that he decided to be baptized. That year, Daniel Boone and his family were living on the Watauga River (in what is now eastern Tennessee), living near James Robertson,[2] later known as the "Father of Tennessee." Robertson's children later wrote to historian Lyman Draper that "a traveling Episcopalian clergyman" baptized Daniel Boone, his wife Rebecca, and their seven children, and three of the Robertson children at the Robertson's house.[3]

Since the Quakers did not practice baptism, this was an important link in the shift Daniel and his family underwent from his Quaker upbringing to mainstream Protestantism. It is also an indication of their Christian faith that they would desire baptism for themselves and their children. 

We have some of Daniel Boone's own words about his faith in a letter he wrote late in life to Sarah Boone, his sister-in-law. He said, "all the Relegan I have to love and fear God beleve in Jeses Christ, Do all the good to my Nighbour and my self that I Can and Do as Little harm as I Can help and trust on God's marcy for the rest and I Beleve God neve made a man of my prisepel to be Lost" (October 19, 1816).[4]

The account of the baptism of Daniel Boone and his family fits with what Daniel's youngest son, Nathan Boone, said about his father.

In his latter years my father was a great student of the Bible. He was seldom seen reading any other book and fully believed in the great truths of Christianity. He seemed most partial towards the Presbyterians, although he disliked the unkind differences too frequently manifested by different Christian sects. He had all his children, when he could, regularly christened. His worship was in secret, and he placed his hopes in the Savior. Whenever preaching was in his neighborhood, he made it a point to attend and well remembered what he heard and read.[5] 

Three more children were born to Daniel and Rebecca after 1772, so the reference to having their children "regularly christened" (that is, baptized after they were born) makes sense. Nathan, born in 1781, was probably thinking especially of his own baptism. 

Robert Morgan, in his biography of Boone, briefly mentions this account of Daniel Boone's baptism, but dismisses it as "almost certainly untrue."[6] Yet his piece of evidence against it is that Anglicans were not called Episcopalians until after the American Revolution, which is not a convincing argument. The letters to Draper that call the minister an Episcopalian were written in 1854 and 1855, and it would have been natural for Robertson's children to call the denomination by its current name. The event is not something of which they were unsure. They wrote that "such events are rarely forgotten" and that one of them had "heard her mother relate it so frequently that she has no doubt of it."[7]

In fact, there is a likely candidate for the identity of this traveling minister: Rev. John Lythe. Even Draper, in his short bio of Rev. Lythe in The Life of Daniel Boone, refers to him anachronistically as "of the Episcopal Church."[8] He was a traveling Anglican minister from Virginia. He spent a year in South Carolina in 1767 and he shows up in Harrodsburg, KY in 1775 as the first clergyman in Kentucky.[9] He was a delegate to the first legislative assembly held in Kentucky at Fort Boonesborough in 1775 and served as its chaplain. He proposed a bill "to prevent profane swearing and Sabbath-breaking" and the next day held the first Christian worship service in what would become Kentucky.

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[1] Account from Rev. James Welch, quoted in John Bakeless, Daniel Boone, 368.

[2]  My Father, Daniel Boone: The Draper Interviews with Nathan Boone, ed. Neal O. Hammon, 38. Lyman Draper, The Life of Daniel Boone, 284, 295. John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone, 88.
[3] Letters from Felix Robertson (James Robertson's son) to Lyman Draper, quoted in William Curry Harlee, Kinfolks: A Genealogical and Biographical Record, 3 vols. New Orleans: Searcy & Pfaff, 1935-1937, 3:2500, 2513.
[4] Quoted in Ella Atterbury Spraker, The Boone Family, 578.
[5] My Father, Daniel Boone: The Draper Interviews with Nathan Boone, ed. Neal O. Hammon, 139.
[6] Robert Morgan, Boone: A Biography, 431.
[7] Letters from Felix Robertson (James Robertson's son) to Lyman Draper, quoted in William Curry Harlee, Kinfolks: A Genealogical and Biographical Record, 3 vols. New Orleans: Searcy & Pfaff, 1935-1937, 3:2500, 2513.
[8] Lyman Draper, The Life of Daniel Boone, 569.
[9] The Churchman's Year Book, with Kalender for the Year of Grace 1870, compiled by William Stevens Perry, 264-265. Lyman Draper, The Life of Daniel Boone, 569.

The Parents of Daniel Boone: Squire and Sarah Boone

The burial place of Squire and Sarah Boone

While Daniel Boone is known for moving west, discovering new opportunities and developing new communities, this work had begun with his parents. Squire set a new pattern that his son would follow, leaving the ancestral homeland in England to move Pennsylvania and then again to the backwoods of North Carolina.

Daniel Boone’s father, Squire Boone, was born November 25th, 1696 in Bradninch, Devonshire, in the southwest of England.[1] According to parish records, he was baptized at St. Disen's Church on Christmas Day, December 25th, 1696. The family continued to participate in the Church of England, with their children being baptized at St. Disen’s, until they became Quakers around 1703 (their son Joseph, born in April of 1704, was the first one not to be baptized at St. Disen’s). They joined the Monthly Meeting of the Society of Friends at Callumpton, about a mile from Bradninch.[2]

Quakers did not practice baptism and other rituals common to most churches. They believed that the inner light from God in each person, rather than Scripture or the teachings of the church, was the true source of truth and authority. They wore plain clothes and avoided terms that showed respect to rank or privilege (hence they used “thee” and “thou” rather than the more formal “you,” which at first was used for superiors). They refused to take oaths and were pacifist. These beliefs alienated them from society and led to persecution until the late 1680s. Pennsylvania had been founded by William Penn, a Quaker, with provisions for religious liberty. The Boone family joined in the Quaker migration to Pennsylvania about ten years after becoming Quakers.

Squire and his older siblings, George and Sarah, preceded the rest of the family in coming to Pennsylvania. George was married on July 27, 1713 at the Abingdon Monthly Meeting of the Society of Friends near Philadelphia,[3] and Squire and Sarah either had accompanied him or joined him in 1714.[4] The rest of their family would follow them in 1717 and join the Gwynedd Monthly Meeting of the Friends in North Wales, Pennsylvania on October 31, 1717.[5] There Squire married Sarah Morgan, another Quaker, on July 23, 1720.[6] 

Sarah had been born in 1700 to parents who were natives of Wales. Her father Edward was a tailor and early settler in the Welsh settlement of Gwynedd, Pennsylvania.[7] Daniel Boone later said that his mother was a relative of “General Daniel Morgan, hero of the Revolution” and that she was “a woman of great neatness and industry in her housekeeping.”[8] It is said by one who knew them that “Squire Boone was a man of rather small stature, fair complexion, red hair and grey eyes; while his wife was a woman something over the common size, strong and active, with black hair and eyes, and raised in the Quaker order.”[9] Squire and Sarah went on to have eleven children, seven of whom lived past the age of eighty.[10]

In 1730 Squire and Sarah purchased 250 acres in what would become Exeter Township, in present Berks County, Pennsylvania.[11] There he built a log cabin over a cellar with a spring in it. That is where Squire and Sarah’s sixth child, Daniel, was born on October 22, 1734. Squire was a weaver, as his father had been, as well as a blacksmith and farmer.[12] He kept five or six looms in operation and employed Henry Miller to work in the blacksmith shop and to teach Daniel the trade as well.[13] When Daniel was ten years old, he began to accompany his mother during “grass season” as they moved several miles away with their cows for better pasture. Sarah attended to the milk and Daniel herded the cows during the day and hunted, first with a club and then with a rifle.[14] Daniel also helped his father with the farming.[15] Daniel’s parents were loyal to him, as can been seen in several stories where they stood by him when he frustrated a tutor, got into a fight, and provoked the jealousy of “Saucy Jack” at a shooting contest.[16] The family attended the local Oley (later renamed Exeter) Meeting of the Society of Friends, and Squire became a trustee there in 1736 and an overseer in 1739.[17]

In 1742 Squire’s oldest child, Sarah, married a non-Quaker, provoking a reprimand from the Meeting. Squire formally confessed “himself in fault in keeping them in his house after their keeping company” and promised to be more careful in the future.[18] Sarah also made confession of her sins after it became evident that she had been with child before the wedding.[19] In 1747 Squire’s next child, Israel, also married a non-Quaker. A committee of the Meeting confronted Squire about this marriage, but this time Squire denied he had done anything wrong and so refused to repent.[20] It is not stated why his response was different this time,[21] but it led the Meeting the next year to declare that Squire was no longer a member of the Society of Friends.[22]

In 1750, Squire moved his family from Pennsylvania to the Yadkin valley of North Carolina, purchasing two parcels of land, each of 640 acres, in 1753.[23] One was at the confluence of Elisha Creek and Dutchman Creek (just east of present-day Mocksville, NC) and the other was on both sides of Bear Creek (two miles west of Mocksville).[24] There he continued his prior occupations. In addition, he became a justice of the peace and a member of the county court in 1753 and was licensed to operate a “Public House” in 1754.[25] One of the attorneys who frequently appeared on legal business before him was Richard Henderson, who later employed Daniel Boone to work for the Transylvania Company in its effort to settle Kentucky.[26]

While Squire’s wife, Sarah, received in 1750 a certificate from the women’s Meeting at Exeter as a traveling minister[27] and their daughter Hannah “often preached in public on the Quaker faith,”[28] yet most of the family left the Society of Friends when they left Pennsylvania. Even Hannah later joined Mill Creek Baptist Church in Kentucky. Much of Daniel Boone's family became members at Boone’s Ford Church, a Baptist church organized and pastored by Rev. John Gano in the 1750s.[29] People from a variety of denominations had built a meeting house for the use of all, and within two years the main body organized as a Baptist church.

The Cherokees were allied with the British for the early part of the French and Indian War, but due to various provocations they switched sides and began to attack the settlers in North Carolina in 1759. Thus, Squire, his son Daniel, and son-in-law William Grant and their families moved to safety. Daniel went to northern Virginia and Squire and William went to Georgetown, Maryland (present-day Washington D.C.).[30] At this time Squire conveyed his eastern parcel of land to his son Squire and his western parcel of land to Daniel.[31] They returned to the Yadkin valley in 1762, where Squire and Sarah likely lived on the properties that now belonged to their sons.[32] 

Squire Boone lived three years more before he died at on January 2nd, 1765 in his sixty-ninth year.[33] He was buried in the cemetery of the Joppa Meeting House, which would become the meeting place of a Presbyterian church but at the time was open to use by all denominations.[34] After this, his wife Sarah lived with their daughter Mary and her husband William Bryan. Daniel Boone left for Kentucky after his father died, even as Squire had left Pennsylvania after his father had died, but in Daniel’s case his mother was still living. It is said that when he left North Carolina in 1773, “Even Daniel, in spite of his brave and manly heart was seen to lift the lapel of his pouch to dry the tears from his eyes whilst his dear old mother held around his neck weeping bitterly. Daniel was devoted to her and she loved Daniel above all her children.”[35] Sarah died in 1777 and was laid to rest in the Joppa burial ground next to her husband.

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[1] Lyman Draper, The Life of Daniel Boone (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1998), 104-105.

[2] Hazel A. Spraker, The Boone Family (Genealogical Pub. Co., [1922] 1993), 21. This is where their certificate was from when they came to Pennsylvania. 

[3] Spraker, 590. Ken Kamper, “A Year by Year Listing of Events in the Life and Family of Daniel Boone” (2017).

[4] Draper, The Life of Daniel Boone, 106; Ken Kamper, “A Year by Year Listing of Events in the Life and Family of Daniel Boone” (2017). 

[5] Draper, The Life of Daniel Boone, 106. 

[6] Ibid, 108.

[7] Spraker, 32. 

[8] My Father, Daniel Boone: The Draper Interviews with Nathan Boone (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 10.

[9] Ibid, 108. This statement is from Daniel Bryan.

[10] Spraker, 38. “Extraordinary Longevity” Newbern Sentinel (New Bern, North Carolina) 23 Dec 1820, Sat. 

[11] Spraker, 108.

[12] My Father, Daniel Boone, 11-12; Draper, The Life of Daniel Boone, 104.

[13] My Father, Daniel Boone, 12.

[14] Ibid., 11.

[15] Ibid., 13. 

[16] Draper, The Life of Daniel Boone, 113, 127-128; John Bakeless, Daniel Boone (University of Nebraska Press, 1989 [1939]), 11.

[17] Exeter Meeting Records, cited in Spraker, 35, 39. The meeting house still stands 1.5 miles from the Boone homestead.

[18] Minutes of Exeter Meeting, Book A, page 33, cited in Spraker, 35.

[19] Minutes of the Exeter Meeting, cited in John M. Faragher, Daniel Boone (New York, NY: Henry Holt, 1992), 24.

[20] Faragher, 25

[21] That this was a son instead of a daughter, that Squire had asked for others to dissuade his son from marrying a non-Quaker, and that premarital sex was perhaps not part of the situation, may have been why he saw this case differently. He wrote an angry letter to the Meeting which might have shed light on this, but the secretary deemed it too impertinent to record in the minutes (Faragher, 25).

[22] Minutes of the Exeter Meeting, cited in Faragher, 26.

[23] Meredith Mason Brown, Frontiersman: Daniel Boone and the Making of America (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2008), 10.

[24] James W. Wall, “Boone, Squire” Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, ed. by William S. Powell (University of North Carolina Press, 1979). 

[25] Ibid. 

[26] Archibald Henderson, “The Creative Forces in Westward Expansion: Henderson and Boone” (The American Historical Review, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Oct., 1914), pp. 86-107), 96ff.

[27] Minutes of the Exeter Meeting, cited in John J. Stoudt, “Daniel and Squire Boone,” July 1936 issue of the Historical Review of Berks County.

[28] My Father, Daniel Boone, 29.

[29] Henry Sheets, A History of the Liberty Baptist Association (Raleigh, N.C. : Press of Edwards and Broughton Printing Co., 1909), 122-123; John Gano, Biographical memoirs of the late Rev. John Gano, of Frankfort (Kentucky) (New York, Printed by Southwick and Hardcastle for J. Tiebout, 1806), 81-85. 

[30] Draper, The Life of Daniel Boone, 147-148.

[31] James W. Wall, “Boone, Squire” Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, ed. by William S. Powell (University of North CarolinaPress,1979).

[32] Ibid. Daniel’s land was closer to the Joppa Meeting House where Squire was later buried, but Daniel sold his land in 1764, so at least in 1765 Squire and his wife were likely living on Squire, Jr.’s land.

[33] Ibid., 183; Spraker, 38.

[34] Draper, The Life of Daniel Boone, 198. Draper also records that Squire “performed services for the meeting.” Some have understood this to mean that Squire led services at Joppa, but in context it seems that this refers to the Quaker meeting in Pennsylvania, especially since the source is Thomas Pearson of Berks County.

[35] Peter Houston, A Sketch of the Life and Character of Daniel Boone (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1997), 12. Peter and his family were neighbors and friends of the Boones in North Carolina. He was 12 years old at the time.