Life of Daniel Boone, the Great Western Hunter and Pioneer
Hartley, Cecil B.Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019
Rating 3.0- Word count
- 427K words
- Chapters
- 43
Tags
English Originals Historical Figures Nature ObservationPortrait GalleryLegendary LivesAdventure JourneyPioneer BiographyHeroism19th CenturyWestern FrontierSummary
Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.Life of Daniel Boone, the Great Western Hunter and Pioneer by Cecil B. HartleyAuthor: Hartley, Cecil B.,Language: English, Class: F396: United States local history: Old Southwest. Lower Mississippi Valley, Release Date: Nov 11, 2004Editor's review
This is a nineteenth-century biography of Daniel Boone, a popular biography in the tradition of American frontier narrative. It casts Boone as the archetypal western hunter and pioneer, recounting his hunting, exploration, and settlement experiences in language marked by the flavor of its age and a strong tendency toward legend. For Chinese readers, its value lies not in rigorous modern historical scholarship but in showing how nineteenth-century Americans told the story of their frontier hero: which details were repeatedly emphasized, which conflicts were simplified, which values were attached to the image of the "pioneer." It can serve as a sample for understanding American western narrative, frontier myth, and popular biography writing, and is suitable for readers interested in early American historical narrative. Read it with a critical sense of historical sources, comparing the biographical narrative with the historical background, rather than treating it as the sole authoritative account of Boone's life.Who it's for
A good fit for
- Readers interested in American frontier history and western narrative
- Literary and historical readers studying popular biography and the making of heroes
- Those who wish to understand early American writing through a public-domain English text
- General readers curious about the pioneer image and cultural imagination
Not a good fit for
- Historical scholars seeking rigorous modern academic biography with annotations
- Readers expecting Native American perspectives or plural narratives
- Those seeking precise historical chronologies and verified sources
Reading tips
- First learn the basic background of the American western frontier from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, then enter the biographical narrative.
- Mark the gap between legendary passages and concrete historical facts as you read, keeping brief comparative notes.
- Pair the reading with modern historians' discussions of Boone and the frontier myth for a critical reading.
- Read the English original chapter by chapter, summarizing in your own words each chapter's main points and value orientations.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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FAQ
How historically reliable is this biography?
It is a nineteenth-century popular biography with a marked tendency toward legend and hero-making, not a rigorous biography in the modern academic sense. Its specific events, dialogues, and details should be treated with caution and not cited directly as historical fact. For research, regard it as a textual sample of frontier narrative and read it against modern historical works.Why read this old biography today?
Its value lies in showing how nineteenth-century Americans told the story of a frontier hero and how Boone's image was shaped into a symbol of the pioneering spirit. For those studying American western narrative, popular publishing, and national cultural imagination, such texts offer direct samples. General readers can also use it to understand how the "frontier myth" was constructed, rather than merely to obtain information about Boone's life.Does the book include Native American perspectives?
From the available material, this is a nineteenth-century frontier biography centered on Boone, with a narrative framework built around the experiences of pioneers and hunters; it typically does not offer Native American perspectives themselves. Readers concerned with Native American history and plural narratives should seek relevant ethnohistory and contemporary scholarship, and should not expect this book to present balanced, multi-sided views.This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.
About the author
Hartley, Cecil B. AuthorCecil B. Hartley was a nineteenth-century writer on etiquette whose biographical details are scarce in publicly available sources; his birth and death years, nationality and educational background are unknown. Judging from the two works extant in the collection, his writing spanned two genres: etiquette guidance and biography. His representative work, The Gentlemen's Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness, addressed a male readership and set out rules for conduct, conversation and social occasions, belonging to the popular conduct-guide literature of the period; its tone is practical and it focuses on workable everyday manners. His other work, Life of Daniel Boone, the Great Western Hunter and Pioneer, takes the legendary frontiersman as its subject and adopts the narrative coloring common to nineteenth-century biographical writing. Overall, his works reflect the nineteenth-century Anglo-American interest in both gentlemanly cultivation and frontier heroes.