Some complaint having been made respecting Captain Boone’s surrender of his party at the Blue Licks, and other parts of his military conduct, his friends Colonel Richard Callaway and Colonel Benjamin Logan, exhibited charges against him which occasioned his being tried by court-martial.  This was undoubtedly done with a view to put an end to the calumny by disproving or explaining the charges.  The result of the trial was an honorable acquittal increased popularity of the Captain among his fellow citizens, and his promotion to the rank of Major.[39]

While Boone had been a prisoner among the Indians, his wife and family, supposing him to be dead, had returned to North Carolina.  In the autumn of 1778 he went after them to the house of Mrs. Boone’s father on the Yadkin.

In 1779, a commission having been opened by the Virginia Legislature to settle Kentucky land claims, Major Boone “laid out the chief of his little property to procure land warrants, and having raised about twenty thousand dollars in paper money, with which he intended to purchase them, on his way from Kentucky to Richmond, he was robbed of the whole, and left destitute of the means of procuring more.  This heavy misfortune did not fall on himself alone.  Large sums had been entrusted to him by his friends for similar purposes, and the loss was extensively felt.”

Boone must have suffered much anxiety in consequence of this affair.  Little is known respecting it, excepting that it did not impair the confidence of his friends in his perfect integrity.

This appears in the following extract of a letter from Colonel Thomas Hart, late of Lexington, Kentucky, to Captain Nathaniel Hart, dated Grayfields, August 3d, 1780.

“I observe what you say respecting our losses by Daniel Boone. [Boone had been robbed of funds in part belonging to T. and N. Hart.] I had heard of the misfortune soon after it happened, but not of my being partaker before now.  I feel for the poor people who, perhaps, are to lose even their pre-emptions:  but I must say, I feel more for Boone, whose character, I am told, suffers by it.  Much degenerated must the people of this age be, when amongst them are to be found men to censure and blast the reputation of a person so just and upright, and in whose breast is a seat of virtue too pure to admit of a thought so base and dishonorable.  I have known Boone in times of old, when poverty and distress had him fast by the hand:  and in these wretched circumstances, I have ever found him of a noble and generous soul, despising every thing mean; and therefore I will freely grant him a discharge for whatever sums of mine he might have been possessed of at the time.”

Boone’s ignorance of legal proceedings, and his aversion to lawsuits, appear to have occasioned the loss of his real estate; and the loose manner in which titles were granted, one conflicting with another, occasioned similar losses to much more experienced and careful men at the same period.