Tuesday, November 2, 2010

“All you need for happiness is a good gun, a good horse, and a good wife” Daniel Boone, born on the 2nd of November, according to the old calendar, in 1734... Duchess Maria Antonia was born on Dan'l's 21st birthday over in Austria, unaware, of course, that she'd be known in France as Marie Antoinette, doomed queen, having been dispatched into political wedlock. Long many a year was born on Dan'l's 21st birthday, swell author Natalie Kinsey-Warnock, b. 2 Nov, quite a few years after that... http://www.kinsey-warnock.com/


Here, here's a bit o' me Dan'l Boone book in honor of the old Pathfinder:

AS LONG AS PEOPLE HAVE HAD EYES & MINDS, they've used them to gaze & wonder what they might see if they ventured out beyond the edge of town. But not everybody had the gumption or, in some cases, the misfortune to leave the familiar and chance the mysterious. Off they'd go, all sorts of hardy folks, into the woods, on rivers, across deserts, and over the seas. Thanks to them, we have stories, and one of the best is that of trailblazer Daniel Boone. He tramped many a mile, gathering up knowledge about young America's frontier, storing all that he learned behind his keen blue eyes.
We Americans are, on the whole, a restless bunch, descended from travelers. When ancestors of the folks Daniel Boone knew as "Indians" came east from Asia to North America, they might well have found paths made by who knows who or what. Over the ages, descendants of these prehistoric pioneers and newcomers from across the Atlantic Ocean crisscrossed the continent, tracing new trails. Old roads morphed and networked into canals, railroad tracks, city streets, and multi-lane highways where, nowadays, cars and trucks zip along at 70 MPH. We speed through the clouds in jets, thousands of feet above where beasts and people trudged through the wilds, following in the footsteps of Daniel Boone. We still do.


introduction to The Trailblazing Life of DANIEL BOONE & How Early Americans Took to the Road [National Geographic, 2007]


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