Where exactly is Daniel Boone buried? | Kentucky Life | KET

boon originally from Pennsylvania spent most of his life exploring the new West and blazing trails including the Cumberland Gap Daniel Boone throughout most of his life was a loner that he was more interested in exploring and living in the wild so to speak I think that's where he really felt most comfortable he spent much of his travels in Kentucky before it was a state he tried running stores he tried running a tavern but surveying is what he enjoyed best because he was out in the wilds on his own and taking care of business and he also got paid with some of that land so he wound up having thousands of acres and what would become the state of Kentucky so in 1792 when we did become a state and the other counties that began to be formed the people that lived in those counties had to go to the county office and talk to the tax assessor and file their deeds prove their lands and he just couldn't do that he had thousands of lambs in different counties and he couldn't pay for that in 1799 Hatter says Boone became frustrated and decided to leave Kentucky it was bitter I don't think he would ever want to come back to Kentucky he has said that himself so he travels on to his son Nathan Boone's residence in Louis Missouri at that time and still is today and that's where he kind of began a new life for himself in Missouri Boone's wife Rebecca died before him according to Mark Houseman director of the Washington Historical Society Museum there daniel tells a site for her burial when Rebecca passed Daniels selected this site personally in which to bury her remains because of the way it's situated you know on a knoll above the river bottoms Boone died several years later in 1820 at the age of 85 Boone as far as we know was placed beside Rebecca although there is the controversy of that there may have already been a grave next to hers at the time and so therefore he was placed elsewhere such as at her feet but there's no hard evidence of that that's more oral history that can't be substantiated by anything on paper Houseman says cemeteries at that time were primitive graves were marked crudely with a rock or a wooden plank the Boone's were given a crude misspelled gravestone and there they remained on that quiet Missouri hillside 25 years after Boone's death back in Kentucky a movement was made to open an incorporated Cemetery in Frankfort Mason Brown had gone to Massachusetts and saw the Mount Auburn cemetery there in Boston and he thought it was beautiful it was the first incorporated cemetery in the United States so he wanted to do the same thing here in Frankfort and so the family said well if we could come up with somebody famous it might help bring attention to our Cemetery the plan was hatched to exhume Daniel and Rebecca's bodies and bring them back to Kentucky apparently they were in quite a hurry to do this I wonder if it's not because the state of Missouri's why are you doing this that we should have Daniel Boone here in our state but the decision was made and the graves were reopened some large fragments of bone were found to be intact so the bodies were found to be disintegrated and and so only large fragments of bone were extracted from the two graves but because the graves were not well marked were those actually Boone's bones that made their way back to Kentucky it's one of those great Kentucky Missouri mysteries and people are fascinated by it Sarah Eliot a curator at the Kentucky Historical Society says the controversy began with a cast made of plaster of Paris of Daniel Boone skull before he and Rebecca's bones were reburied in Frankfort in 1980s I was when the state medical examiner made the statement that he thought that it might have been an African American skull as opposed to being Daniel Boone's when he made that statement that kind of sparked an interest in whether or not they had actually exhumed Daniel Boone or was it a slave that had been buried near them the controversy persisted for nearly a decade in 1995 Emily Craig the state medical examiner who's a forensic anthropologist looked the caste and she said that you could tell that it was a male but that was as far as she could go because the caste had been filed down to make it smooth and so the distinctive features were no longer there and she said she did could not say whether or not if it was african-american or not she went as far as saying it's a male and that's that's as far as she would go in an attempt to answer the mystery a ground penetrating survey of the site was conducted last summer while answering some questions new ones were created last summer the Friends of Daniel Boone's burial site in Missouri was able to obtain the use of ground-penetrating radar through the School of Science and Technology at Rolla Missouri not to add any fuel to to the ongoing controversy but there is this one grave site next to the monument on the south side that we don't know who that is seemingly there is a grave site there and it would be right next to the supposed grave of Daniel himself so that being strategically placed right where it is would seem to indicate the possibility that you know there could have been a body buried right next to Rebecca when they went to bury Daniel and then that they moved him over one more grave space but I think is unlikely I think the fact that Daniel and Rebecca's graves were marked with markers however crude they were would seem to take away from the possibility that they dug into the wrong graves while historians may agree to disagree about the whereabouts of Daniel Boone's bones they can find common ground in knowing that both Kentucky and Missouri want to honor the man whose pioneering spirit helped forge our nation but we do know that Daniel Boone is dead he died in 1820 he's buried somewhere in what a beautiful place to be right here in Frankfort Kentucky overlooking the Kentucky River I fully appreciate a good mystery and a good controversy and this is certainly one of American history's biggest controversies as where is Daniel Boone is he here is he there and I think the short answer the simple answer to both those questions is yes he is here and he is there and I don't think there's any any other way you can slice it when you get right down to the the bare bones no pun intended of of the whole thing as our local historian Ralph Gregory has said many times they may have gotten the large bones back to Kentucky but the brains in the heart and everything else that was Daniel and Rebecca Boone remain here in Missouri you

Channel: KET - Kentucky Educational Television

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Keywords: Daniel Boone (Military Commander), Kentucky (US State), Kentucky Educational Television (TV Station), Frankfort, Ky, KET, Kentucky Life, Dave Shuffett, Boone, pioneer, appalachia, reinterred, reinter, rebury, bones, where, buried, graves, historians, controversy, fight, skull, buriel sit, friends, Marthasville, grave, gravestone, gravesite, monument, Rebecca Boone, cemetary, history, bluegrass

Id: GlN6sKJpic4

Length: 8min 14sec (494 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 19 2013