Here Is Where: Discovering America's Great Forgotten History
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I finish packing up my camera gear, and Tom says to me, almost as an aside, “You know there’s some question as to whether Laurens’s ashes are even here.”
“You’re kidding!” I exclaim.
“No, I’m not,” he says. “That’s the family lore at least.”
Far from disappointing, this is a welcome bit of trivia.
“That’s awesome,” I say.
Tom seems surprised by my response, and admittedly it was a poor choice of words. I quickly explain that I’m intrigued by the whole subject of missing remains not due to some morbid fixation but because it relates to the accuracy of grave markers. Some sites claim to be the final resting place of prominent historical figures, when in truth that might not be the case. Laurens makes the sixth distinguished American I’ve now heard about who, possibly, isn’t buried where he’s supposed to be.
Number five is the whole reason I’m off next to Kentucky.
DANIEL BOONE’S GRAVE
The often repeated saying that those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them has a lot of truth in it. But what are “the lessons of history”? The very attempt at definition furnishes ground for new conflicts. History is not a recipe book; past events are never replicated in the present in quite the same way. Historical events are infinitely variable and their interpretations are a constantly shifting process. There are no certainties to be found in the past.
—Historian Gerda Lerner
ALL I WANTED, just to establish a basic understanding of Daniel Boone’s life, was to first nail down when and where the man was born. Timothy Flint’s 1833 Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone, the First Settler of Kentucky is the earliest biography about the famed frontiersman and seemed a trustworthy resource to start with. “Different authorities assign a different birth place to Daniel Boone,” Flint writes in his book’s opening sentence. “One affirms that he was born in Maryland, another in North Carolina, and still another during the transit of his parents across the Atlantic. But they are all equally in error. He was born in the year 1746, in Bucks county, Pennsylvania.”
Flint’s confidence was encouraging—and misguided; he got the county right (although Bucks was originally called Berks) but was way off on the year. In My Father, Daniel Boone, which features historian Lyman Draper’s extensive interviews with Nathan Boone, Nathan states categorically: “I have shown you the family records, which in my father’s own handwriting show his birth to have been October 22, 1734.”
Every other major biography confirms that this is the more accurate date, with one slight caveat. In the middle of the eighteenth century, colonial America, following Europe’s lead, altered its calendar, and all dates before this modification can be referenced in two different ways. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII replaced the “Old Style” Julian calendar, created by Julius Caesar six hundred years earlier, with the “New Style” Gregorian calendar to make up for an eleven-minute discrepancy between the Julian year and the solar year—that is, the time it actually takes our planet to orbit the sun. (An eleven-minute lag doesn’t sound like much, but it adds up, and the months were falling out of sync with the seasons.) Predominantly Catholic countries switched immediately after the papal decree, while Protestant nations were slow to implement Pope Gregory’s somewhat complicated system. Great Britain and the colonies didn’t adopt the New Style until 1752, and many Americans born before then chose to have their original birth date put on their grave, followed by the initials O.S. for Old Style.
So, ultimately, the consensus is that Daniel Boone came into the world on October 22, 1734, in Berks County, Pennsylvania. Or on November 2, 1734, in Bucks County. Or any combination thereof.
“There’s a lot of folklore and misinformation surrounding Boone’s life, and separating fact from legend has always been a challenge,” Steven Caudill, a professional eighteenth-century reenactor who specializes in portraying Boone, says, commiserating with me as we drive through Frankfort, Kentucky.
“I grew up outside of Boonesborough, was raised on stories about Boone, and I’ve always been interested in him,” he says. Almost fifty years old, Steve served in the Army and then in the Winchester, Kentucky, police department before parlaying his fascination with Boone into a full-time job that keeps him on the road year-round. During a brief trip back home he’s agreed to accompany me to Boone’s grave in the Frankfort Cemetery at 215 East Main Street.
Incorporated in 1844, the cemetery was proposed by a local judge named Mason Brown who had visited Mount Auburn Cemetery in Massachusetts, returned home, and encouraged his fellow Kentuckians to create a burial ground equally as picturesque. I’d say they succeeded. Overlooking the Kentucky River, Frankfort Cemetery is one hundred acres of beautifully landscaped hills and gardens connected by winding paths and walkways. More than twenty thousand people are buried here, including an impressive assembly of statesmen, artists, writers, and war heroes. On our way up a sloping macadamized road, Steve and I pass the marker for Presley O’Bannon, the young Marine lieutenant who was the first American to raise a U.S. flag on captured foreign soil. This happened during the April 1805 Battle of Derne at Tripoli and inspired the lyrics in the Marines’ Hymn:
From the halls of Montezuma,
To the shores of Tripoli;
We fight our country’s battles
In the air, on land, and sea.
Farther up the rolling lane, Steve points to a fifteen-foot-high obelisk on our right surrounded by a black wrought-iron fence.
“That’s Boone’s grave.”
Once we get closer, I can make out carvings on each side of the memorial that appear to be scenes from Daniel Boone’s life.
“He never would have worn that,” Steve says, shaking his head, as he sees me examine one panel featuring Boone in his famed coonskin cap.
“Daniel was originally raised a Quaker, and like other long hunters he wore a Quaker-style felt hat.” This is more than a nitpicky sartorial critique on Steve’s part. “Wearing a coonskin cap would have been foolish for a number of reasons. For one, if you’re loading your rifle in the rain,” he says, mimicking a man holding a gun close to his chest and filling it with gunpowder, “you want to keep the inside of the barrel and your powder dry, and Quaker-style hats had larger brims to protect them from getting wet.”
Steve isn’t bothered by the panel that shows Boone slaying a deer or the one of his wife, Rebecca, milking a cow, but he’s peeved by the last image, of Boone fighting a Native American. “He’s always portrayed as this Indian killer,” Steve says. “If anything, he was a peacemaker, despite the fact that his brother and two sons were killed by Indians.” According to Nathan Boone, Daniel did kill at least one Indian during the Battle of Blue Licks at the end of the American Revolution, and Steve tells me there are two other instances in which Boone took an Indian’s life.
“Both times in self-defense,” he adds.
Perhaps the most persistent Boone misconception is that he founded Kentucky. Steve knocks down that myth instantly. “He founded Boonesborough and did more than anyone else to lead people into these parts, but others had been settling here before he did.”
“What’s so important about him, then?” I ask Steve. That came out harsher than I intended, and I already have an idea of Boone’s significance anyway. I’m just curious about Steve’s take, and I rephrase my question. “I mean, in your opinion, what would you say is his real legacy?”
Steve proceeds to emphasize how much Boone shaped the way our country came to see itself. Before Davy Crockett, Kit Carson, or Lewis and Clark, Daniel Boone represented the iconic American frontiersman. His roving, adventurous life in the woods influenced generations of artists and authors, from Thomas Cole and Frederick Church to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman. James Fenimore Cooper modeled Natty Bumppo in his Leatherstocking series partly after Boone, and the real-life abduction of Boone’s daughter by a Shawnee-led war party inspired a dramatic plotline in The Last of the Mohicans. (Bo
one famously rescued his daughter and two other teenage girls in a daring raid on their captors.) Cooper’s books were among the first novels out of America to become international bestsellers, and this further boosted Boone’s fame overseas. Throughout the late 1700s and early 1800s, a time when our national identity was being forged, Boone—more so than presidents Washington, Adams, and Jefferson, or any other political figure back then—symbolized in the United States and abroad the quintessential American: self-made, rugged, independent, frugal, lacking pretense or pride, forever on the move, always exploring.
“Boone is a part of who we are,” Steve says.
No dates, quotes, Bible verses, or mortuary symbols of any kind appear on Boone’s memorial. Perhaps erring on the side of caution, whoever designed the obelisk had only two words engraved in the stone: DANIEL BOONE. But even this is in doubt; Daniel Boone’s remains might not actually be here.
“Boone was originally buried in Marthasville, Missouri, next to his wife, Rebecca,” Steve says, “and there’s a grave marker for him there, too. About twenty-five years after Boone’s death, the founders of this cemetery pushed to have his body put here. A host of dignitaries met with members of Boone’s family and told them it would be a great honor to have Daniel and Rebecca back in Kentucky, and they agreed. Fifteen to twenty thousand people attended an elaborate parade when the remains were brought to Frankfort.”
“At least what they thought were his remains, right?”
“That’s the problem. Eyewitnesses in Missouri, who were at Daniel’s and Rebecca’s graves when they were dug up, later claimed that everything was so decayed and jumbled together, including the bones of other relatives and slaves, that the representatives from Kentucky took the wrong ones. A plaster cast had been made of Boone’s skull before he was reburied, and in 1983 an anthropologist named Dr. David Wolf looked at it and said it wasn’t the skull of a Caucasian male.”
“A lot of what I’ve read suggests that whoever’s here is really an unnamed slave.”
“Well, that’s what the Missouri folks say.”
Steve reveres Boone, and I assure him that my intention isn’t to make light of Boone’s fate or malign those who insist he’s buried in Kentucky—or in Missouri. The uncertainty over Boone’s final whereabouts, not to mention his date of birth, relates to the more fundamental question about what we can learn from history when so many basic facts turn out to be mistaken or fabricated. Historical sites are hardly alone. Biographies often have their biases, either demeaning or inflating their subjects through the selective use of material; memoirs are notoriously self-serving; film footage and historic photographs have been staged or doctored; paintings tend to be even more unreliable; and history textbooks sometimes contain glaring whoppers overlooked by review panels and boards of education.
Getting back to physical places, I’ve noticed throughout my research a pattern of errors and irregularities even within the narrow context of historic grave sites. Starting with Amelia Earhart’s. Her name came up while I was delving into the whole Wright brothers versus Gustave Whitehead controversy and stumbled across pictures of Burbank, California’s Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery. WELCOME TO THIS SHRINE OF AMERICAN AVIATION, a sign reads at the entrance of the massive vault dedicated to our country’s greatest pilots. THE PLAQUES HEREIN MARK THE FINAL RESTING PLACE OF PIONEERS OF FLIGHT. Another photograph shows a plaque for Earhart, which surprised me because her remains were never recovered after she crashed somewhere in the Pacific on July 2, 1937. I called Les Copeland, president of the Burbank Aviation Museum (located at Valhalla), to inquire about this discrepancy. Les, who couldn’t have been nicer, said they were accurate but agreed that a visitor could be led to believe that Earhart was entombed there. “Keep in mind, though,” he added, “that her plaque is on the wall, and the others, for the pilots actually buried here, are on the floor.” That’s a fair point, and I don’t mean to imply an intentional deception, but the “final resting place” wording is somewhat confusing.
More baffling is the squat marble tombstone in Granbury, Texas, for “Jesse Woodson James.” The outlaw’s full name is given correctly, and his birthday, September 5, 1847, matches up with the historical record. The date of death, however—August 15, 1951—does not, and a line at the bottom grudgingly acknowledges the more accepted date: SUPPOSEDLY KILLED IN 1882.
Most Jesse James experts agree that James was fatally shot in the back of the head on April 3, 1882, by fellow gang member Robert Ford for a $5,000 reward. James was laid to rest outside his family’s farmhouse in Kearney, Missouri, under a headstone with an epitaph dictated by his mother: IN LOVING MEMORY OF MY BELOVED SON, MURDERED BY A TRAITOR AND COWARD WHOSE NAME IS NOT WORTHY TO APPEAR HERE. James’s body was later disinterred and reburied next to his mom’s at Kearney’s Mount Olivet Cemetery.
The pro-Granbury crowd contends that James faked his death to evade a lifetime of manhunts and, after changing his name to J. Frank Dalton, moved to northern Texas, where he earned his living as a railroad contractor. Dalton “confessed” to being James at the age of 101, and when he died three years later, the local sheriff examined his body and reported it was missing its middle fingertip and had burn marks on its feet (apparently from when Union soldiers tortured James, a Confederate guerrilla in the Civil War) as well as other distinguishing scars consistent with injuries James had sustained earlier in life.
To resolve the decades-long quarrel, scientists exhumed the Kearney remains in 1995 and conducted a mitochondrial DNA test (using, of course, PCR), which indeed showed a positive link to relatives on James’s maternal side. Not to be outdone, folks in Granbury dug up their Jesse James in 2000 to perform a genetic analysis, but when they opened the coffin they found not the corpse of a 104-year-old J. Frank Dalton but of a younger man with only one arm. The headstone had apparently been placed over the wrong spot. Nevertheless, it’s still there, proudly proclaiming to be where the real Jesse James is buried.
Like Boone and James, Chief Sitting Bull has two graves in different states. After his Lakota warriors helped crush General George Armstrong Custer’s Seventh Cavalry Regiment at Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull laid low in Canada for five years. He returned to America in 1885 and toured briefly in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show, earning $50 a week. In 1890, Indian Service agents feared that Sitting Bull was inciting a potentially violent Native American movement to regain territorial lands, and on December 15 police at the Standing Rock Reservation shot him dead while serving out an arrest warrant. Sitting Bull was unceremoniously buried by U.S. soldiers on the North Dakota side of Fort Yates, and the obscure and mostly unvisited grave site gradually fell into disrepair. His nephew, Clarence Grey Eagle, and a contingent of businessmen from Mobridge, South Dakota, hatched an elaborate plan to exhume Sitting Bull and bury him on a river bluff near Mobridge. After digging up his skeleton during an early-morning snowstorm on April 8, 1953, they loaded it into a hearse and used a decoy car to fool any North Dakota officials intent on trailing them. They crossed into South Dakota without incident and interred Sitting Bull under tons of steel-girded concrete to prevent anyone from stealing him back. Echoing the Boone saga, some historians and descendants of Sitting Bull insist that Grey Eagle and his cohorts dug up the wrong bones.
Last but not least is the story of poor Thomas Paine, the British-born immigrant turned ardent American patriot who has only one grave to his name, and he barely got that. Paine was so reviled by the end of his life for having disparaged all organized religions in his writings that no church would allow his body to be buried on their grounds. He was eventually laid to rest on his farm in New Rochelle, New York, and only six people attended the funeral. (Twenty-thousand mourners, by comparison, showed up at Ben Franklin’s.)
A historical marker in New Rochelle reads:
ON THIS SITE WAS BURIED
THOMAS PAINE
1737–1809
AUTHOR OF
COMMON SENSE
THE PAMPHLET THAT STIRRED
John Adams Said:
“Without the pen of Paine the sword of Washington would have been wielded in vain. ”
AND
“History is to ascribe the American Revolution to Thomas Paine. ”
That first line alone is both wrong and outdated. The marker does not stand over the original grave site, and while Paine indeed “was buried” near here in 1809, his remains were stolen ten years later by an English journalist named William Cobbett and never recovered. Paine’s grave has been empty for two hundred years, and how this came to be is a tale worthy of elaboration.
A former critic of Paine’s turned fanatical admirer, Cobbett was appalled that his newfound hero had been treated so shabbily at life’s end by the very nation Paine had helped rouse to freedom decades before with the January 1776 publication of Common Sense, Paine’s impassioned call to arms against the British. The pamphlet sold 500,000 copies during the Revolution, a mind-blowing number considering that the country’s entire population was only 2.5 million and many folks were illiterate. No other book except the Bible has been read by a larger percentage of Americans. And when the Continental Army edged perilously close to defeat in December 1776, Paine churned out a series of publications titled The Crisis to lift the country’s spirits. “These are the times that try men’s souls,” he famously proclaimed in the first essay, which was composed in the shivering cold at Fort Trenton. (Paine had enlisted as a soldier, but George Washington personally decided that the thirty-year-old pamphleteer would better serve his country by writing, not fighting. Paine donated his substantial profits from The Crisis to buy clothes and supplies for the Army’s ill-equipped and hungry troops.) Washington rallied his embattled men with Paine’s words and credited him with helping to turn the tide of the war in America’s favor.