Many Boones.

One of the most popular frontier figures was Daniel Boone, famous backswoodsman, foe of Indians, and one of the first settlers of the state of Kentucky. Boone's legend grew in the first half of the nineteenth century; he became the subject of many biographies, poems, adventure tales, paintings, and sculptures. Each of these works emphasized different elements of the Boone legend, and in doing so, affirmed different visions of the frontier. For Westerners, Boone was a hero, a solitary, courageous man of action. For some Easterners he became either a gentleman-hunter or an emblem of unrestrained, degenerate, radical democracy. In the South, Boone was a chivalric "knight-errant."

Filson.

Boone's first literary appearance was in John Filson's Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke (1784). Filson was a Pennsylvannia schoolteacher and speculator who traveled through the Kentucky frontier with Boone as...