This is not your K-12 history text about the famous American explorer Daniel Boone. He was not a simple man who so easily hiked over the Appalachian Mountains and settled Boonesborough and then all of Kentucky. He fought many demons trying to settle what later became Kentucky – weather, Indians, politics, and finances. Blood and Treasure will give you a much deeper understanding of the challenges and dangers that Daniel Boone, and other early American explorers rose above during the early and late western explorations of our great country! With footnotes and references throughout the text, you know this historical account has been thoroughly researched. I recommend this book anyone who desires a much deeper understanding of Daniel Boone’s life including the historical context in which he lived.

"Daniel Boone had always despised, and would for the rest of his life, his outsize reputation as an Indian fighter. He maintained that dealing with belligerent Native Americans, whether via combat or negotiation, was for the most part a matter of luck and instinct. His rescue by Simon Kenton was evidence of the former, his quick thinking on the Licking River, the latter. He was vastly more proud of his ability to endure the burdens of a huntsman’s life with a seemingly preternatural stoicism. Now, it was as if the patience he had honed over a lifetime of stalking game through the deep woods was in anticipation of this moment. He would need that gift in the coming months."

When I was a kid, one of my favorite possessions was a bona fide, official Davy Crockett coonskin cap. No actual raccoons suffered to create that bit of headgear. Disney had made several live-action films in the 1950s (TV mini-series’ really) celebrating Davey Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. Crockett may have actually worn one that wild creatures suffered to provide. Daniel Boone preferred beaver hats. Although Crockett and Boone were born a half-century apart their deaths were separated by a mere sixteen years. But to young TV viewers in the 1950s the two seemed inseparable, played on the screen by the same actor, Fess Parker, wearing pretty much the same costumes, no doubt saving Disney some wardrobe expenses.

The memories I retain of the shows are much-faded, but I doubt much has been lost. Civilized American good guy frontiersmen (Crockett) or pioneer (Boone) doing battle with hostile indigenous residents, and battling corruption among his own people. Standard TV fodder of the 1950s and early 1960s, with the usual doses of humble wisdom, and little mention made of the genocide that was being foisted on sundry North American native peoples.

It was the chance to fill that cavernous memory hole with some actual information, on at least one of Fess Parker’s greatest roles, that drew me to Blood and Treasure. On finishing the book, it was possible to drop a coin into that chasm and hear it hit bottom, after a reasonable wait, much better then hearing nothing prior.

There is history and there is Boone. It is the information on both that is of great value here. Those of my generation at least know the name Daniel Boone, even if our image of him may have been the product of Disneyfication. I expect there are many, born later, to whom the name Boone is likelier to summon images of a baseball figure, a town or city by that name, or a brand of sickly alcoholic beverage. He was a fascinating real-world character, whatever hat he chose to wear. The authors report in the C-Span interview that, unlike Parker’s cinema-friendly 6’5”, Daniel Boone was actually 5’7” or 5’8,” a typical height for a man of his times. He had several cousins, however who were over six feet and Boone was concerned that a raccoon skin cap would make him look even smaller. He favored a felt hunter’s hat that was made of beaver.

The character himself is fascinating, presenting both as a man of his era, and a person with some 21st century sensibilities. Daniel Boone was born in what is now Berks County, Pennsylvania, in 1734, the 6th of eleven children, to Quaker immigrants from England and Wales. The family ran afoul of local public opinion when one of their children married outside the religion, while visibly pregnant. When another, Boone’s brother, Israel, also married outside the faith, and dad stood by him, Pop was excommunicated. Daniel stayed away from the church after that. Three years later the family moved to North Carolina. While Boone carried a bible with him on his long hunts, considered himself a Christian and had all his children baptized, he was not exactly a bible thumper. He was open to other ways of viewing the world. This willingness to learn would serve him well. Boone was fascinated by and respectful of Indian ways as a kid. He spent considerable time with Native Americans, studying their culture, and learning their woodland hunting, tracking, and survival skills. He learned the birdsongs of local avian life, studied the use of plants for medicinal purposes, learned Indian crafts. He was a proficient enough hunter that by age twelve he was providing game meat for his family. His gift for frontier life was clear very early on. In a way he was a frontiersman savant, like those 7-year-olds who play Rachmaninoff as if it’s no big deal. By fifteen he was considered the finest hunter in the area.

He had considerable respect for his wife, Rebecca, maintaining impressive wisdom about their relationship. After he had been away on a long hunt, for a year, for example, he returned home to be presented with a new daughter. He could count high enough to figure that the child was not his. Rebecca told him that she had thought he was dead (not an unlikely excuse at the time) and had fallen for someone who looked very much like Daniel, his younger brother. Daniel coped, noting with an impressive sense of humor that he had married a full-blooded woman, not a portrait of a saint, raised the girl as his own, and was grateful that Rebecca had at least kept it in the family.

He confronts many personal challenges over the years, losing several children (he and Rebecca had ten) to illness or Indian attacks. The book opens with the torture and murder of his teenage son, James. He is called on time and time again to work with militia or government military units. He served with the British in their conflict with their French rivals for North American influence. He was a part of many of the conflicts that took part in the western colonial lands in the late 18th century. I had not heard of any of these. Drury and Clavin point out their often very surprising significance.

Boone was not initially cast to star in this novel. Drury and Clavin, with more than a few history book pelts in their saddlebags, had written about the wars waged on the plains Indians, many of whom had been pushed west by the advancing white invaders, and wanted to trace that process back. The book covers, roughly, the period from the 1730s,when Boone was born, to 1799, when he moved his family west to Missouri. The book was supposed to be about how the Indians had been driven out of the land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. In doing their research, however, Boone kept turning up, a Zelig-like character, involved in many of the seminal events of his time. Served with a British regiment? Check. Served with George Washington? Check. Developed the primary trail through the Cumberland Gap? You betcha. He even established a town that would be named after him, Boonesborough, and led the defense of a western fort, the loss of which might have changed the outcome of the American Revolution. The man really was a legend in his own time. A natural leader, he partook of many of the important battles that occurred between settlers, through their militias and their English backers, and both the native people they were attempting to displace and their French allies. He functioned as a diplomat as well, respected by many of the Indians and seen as a man of his word, not a common attribute at the time. And so he became the narrative thread that pulled together a large number of related, but disconnected parts.

The frontier in the 18th century was the Appalachian Mountains. The Wild, Wild West was the land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi. The English had entered into treaties with Indian tribes that basically drew a line there. We will allow our colonists to advance only so far, and no farther. The colonists, however, were more than happy to roll their eyes, mutter a “whatever” or the 18th century equivalent, and continue pushing westward, making life difficult for just about everyone. I was reminded of contemporary settlers, eager to occupy land outside their legal realm. At least some of this westward movement was driven by land speculation, including by some founding father sorts. I know it is tough to believe that real-estate developers might be anything other than sober, law-abiding capitalists, but, like the poor, it appears that we will always have them with us.

Drury and Clavin offer a look at the diverse tribes that occupied the areas in conflict, showing differences among them. One particularly horrifying episode involved a group of Indians who had converted to the Moravian faith, a sect of Christianity. They were pacifists, took up no arms, but were slaughtered anyway by a group of American Rangers in what became known as the Moravian Massacre, a shameful episode, widely talked about at the time. We also see leaders of one tribe, in negotiations, willingly ceding land to their white counterparts, when they, in fact, had no hold over that land at all. I was reminded of the contemporary situation in Afghanistan, among other places, where tribal allegiances easily trump larger national demands. Many of the most effective, and memorable of Indian leaders are shown, impressive in their tactical leadership, creativity, and tenacity.

The American Revolution was more an eastern than western conflict, but there were times when battles on the western frontier might have determined a different outcome to the colonial attempt to separate from the motherland. These were mostly, no they were entirely, news to me.

It is in learning about so many of these turning points that the value of the book is most manifest. If, like me, your knowledge of American history has been shaped primarily by what we learned in grade school, high school, and college, and absorbed from popular culture, you will get a very strong sense of just how much we do not know, and had never suspected. In a way, it was like opening up the back of a mechanical watch and seeing all the intricate gears at work, impacting each other to produce the simple result of indicating the time of day. Getting there is not so simple. Nor is truly appreciating how 21st century America came to be what it is today. This book offers an up-close look at some of those gears.

My reading experience of this book was wildly divergent. I found it to be a very difficult read for the first half, at least, dragging myself through anywhere from ten to thirty pages a day for what seemed forever. Even then, I recognized that there was a lot of valuable information to be absorbed, so stuck with it. It is true that there are a lot of characters passing through these pages, a bounty of place names, a plethora of battles, skirmishes, and conflicts that were significant and interesting. But it felt so overwhelming that the TMI sirens were blaring repeatedly.

But at a certain point, some of the characters, through repeated appearance, became recognizable. Oh, yeah, I remember him now. Wasn’t he the one who…? Yep, that’s the guy. At a certain point it was not a duty to return to the book, fulfilling a felt obligation, trying to learn something, but a joy. Quite a switch, I know. But as I read the latter half of the book, it became clear that this was not just a rich history book, but quite an amazing adventure story, a saga, filled with deeds heroic and dastardly. There are many compelling characters in these pages, and so many ripping yarns that reading this became like sailing through something by George R. R. Martin. Taking the analogy to the next step, I have zero doubt that, with the many compelling narratives at play in this book, it would make a fantastic GoT-level TV series. It certainly has the blood and gore to play at that level, the territorial rivalries, the vanity, backstabbing, the double-dealing, the battles, sieges, murders, tortures and war crimes, but also the underlying content to give it all a lot more heft. This is how nations are created. This is how they grow. These are the people who paid the price for that creation. These are the decisions that were made, the promises broken and kept, the lies told, the excuses offered. Sorry, no dragons, or other mythical beasts, but there is, at the core, a bona fide legend. (James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the Mohican was inspired by Boone rescuing his kidnapped daughter, Jemima) Thankfully, it will require no blood for you to check this one out, and only a modest amount of treasure.

"Like the Cherokee, the tribes north of the Ohio River strongly suspected that America’s War for Independence was being fought over Indian land despite high-minded slogans about taxation without representation. It was the Shawnee who recognized the earliest that this internecine conflict among the whites could only end badly for the tribe should the rapacious colonists prevail. Native American support of the Crown, in essence, was the lesser of two evils. It was not the British, after all, who had begun desecrating Kanta-ke with cabins and cornfields. "

Review posted – May 21, 2021

Publication date – April 20, 2021

I received this book as an e-pub from St Martin’s Press via NetGalley in return for a fair review. No raccoons, beavers, or other wildlife were harmed providing headgear used during the writing of this review.

For the complete review, with images and link, please follow this link to Goodreads - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4007721972

My husband has always been very interested in Daniel Boone so I requested this book for him and we read it together. He absolutely loved it and I was happy to learn more about a historical figure who was important to the area where I live and am from, and the events of those times. It was a lot more readable and less dry than other non-fiction narratives I have read, which is very important to me. It kept my interest, but it is pretty graphic, so keep that in mind if you're squeamish.

I love when historical memoirs read like a novel. This well-researched account of Daniel Boone’s life and legacy had me interested from page 1 until the end. Daniel Boone is mentioned in U.S. History classes in schools, but I never realized how larger=than-life he really was.

Authors Bobby Drury and Tom Clavin take care to share Boone’s journeys and exploits without having to artificially place him on a pedestal above others in his time. They provide several accounts from Boone’s previous biographers, in which Boone’s heroicism and modesty provide enough evidence as to how special an individual he truly was.

I was quite astounded with how much I learned from “Blood and Treasure.” In my humble opinion, Daniel Boone should be grouped with the likes of George Washington in terms of his importance to helping America break away and become its own country. While Washington fought the campaigns east of the Appalachians, Boone was instrumental in fighting for the frontier against Indians, the French, and British alike.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and enthusiastically suggest it to anyone interested in westward expansion or the American Revolution.

Blood and Treasure: Daniel Boone and the Fight for America's First Frontier by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin was received directly from the publisher and I chose to review it. The setting of the book and the famous name in the title both interest me a lot. This book, at times, goes into great detail beyond the romanticized television stories of the period and person. The downfall of this particular book was its "wokeness." Settlers exploring outward are not infesting the land, the authors infested my kindle with such writing. This type of behavior has ruined many a book, television show and even movies in this day and age.

3 Stars

This was an interesting look at the early frontier experience using Daniel Boone as a focus. The author also approached the frontier from the perspective of the Native Americans being displaced by the settlers moving in.

In the mid-eighteenth century, Daniel Boone was a frontiersman and Revolutionary War hero. He and his family explored and settled the frontier that is today Virginia and Kentucky.
"Blood and Treasure" tells the story of Boone's adventures, exploits and trials. It's a heartbreaking story about British, French and the new nation's attitudes toward Native Americans.
Be prepared for quite a bit of blood and guts in this book. "Settling" the frontier required violence and fighting that occurred on both the white and Indian side.
The book is a fast read, though, with plenty of interesting history and research. It tells a different side of the story and reveals the challenges of all involved parties.

Daniel Boone is a legendary figure of our history. This book is a depiction of his pursuit of expansion into the West. However, even though the authors use Daniel Boone and his bigger than life exploits, I found that they centered most of it on the Native American Tribes and the issues they had with whites coming onto their lands.
It seems as though the authors put a lot of their thoughts and opinions into the narrative and it’s almost like your wondering if they are not telling some of the tall tales as well. There are tons of facts and research as well.

I received a free advanced copy from NetGalley and these are my willingly given thoughts and opinions.

This is the story of young America, through the Revolutionary War, that I haven't read much about. The story of the West, and how early settlers eager for the less crowded lands west of central Virginia followed rumors and Daniel Boone into what is now Kentucky. Focusing the story through Boone's experience helps to anchor the book, although Drury and Clavin do expand the focus occasionally to show us what is happening in other parts of the country at the same time.

"Blood and Treasure" is carefully researched but written more like a fast-paced novel than a slow, fact-filled non-fiction tome. Life on the frontier was incredibly hard and the reader isn't spared from how violent and tragic life can be. Knowing basically nothing about Boone, I found this an interesting story about him and his desire to go westward decades before the concept of "manifest destiny" was officially the American policy. On the flip side of this coin, Clavin and Drury do an excellent job telling us about the natives who lived in the "uncharted" west and how they interacted with the invading Americans, as well as how different tribes influenced the French and Indian War and the American Revolution, the treaties various tribes made with the British, etc. The authors don't spare turn away from the crimes Americans committed against the tribes, or the blood spilled and lives lost on both sides as the Americans moved westward.

An excellent and highly readable focus on a little known but highly romanticized period of American history. A definite must read.

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

The below 4-star review was posted to Hillbilly Highways on 4/21/21 and to Amazon and Goodreads on 5/1/21:

Like most people, I have big holes in my knowledge of the world. Drury and Clavin helped me fill some of those holes with their new biography of Daniel Boone, Blood and Treasure. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know who Daniel Boone was. But I’ve never read a book about Boone as an adult, and there is a lot I don’t know about southern Appalachia’s frontier history, even though it is my history.

Drury and Clavin’s approach is perfect for me. I’m not a big biography reader. When I do read one, I prefer it devote ample page space to putting a person’s life into historical context. Drury and Clavin do that—there is an entire chapter devoted to the French and Indian War that elides Boone altogether. Ample page space given over to Boone’s time in the Yadkin Valley is equally welcomed by me, as a North Carolinian.

History—good history at least—is hard in any circumstance. Daniel Boone presents particular difficulties. On one hand, there are centuries of mythmaking. On the other, there is a contemporary insistence that American expansion was an act of unmitigated and unreciprocated evil. The truth is much messier than either the triumphalist or revisionist narratives would have you believe. It’s hard to squeeze into any one narrative. History as written can be two-dimensional; history as it happened is always three-dimensional.

Frontier history is always messy. The frontiersmen were cruel to the Indians, who were cruel to them (often first) and to each other. The political situation was more than complex, with the antagonisms among the French, British, American settlers, and various Indian tribes shifting constantly. Drury and Clavin know full well how foreign the violence perpetrated has become to us. They respond by shooting us straight.

“To modern sensibilities it is difficult to absorb the savageries practiced by both sides of the conflict: the crawling and bawling white toddler found scalped amid the scorched remains of his parents; the captured Indians hung from trees with their severed p____es jammed into slit throats.”

There is also the matter of balancing between taking care with the history and embracing the story. There is a pull to repeat a story too good to fact check. There is a countervailing pull to avoid making violence sexy. Drury and Clavin seem careful in their history. But they don’t shy away from telling many (and there are many) wild stories about Boone.

Boone’s rescue of his kidnapped daughter did, after all, form the basis for The Last of the Mohicans. His escape from Indians and race to warn of their impending attack is as impressive as the Hugh Glass trek that inspired The Revenant, and better sourced historically.

Boone didn’t think of himself as just a fighter and he wasn’t. “Daniel Boone had always despised, and would for the rest of his life, his outsize reputation as an Indian fighter. . . . He was vastly more proud of his ability to endure the burdens of a huntsman’s life with a seemingly preternatural stoicism.”

Boone was a skilled fighter to be sure, especially when it came to the kind of irregular action that dominated on the frontier. He was an expert marksman. But he was a man of many skills. Able to survive and navigate in the back country for months at a time. Able to talk his way out of trouble with Indians as quick or quicker than fight his way out. Able to whip up a batch of homemade gunpowder. Able to “restock a rifle with a piece of raw timber” while on the run and use it to take down a small buffalo. Able to travel 160 miles across hard country in four days after escaping from Indians.

Most of the narrative is devoted to Boone’s work in “Kanta-ke,” including frontier skirmishing during the American Revolution. A substantial early chunk of the book covers the French and Indian War. But I was pleased to see how much page space was devoted to Boone’s time in Yadkin Valley and the North Carolina highlands. And not just because I am a North Carolinian. That time is essential to understanding Boone as a man and not just as a myth.

Boone had Quaker roots, but in many ways, he was a quintessential example of the Scots-English borderer who would dominate the American frontier. His family followed a traditional hillbilly route, first moving west deep into Pennsylvania, then south along the ridges all the way to the Yadkin Valley. Boone moving again into the mountains, then across them to Kentucky, wasn’t at all odd in a time and place where “it was not unusual for pioneer families to shift their homes six times or more in their lifetimes.” Boone hewed to the moral casualness of the hillbilly, not the Quaker. When he returned from a long hunt to discover that his brother had knocked up his wife, Boone readily forgave both and raised the girl as his own.

Boone was most adept at the skills most valued by hillbillies and carried immense respect in frontier communities because of it, even if he clashed with more refined, wealthy interlopers from the east who thought they were owed deference. He was good with a rifle. I mean good. He could survive unsupported for months in the backcountry and move long distances through rough terrain at speed. He didn’t believe in honorable combat. He was quick to surrender to superior Indian forces and equally quick to escape. He respected the Indians as peers—it only made him a more effective Indian fighter. He didn’t worry much about legalities when it came to homesteading.

Blood and Treasure isn’t perfect. I was surprised to see them describe the Battle of King’s Mountain as taking place “in the borderlands between the Carolinas and Tennessee.” It is well over a two-hour drive from Kings Mountain to the Tennessee border, even today. The similes employed by Drury and Clavin don’t always land (e.g., “The pang of betrayal stung the Shawnee like a copperhead’s strike.”).

Still, though, it is finally written. The narrative raced along for me once I internalized the writing style and Drury and Clavin got into Boone’s adulthood. Drury and Clavin’s approach was just the kind of history writing I like, especially given I walked in with a weak background on Boone and on Appalachia’s time as America’s backcountry. It is a crunchy book full of interesting tidbits. I highlighted dozens of interesting passages in my Kindle copy, greatly slowing the writing on this review but a delight in their own right to scan back over.

Disclosure: I received an advance review copy of Blood and Treasure.

What I found as I read Blood and Treasure is a well-researched book that takes a look at the men and a few women who blazed trails at the founding of the new nation. The book also tells us of the indigenous people who were trying to hang on to their land and their way of life. The main focus is Daniel Boone who started as an obscure hunter and trail blazer. Then his notoriety brought jealousy and danger.
Many historical events (like the French and Indian War) and people (George Washington and Pontiac) are discussed. As pioneers are making their way from the colonies to new homesteads, another raging battle is the Revolutionary War.
This is a fascinating book for readers who enjoy early American history. It is also interesting for those who want to know more about the people who sacrificed their own blood and treasure to make their dreams come true, or those who fought not to lose their ancestral land.
Thank you #netgalley and #bloodandtreasure for a copy of this book.

Wow, I absolutely loved this book! This was my first book on Daniel Boone, and it did not disappoint. I will definitely be picking up more books by this team in the future.

Structure and Formatting 5/5
This book starts out with a bang, highlighting a pivotal moment for Daniel Boone in his later life, and then starts back at the beginning to see how we got there. While I don't typically like flashback/flash forwards in my nonfiction book, it just worked for me here. It effectively grabbed my attention and made me want to keep reading to get back to the action of the opening scene. The chapters were fairly bite-sized, which I tend to like in my nonfiction as well since it gives more pauses for processing than books with longer chapters.

Thoroughness of Research 5/5
Like I said, this was my first book on Daniel Boone, but I have a good sense of who has already covered him in other books. Who are the legendary story collectors, who are the biographers... this did a great job of hyping up some books already on my TBR while adding a few more to my list.

Storytelling/Writing 5/5
This is a page-turner. Action-packed and fast paced, the short chapters and writing devices typically found in fiction help to drive this story forward. This is a bingeable book, which I can attest to since I managed to read this in one day picking it up any chance I got before and after work. 😅

Level of Enjoyment 5/5
This was such a good one! Once I saw there was a chapter (chapter 3) entitled "Long Hunters," I was even more excited to continue on since my ancestor Charles Skaggs was a long hunter. I wanted to learn about him and his life. While he did not appear in the book, I took the descriptions given of long hunters in general and thought about them in relation to him and his life and family. It definitely made this book feel more personal and fun while reading.

Prior Knowledge Needed 5/5
You can go into this knowing absolutely nothing about Daniel Boone, the colonial wars, the French and Indian War, or the Revolution and still enjoy this. I would say my knowledge of the French and Indian War and Revolution enhanced my experience of this book since I already knew the "characters" being mentioned, but this is written in a way that even people unfamiliar with those events will be able to enjoy and understand the book.

Thanks to Netgalley for an ARC of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.

This book was both informative and enjoyable, and much broader in scope than I anticipated. I focused on the "Daniel Boone" in the title, but this book was much more than a biography of Daniel Boone.

Somehow, the authors managed to include massive amounts of information, without turning this into a tedious recitation of history. I learned a lot, but the book was always lively and enjoyable reading.

While we did hear a lot about Daniel Boone, it seemed as if he was more the focus to organize the discussion of history of the westward expansion - since he was so much a part of things, it was a good way to organize the discussion, while keeping it human.

One thing I very much appreciated was that the book looked at the time and events from the Native American perspective as well as from the colonial perspective. Vastly different from the "history" I learned in school, back in the day!

Well worth reading - I enjoyed it, and I also learned a few things!

For some reason, this review was rejected by Amazon as some sort of violation of community guidelines. I can't figure it out!

I have read several of Tom Clavin's books and have enjoyed them all! I always learn something new about America's early history. One thing I appreciate about his books is that he keeps the story interesting. It isn't just dry historical nonfiction....he keeps it interesting and entertaining. These books don't read like a textbook, but rather an unfolding of history by someone who obviously loves it.

Drury and Clavin build a history of the early push beyond the Appalachian mountains using obviously in-depth research and contemporary sources including diaries, newspaper articles and firsthand stories. That makes this book about the real Daniel Boone and not a re-telling of the myth behind the man. This book is about the man....not the larger than life hero from old fiction novels and television shows. And it doesn't pull punches. The foray into the unsettled west was bloody, violent and grim at times. Native American tribes were brutalized, and attacked those venturing into their lands to save their way of life. Men, women and children died. Many, many of them.

Loved this book! As usual I'm going to buy a hardback copy for my husband and the audio book for myself. For me these books always warrant a revisit. And my husband loves history as much as I do.

I'm definitely eagerly awaiting the next book from both of these authors!

**I voluntarily read a review copy of this book from St. Martins Press. All opinions expressed are entirely my own.**

Blood and Treasure by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin focuses on Daniel Boone and his role in the fight for America’s first frontier. In the mid-18th century, the drive to conquer and settle the area beyond the Appalachian Mountains, North America’s “first frontier.” That drive would commence a series of bloody battles against the Native American tribes, the French and lastly British as the fight for independence intensifies. Drury and Clavin provide an epic narrative of Daniel Boone, as America’s first and great pathfinder, whose explorations would become legend, while tearing down the coonskin cap-wearing caricature that many Americans are familiar with. Blood and Treasure is more than just Daniel Boone’s story. It is the story of the ordinary and the extraordinary men and women, colonists and Native, who witnessed the road that led to the birth of the United States. The reader is placed in the middle of America's first frontier and the tales of courage and sacrifice that occurred there.
I have been interested in Daniel Boone’s story ever since I discovered that his older sister, Sarah Boone Wilcoxson (1724-1815) is my 14th great grandmother on my paternal grandfather’s side. I dived into Blood and Treasure as I was eager to learn more about the man and how he became a legend. It is evident that Drury and Clavin painstakingly researched the story of Daniel Boone and the events surrounding his life. Boone was a man born with wanderlust and the perfect individual to explore the unexplored. While the information seemed overwhelming, and it took me a few days as I carefully read, Drury and Clavin are able to take a complicated history and provide a fast-paced, fiery narrative and honest depiction of the frontier. What I liked about the book is, while the main focus is on Daniel Boone, his contemporaries were allowed to have a voice and help provide a bigger picture of the events than just through Boone’s own recollections. Blood and Treasure provides a clearer picture of who these men and women really were, the good, the bad and the ugly, and not the just pedestal heroes that we have been led to know. I highly recommend Blood and Treasure.

Blood and Treasure is available in hardcover, eBook, and audiobook.

My thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for an advanced copy of this book.

Popular history tends to get short shrift among the literati. Vivid narration, celebrity subjects (of the historical nature), not much in the way of analysis or the big issues of the time. This is the wrong way too look at this genre, as many books, this one included, while supposedly about one subject does reach as high in many ways.

Blood and Treasure: Daniel Boone and the Fight for America's First Frontier, by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin is really about more than the titular frontiers man, or as he would probably prefer long hunter. The book is about the founding and growth of America, its birthing pains, the men and women who suffered and the evil that men do. Daniel Boone cones across as a decent man, a natural leader, a huge hunter of animals, and a man who really just wanted to be left alone. There is derring-do of course, but the book balances this with the reality of how tough a time it was to survive.

The research seems very comprehensive. I particularly enjoyed the footnotes. One footnote on honey bees sent me down an Internet tunnel for quite awhile. I've enjoyed other books by these authors, both together and separate. This would be a fine Father's Day gift, with much to think and contemplate on besides how much a legend Daniel Boone continues to be.

Recognizing that you can’t write an historical book about Daniel Boone and his accomplishments as a frontiersman without also providing contextual stories about the Native indigenous population and subsequent conflicts, I often found myself wondering which one was the book about. Did the authors really want to tell the story of the much aligned Native population and used the documented life of well-known Daniel Boone as the focal point of the British expansion? If so, I might have suggested a different title, subtitle.

Overall... I did enjoy gaining more information about the history presented in this scholarship - the back and forth contextual setting for the expansion of colonists into western North Carolina and then over the Appalachia into the Kentucky River Valley and the subsequent interactions with multiple native tribes.

The book is well researched and valuable for understanding the political nature of the native population as it existed during this time. There are a lot of atrocities on both sides, although the authors do show a preference. I hated the ending. The final paragraph completely soured the book for me.

In this advance copy there are quite a few phrases, turns of phrases, adjectives that reveal a distaste for Boone, frontier settlers, and the expansion. The story weaves an informative narrative when suddenly the authors personal opinion sticks out, leaving you wondering why that was necessary.

This subtle sourness is the only reason I give the book four-stars.

Drury and Clavin have written a very-well-researched piece about the American legend, Daniel Boone. While I was anticipating a more novelized version, this unemotional, fact-based version paints a clear, realistic picture of the beloved woodsman. It also clearly explains his role in both readily familiar as well as more obscure historical events. The book is definitely a vocabulary booster, and made me glad that I could simply highlight words such as chiaroscuro, atavistically, and eponymous on my Kindle to discover their meaning. I recommend this book to both those who have a passion for American history and those who simply want to know a bit more about Boone and the times in which he lived. I am grateful to have received a complimentary copy of Blood and Treasure from St. Martin Press via NetGalley without obligation. All opinions expressed here are my own.

Who was the real Daniel Boone? Was the pioneer and explorer who wore a coonskin cap in the television show that bears his name historically accurate? I watched the reruns of 𝐷𝑎𝑛𝑖𝑒𝑙 𝐵𝑜𝑜𝑛𝑒 when I was a child. History intrigued me, but at the time, I didn’t realize how historically inaccurate the show was. And let’s be honest. At that time, I probably didn’t care.
After reading this explosive true saga of Daniel Boone, I greatly admire the man and the hardships he went through for this nation. What he really did and the things he experienced are much more interesting than any of the myths told about him.

Reading this book puts you right in the middle of all of it, and it makes you understand just how spoiled we are now. Daniel Boone was an amazing hunter and tracker. Starting when he was a teen, he was a long hunter. They would go out for weeks or even months at a time to kill game, and sometimes they would even be gone during the cold winter months. Can you imagine having to sleep outdoors during those months? But I’m not sure if sleeping outside in the brutal cold of winter would have been worse than sleeping outside during the heat of summer. (Read the second favorite sentence below.)

Even though one of his sons was scalped by an Indian in the beginning of the book, he wasn’t always fighting the Indians. He considered many of them friends, but he also had enemies among them. He even took part in the early politics of this nation at a time when politicians didn’t become rich. He was honest and he had integrity.

If you want to learn about the real Daniel Boone, you want to read this book. I wanted to include everything that I learned from this book in my review, but then this review would be a book. Besides, that would take a lot of the joy of reading it away from you. These authors put a lot of research into writing this book, and they are brutally honest. Yes, there was a lot of bloodshed during the founding of this nation. Yes, there was a lot of treachery. But there was also a lot of bravery.

★ ★ ★ 1/2 (rounded up)
This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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WHAT'S BLOOD AND TREASURE ABOUT?
It's pretty much in the subtitle—this book is about 2 things—Daniel Boone and the fight (literal and metaphoric) for America's first Frontier—with a focus on what we now know as Kentucky, but pretty much everything on the Western edge of the American colonies/states.

It's not a biography of Boone (I'll tell you now, I wrongly expected this to be more of one), it's more like he's the organizing principle for the book, as we learn about Boone's roots, early life, and adulthood the authors talk about the conflicts with the Indians on the edge of white civilization's expanse. We'd get a chunk of a wide-view of history over a period, and then we'd focus on Boone's life around that time. Then the focus would widen a bit and we'd look at another period of time—and so on.

Two significant ingredients in "the Fight" for the Frontier were what's called The French and Indian War and the American Revolution. There's the French and Indian War (and conflicts that led up to it and sprang from it) to begin with, paved the way for the latter conflicts—we see the pressure put on various tribes from the expansion of settlers, the resistance those settlers faced (from shifting alliances of Indians between themselves, and varying alliances between Western powers and the Indians).

As for the Revolution—while most histories/documentaries/etc. about it will acknowledge the fighting in the South and West, few take any time to focus on it. Instead, we casual history readers just get repeated retellings of the stuff we learned in elementary school—Washington*, the Continent Army, Benedict Arnold, Nathan Hale, the Green Mountain Boys, and whatnot—and whatever expansions on some of those topics that Hamilton has taught us in the last few years. This book is a great corrective to that showing how the Indians were largely pawns for the British to use against the colonies, to distract from the larger skirmishes as well as to try to open up another front on the war—another way to steal power and influence from the colonies. You see very clearly how easily the entire War could've changed if not for a couple of significant losses suffered by the British and their Indian allies.

* Washington is also featured pretty heavily in the earlier chapters, too—even if he maybe only briefly met Boone on one occasion.

LANGUAGE CHOICES
I know this sort of this is pretty customary, but I really appreciated the Note to Readers explaining the authors' language choices—starting with the tribal designations they used—the standard versions accepted today (there are enough various entities mentioned throughout that if they'd gone with contemporary names and spellings, I—and most readers—would've been very confused).

At the same time, they did preserve the varied and non-standard spellings for just about everything else. For example, there were at least three variant spellings for Kentucky: Cantucky, Kanta-ke, and Kentucki (I think there was one more, but I can't find it).

I was a little surprised that they stuck with the term "Indian" as much as they did—but their explanation for it seemed likely and understandable.

AN IMAGE SHATTERED—OR MAYBE JUST CORRECTED
Yes, I know that the Fess Parker TV show I saw after school in syndication was only very loosely based in reality. And that the handful of MG-targeted biographies I read several times around the same time were sanitized and very partial. Still, those are the images and notions about Boone that have filled my mind for decades. So reading all the ways they were wrong and/or incomplete threw me more than I'm comfortable with.

His appearance was particularly jarring—the actual Boone eschewed coonskin caps because they were flat-topped and preferred a high-crowned felt hat to look taller. THat's wrong on so many levels. "Tall as a mountain was he" is about as far from the truth as you can get.

The fact that he spent most of his life bouncing between comfort and/or wealth and massive debt is both a commentary on his strengths and weaknesses as it is the volatile times he lived in—he lost so much thanks to colonial governments being mercurial. It was reassuring to see the repeated insistence that he was an honest man, who worked to repay his debts even if it took too long.

In the end, Boone seemed to be a good guy trying his best to get by and provide for his family—who accidentally stepped into some degree of celebrity, that magnified some good qualities and replaced the man with a legend.

SO, WHAT DID I THINK ABOUT BLOOD AND TREASURE?
The writing itself? There are moments that were fantastic. On the whole...., but from time to time, when Drury and Clavin wanted to drive an image or description home, they could be stunning. I would have preferred things to be a bit more even—a bit more balanced and consistent on that front. But the topic and scope didn't really allow for that. So I'll just enjoy those moments of it that I got.

As for the book as a whole? It was impressive, entertaining (generally), and informative. When it was at its best, it didn't feel like reading dry history but a compelling look at that portion of US History. At its worst, it was a litany of names, dates, and ideas that didn't do much for me. Thankfully, those moments were few and far between. It's not a difficult read at any point, just pretty dry on occasion.

There are so many other things I'd like to have mentioned or discussed—but it would make this post unwieldy. The notes about hunting (both the good and the horrible), Boone's heroics, his character, and family; various aspects of the Indian customs discussed and so much. There's just so much in this book to chew on that I can't sum it up.

I liked this—I liked it enough to look at a few other books by this duo to see what they can do with other topics, people, and eras. I think anyone with a modicum of interest in Boone will enjoy this and be glad for the experience.

Disclaimer: I received this eARC from St. Martin's Press via NetGalley in exchange for this post—thanks to both for this.