Who Was Daniel Boone? The Frontiersman Behind Our Boone Knife

Forget the coonskin cap. Daniel Boone never wore one, that was Fess Parker's costume department in the 1960s TV show, and Boone reportedly hated the whole caricature while he was alive to see it start. The real Daniel Boone didn't need a costume. He cut a 200-mile road through a mountain range with an axe and a small crew of men who trusted him to get it right.

The road that opened a country

In 1775, Boone led about thirty woodsmen through the Cumberland Gap, the one natural break in the Appalachian wall separating the East Coast from Kentucky. What they blazed became the Wilderness Road, and it's hard to overstate what that road did. By the early 1800s, an estimated 200,000 settlers had walked it. Boone didn't discover Kentucky. He made it reachable, and he did it with an axe, not a legend.

Captured, adopted, and the escape that saved a settlement

In February 1778, Shawnee warriors captured Boone along Kentucky's Licking River. Chief Blackfish, who had recently lost a son, adopted Boone in his place and renamed him Sheltowee, "Big Turtle." Boone lived with the Shawnee for months, treated well enough to hunt, but he wasn't there by choice.

By June, he'd learned the Shawnee were planning an assault on Boonesborough, the settlement he'd helped found. So he ran. Roughly 160 miles, much of it on foot, in days, to reach Boonesborough before the attack did. He made it in time to warn them. That September, the settlement held through a nine-day siege.

That's the actual story. Not a man in a fur hat posing with a rifle. A man who did the unglamorous, physically brutal work of opening a wilderness, then did it again to save the people who'd followed him into it.

Why we named a knife after him

Every Forseti knife carries a name for a reason, and the Boone earned this one honestly. The Boone Hand-Forged Damascus Steel Skinner is a compact hunting knife built for the same kind of work Boone actually did: not a display piece, a tool. 256-layer hand-forged Damascus blade, Tali wood handle, leather sheath and a lanyard hole so it's there when you reach for it in the field. $99.99.

That's the whole point of the legend-naming system. We're not slapping a famous name on a product to sound cool. We're matching a knife's character to a person who actually lived that character, so the name means something every time you pick it up. Boone didn't work with a display piece. Neither should you.

Shop the Boone Skinner at forsetisteel.com.