Daniel Boone is and always will be my hero. I guess I can trace this back to my youth when “Daniel Boone” staring Fess Parker came on our old black and white television.

I can still remember some of the song that introduced the show.

“Daniel Boone was a man, yes, a big man,

With an eye like an eagle, and as tall as a mountain was he.”

No other words made a four-year-old’s heart beat faster like those. I even held back tears when Fess Parker, the actor that played Daniel Boone, died.

Daniel Boone was a true man and could do no wrong in my eyes, and when my grandfather started calling me Dan Boone, that only made my obsession worse.

Each week Boone and his assortment of side-kicks would correct all wrongs, face down Indians and bears and always make it home in time to have supper with his beloved wife, Becky.

It would be years later that I discovered how human Daniel Boone really was and how important he was to Tennessee, Virginia, and Kentucky.

To begin with, Boone rarely stayed at home but spent much of his life, hunting, trading and exploring the land just across the Appalachian Mountains from his home in North Carolina. In some cases, he was gone for a year or more, only to return to rest for a short time and then hit the trail again.

One of my favorite Boone stories happened right after one of these long hunting trips. Boone came home after being gone for almost a year to find his beloved Becky pregnant with a child that could not be his child. The story says he asked who was the father of the child, and his wife told him the father was his brother. The story says that Boone said, “well, at least it is a Boone” and never brought the subject up again. To Boone family meant everything.

Boone probably came through the Roan Mountain area and traded with the Indians for ginseng and animal pelts. He explored the unmapped areas of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia, and this sometimes got him in trouble with the native population of Indians.

One such encounter occurred near Jonesborough, Tenn. In this fight Boone had to hide behind a four-foot waterfall to save his own scalp. Another fight was supposed to have occurred near Roan’s Creek in Johnson County. According to the story, Boone lost everything he had except his hide and his scalp in this fight.

Boone explored and hunted until he settled in Boonesborough, Ky., and all the while he left his “sign” on the side of trees.

It seems that Daniel Boone had a habit of telling the world that he had killed a bear. When he killed one, often he would carve into a tree with a knife and tell the date he killed it.

One of these trees grew along Carroll Creek, near the town of Jonesborough, Tenn. This 350-year-old beech tree stood until 1920 when it blew down in a storm. It is estimated that this tree was the last “Boone Bear” tree to survive.

Gavels were made from the tree and used in the Jonesborough courthouse around 1924, and a marker was placed to commemorate the site. The tree said:

D. Boon

CillED A. Bar

on tree in the

YEAR

1760.

Even 260 years later, it is safe to say that Daniel Boone was a man, and a big man!