by David Fisher
BILL O’REILLY’S
LEGENDS & LIES
THE REAL WEST
WRITTEN BY DAVID FISHER
Henry Holt and Company
New York
Begin Reading
Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
Thank you for buying this
Henry Holt and Company ebook.
To receive special offers, bonus content,
and info on new releases and other great reads,
sign up for our newsletters.
Or visit us online at
us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup
For email updates on the author, click here.
The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: http://us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.
INTRODUCTION
PACE HIGH SCHOOL
MIAMI, FLORIDA
AUGUST 1971
The classroom was filled with bored faces. About forty of them. All staring at a young history teacher fresh out of college who, at age twenty-one, was just a few years older than his students. What had I gotten myself into?
My initial task was to get these teenagers interested in things that had happened in America hundreds of years ago, events they thought had little or no meaning in their current lives.
It wasn’t easy.
While I taught, I learned. There was a way to spread historical information around so that the urchins would not nod off. But it involved energy and thought, not just standing there pontificating. I learned back then that in order for people to enjoy history, you have to make it come alive in a vivid way. My students were taught to put themselves into the historical fray by visualizing themselves in the action. Those who did that learned about America in an unforgettable way.
Enter this book, Legends & Lies. It is based upon my high school teaching techniques that cut through the clutter to tell amazing stories. Want specifics? How about this: Evidence suggests that the real Lone Ranger was a black man! You’ll ride with him through a series of harrowing adventures that few Americans know about.
What you will read in this book is the truth about some very famous people. It’s not always pretty, and it’s definitely not the stuff they taught you in school. No, these pages are filled with facts and personalities, many of them disturbing. But we have made them all real people on the page because they were real people in life. Folks who did extraordinary things. A guy like Kit Carson, traveling thousands of miles through the freezing Rocky Mountains and then over the scorching-hot Arizona desert. At least Carson had a horse—the bandit Black Bart was afraid of horses and actually walked from Illinois to Montana! Don’t believe me? Read the book. Walk alongside him.
America has a tendency to glamorize its past, creating myths instead of reporting truth. Let’s take the Old West, for example. Our image of that time is John Wayne, Marshal Matt Dillon in Gunsmoke, and maybe a squinting, grizzled Clint Eastwood mowing down bad guys in a dusty town. But the truth about the West is far different from Rio Bravo or Stagecoach or The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. This was a place where brutality ruled, and life expectancy was measured in months. If you lived to be forty, you were way ahead. Some famous western men and women were both heroes and villains, split personalities. The dangers they faced were unrelenting.
Did you know that some Indians were more civilized than the settlers they encountered? But other Native Americans would torture in ways that are nearly inconceivable. Some outlaws, such as Butch Cassidy and Black Bart, were almost noble in their outlook. Some lawmen, such as Pat Garrett, were not. It is these stories that we will relate to you in this book, and after reading them, you will know the truth about America’s lively and unique past. You will have also learned about some lies that still circulate today. Debunking falsehoods is a major theme here.
As in my previous history books, Killing Lincoln, Killing Kennedy, Killing Jesus, and Killing Patton, we will put you on the scene as historical events unfold. You will be in the room and on the trail with Jesse James, Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok, and many other legendary figures. You will vividly see these men live and sometimes die. While reading this book, you will experience history rather than be numbed by it. Some say that after reading the Killing series, they understand the towering figures in history in a unique way. Each of those books has sold millions of copies.
When I engaged my students all those years ago, I painted a verbal picture for them of times past. Billy the Kid, for example, was a lot like they were, a confused teenager who chose the wrong road and paid the ultimate price. Or did he? There’s always a bit more to the story if you dig deep enough. In Legends & Lies, you will see that the Kid’s fate may have turned out far differently than many believe or the press reported.
And that’s the fun of these pages. We dig deep, uncovering facts that illuminate the legends and debunk the lies that have somehow become folklore. History can be thrilling, and America’s past is full of tremendous characters whose exploits can enrich our own lives today. It took me a while to convince my students of that, but I did it, and my history classes rocked, according to their own reviews (conducted each year at the school’s behest).
Now it’s your turn, and as a plus, there’s no homework! Enjoy the exciting journey, and thanks for reading the book!
Bill O’Reilly
January 2015
DANIEL BOONE
Traitor or Patriot?
As Daniel Boone approached his log cabin one October day in 1778, carrying fur and meat to take his family through the winter, he probably guessed something was wrong. Keenly perceptive and attuned to the rhythms of nature, he would have sensed the discord. His family came out to greet him, followed almost immediately by several stern-looking men. As Boone dismounted, one of them handed him a subpoena. Another man stepped forward, unrolled a scroll, and announced, “Daniel Boone, you are hereby formally charged with treason and shall face a court-martial …”
No one embodied the spirit of the frontier more than Daniel Boone, who faced and defeated countless natural and man-made dangers to literally hand cut the trail west through the wilderness. He marched with then colonel George Washington in the French and Indian War, established one of the most important trading posts in the West, served three terms in the Virginia Assembly, and fought in the Revolution. His exploits made him world famous; he served as the model for James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales and numerous other pioneer stories. He was so well known and respected that even Lord Byron, in his epic poem Don Juan, wrote, “Of the great names which in our faces stare, The General Boon, back-woodsman of Kentucky, Was happiest amongst mortals anywhere …”
And yet he was accused of treason—betraying his country—the most foul of all crimes at the time. What really happened to bring him to that courtroom? And was the verdict reached there correct?
Daniel Boone was born in Pennsylvania in 1734, the sixth child of Quakers Sarah and Squire Boone. His father had come to America from England in 1713. The Boones were known as thrifty, prosperous people. His cousin, James Boone, had a knack for numbers and eventually became known as “Boone, the Mathematician.” But Daniel Boone did not find comfort in the classroom or with books. He had enough schooling to know how to sign his name, but his real education was learning the skills of survival on the frontier: He became an expert hunter, tracker, trapper, marksman, and trailblazer. It was said that no Indian could aim his rifle, find his way through a pathles
s forest, or search out game better than young Daniel Boone. He was hard to pin down to any one place; he always loved being on his own, away from the clatter of the cities.
Born in 1734 in Birdsboro, Pennsylvania, Daniel Boone was the seventh of twelve children.
When Squire Boone was “disowned” by the Quaker meeting for allowing his children to “marry out of unity”—meaning to marry non-Quakers—he moved his family to North Carolina. The Boones had only just settled there when the French and Indian War began in 1754. Young Daniel Boone served as a wagoneer in British major Edward Dobb’s North Carolina militia. He marched with Lieutenant Colonel George Washington under the despised General Braddock in his disastrous effort to capture Fort Duquesne. When Braddock was killed in the Battle of the Wilderness, Washington took command and began building his heroic reputation. During the war, Boone first heard tell of a place the Indians called the Dark and Bloody Ground, a paradise that some people called Kentucke. An Indian trader named John Finlay had actually been there and was determined to get back. At that time, very little about the lands south of the Ohio River was known to the British, and Boone listened to these stories with excitement, his heart making the decision that he would go there.
A small group of extraordinarily courageous men risked their lives exploring and settling the American frontier. They were people who felt an urgent pull to see what lay beyond the next mountain and depended on their skills, wits, and sometimes just plain luck to reach the next summit. They were most at home in foreign and wild places, living off God’s bounty. Many of these early American pioneers are forgotten, but through hundreds of years of American history, Daniel Boone has stood for them all.
It took Boone twelve more years to finally get to Kentucke, and by that time he had married his neighbor’s daughter, Rebecca Bryan, and they’d had four children, in addition to taking in several nieces and nephews. He’d also explored the area called Florida (he reportedly bought land near Pensacola but elected not to settle there), as well as the unspoiled wilderness of the Alleghenies, the Cumberlands, and the Shenandoah Valley. In 1851, author Henry Howe described Boone’s arrival in Kentucke, writing that his party, “after a long and fatiguing march, over a mountainous and pathless wilderness, arrived on the Red River. Here, from the top of an eminence, Boone and his companions first beheld a distant view of the beautiful lands of Kentucky. The plains and forests abounded with wild beasts of every kind; deer and elk were common; the buffalo were seen in herds and the plains covered with the richest verdure … this newly discovered Paradise of the West.” Daniel Boone was the first settler to set his eyes and bestow a name on many of the now familiar features of Kentucky. Like many frontiersmen of the time, as Boone explored, he carved his name into the trees to show he had been there, and a beech tree on the Watauga River in Tennessee still bears the inscription D. BOON CILLED A. BAR ON TREE IN THE YEAR 1760.
Thomas Cole’s Daniel Boone Sitting at the Door of His Cabin on the Great Osage Lake, Kentucky, 1826
His first time in Kentucke, he stayed only long enough to know that he’d found the open spaces in which he wanted to raise his family. He returned in 1769 with five other men, blazing the first trail from North Carolina into eastern Tennessee. During that expedition, he spent two years there, twice being captured by Indians; the first time, he was set free, the next time, he escaped. As he later wrote, the Indians “had kept us in confinement seven days, treating us with common savage usage … in the dead of the night, as we lay in a thick cane-break by a large fire, when sleep had locked up their senses, my situation not disposing me for rest, I touched my companion, and gentle awoke him. We improved this favorable opportunity, and departed, leaving them to take their rest, and speedily directed our course towards our old camp.” His companion was his brother-in-law, John Stewart, who had been captured with him both times, but eventually Stewart’s luck ran out. While out hunting one day, he was shot by an Indian raiding party and took refuge in a hollowed-out tree, where he bled to death; his body was found there almost five years later.
Boone would spend his winters hunting beaver and otter, and in the spring sell or trade the furs he had collected. In the summers he would farm and hunt deer, gathering meat for the winter and deerskins for trade. The value of these deerskins, or buckskins, fluctuated against the British pound and later the American dollar, and eventually buck became an acceptable slang term for “dollar.”
Boone also made his clothes from the skins of the animals, and his buckskin shirt and leggings, moccasins, and beaver cap were the accepted dress of the frontiersmen.
In 1773, Boone decided it was time to move his family to Kentucke. He sold his farm and all his possessions and agreed to lead the first group of about fifty British colonists into the new territory. On the journey west, his son James trailed behind, bringing cattle and supplies to the settlements. On October 9, James Boone’s small group was camped along Wallen Creek when Indians attacked. They had failed to take the necessary precautions and were defenseless. James and several others were brutally tortured and killed. Although Boone urged the rest of the settlers to push forward, this deadly attack frightened them into returning to civilization in Virginia and Carolina. He had no choice but to go back with them.
Early American history has been told—and often exaggerated—by the pen and the paintbrush. Daniel Boone’s fame as a bear hunter is depicted by Severino Baraldi (above), while this portrait of the lone woodsman was painted by Robert Lindneux.
Boone blazing the trail west in George Caleb Bingham’s 1851–52 oil painting, Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap
Boone was not a man who relished a fight, but he never backed away from one, either. In 1774, he led the defense of three forts along Virginia’s Clinch River from Shawnee attacks and, as a result, earned a promotion to captain in the militia—as well as the respect of his men. While Boone proved to be one of the settlers’ most ferocious fighters, he did understand the reason for the Indians’ resistance and perhaps even sympathized with them, admitting that the war against them was intended to “dispossess them of their desirable habitations”—in simpler words, take their land.
His reputation was growing, the word spread by his admirers, who never hesitated to tell stories of his courage, even if some were a bit exaggerated. In 1775, the Transylvania Company, which had purchased from the Cherokees all the land lying between the Cumberland Mountains, the Cumberland River, and the Kentucky River, south of the Ohio, hired Boone to lead the expedition of axmen that carved the three-hundred-mile-long Wilderness Road through three states and the Cumberland Gap. It was this trail that opened up the frontier to the many thousands of settlers who would follow.
When Boone’s men finally reached Kentucke, he laid out the town and fort of Boonesborough. During that journey, four men were killed and five were wounded by the increasingly hostile Shawnees. But Boonesborough and Harrodsburg, wrote Henry Howe, “became the nucleus and support of emigration and settlement in Kentucky.” The settlers, including Boone’s wife and their children, raced to erect fortifications strong enough to resist Indian attacks, and on May 23, 1776, the Shawnees attacked Boonesborough. They were repelled, but they would come back, and everybody knew it.
Less than two weeks later, the Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, signed the Declaration of Independence. It would take more than a month for the settlers to learn of it. The coming war for independence did not really affect or concern them; they were already too busy fighting a war for their own survival. Boone was not a political man and did not strongly support either the Revolutionaries or the British. That was not a luxury he had time for. Life on the frontier was always a daily life-or-death struggle. Just about a week after the noble document was signed, for example, Boone’s daughter, Jemima, and two other young girls were kidnapped by a Shawnee-Cherokee raiding party. He immediately gathered nine men and set off after them.
On April 1, 1775, Boone and thirty axmen began constructio
n of Fort Boonesborough, choosing a location in a defensible field “about 60 yards from the river, and a little over 200 yards from a salt lick.”
From all accounts, Daniel Boone was not a man of exuberant emotions. He kept his feelings contained and was respected for his cunning and his steadfast leadership. He was not a man who ever asked another to take a risk in his place. When a task needed to be done, he took the lead. The rescuers pursued the Indians for three days, finally sneaking up on them as they sat by a breakfast fire. Their first shot wounded a guard and alerted the others to escape. Two of the Indians were killed, and the three girls were freed without harm. This kidnapping and rescue later served as an inspiration for James Fenimore Cooper, who included a similar incident in The Last of the Mohicans, with the character Hawkeye modeled after Boone.
The Revolutionary War just brushed the frontier, and rather than facing the redcoats, the pioneers fought Native Americans supplied and supported by British forces headquartered in Detroit. It was questionable whether the Indians were actually fighting to protect the Empire or to maintain their own rights to live and hunt on the land. By 1777, Indians were focusing their attacks on Boonesborough, forcing the settlers to stay close to the fort. One afternoon, Boone was outside the perimeter when the Shawnees attacked. As Boone took up his long gun to return fire, a bullet smashed into his ankle and sent him to the ground. He was carried through the closing gate as Indian bullets ripped into the wooden walls.
The constant pressure of attacks kept the settlers confined, and by the end of the year, supplies were running low. In early February, Boone was asked to lead a twenty-seven-man expedition to the Blue Licks, a salt lick located several miles away. It was a very risky mission: Several weeks earlier, three Shawnee chiefs in captivity at Fort Randolph had been killed, and the tribe was seeking revenge. As Boone’s men were gathering vital salt, he was alone, hunting for provisions—and he was surprised and captured by a Shawnee war party. More than one hundred warriors were led by Chief Blackfish, a man Boone had met decades earlier while serving in Braddock’s campaign. Blackfish apparently respected Boone as the chief of his people and told him he intended to avenge the murders of the three Indian chiefs by killing everyone in the salt-gathering party, then destroying Boonesborough. Boone negotiated with him, finally offering to arrange the peaceful surrender of his men, who would then go north with the tribe. Chief Blackfish agreed.
