Boone on the altar

The Wilderness Road

Hagiography is the only word for this biography of the patron saint of our ever distant frontier past. In contrast to the samples posted previously these illustrations vault the reverence and heroism of the subject even higher by aligning it with fine art and situating Daniel Boone in compositions evocative of the work of Regionalists like Thomas Hart Benton. Four illustrations by James Daugherty are reproduced as color plates with Struggle also doubling as the cover art. The book is copyrighted 1922 so it is not a stretch to connect Daugherty's work with Benton's or Regionalist work in general. Compare The Wilderness Road (above) to the 1920 painting The People of Chilmark by Benton (below). The same sculpted forms range across each mural-like drama. As an aside it is interesting to note that Benton is also classified as a Social Realist among whose key tenets was the intentional distancing from idealism encouraged by Romanticism. From today's perspective I see a work like People of Chilmark as having distinct Romantic qualities, especially in its overall atmosphere, and not so distant from an arch Romantic work like Gericault's famous painting pared below.

 People Of Chilmark

The Raft of the Medusa

Daugherty's illustrations continue below weirdly working into his palette Fauve-ish hues. The contemporary portrait of Native Americans is jarring. You can almost feel your adrenalin rush imagining the purpose of those war clubs should the savages discover our subject in Escape. And no less remarkable is the choice of Struggle to emblazon the book. The image says it all: kill or be killed - " the only good Indian is a dead Indian". Boone's life spanned the American Revolution and he famously pushed the frontier forward and although he died in 1820 twenty-five years before Manifest Destiny articulated the readily apparent and inexorable expansion across the continent he clearly represents the nascent force to behold, encompass and usurp the land and that force is effectively imbued in these pictures. I hope the reader will understand, as I do, these armchair impressions are very, very simplistic within the complexity of American History, race relations, capitalism and doggone fate.

Escape

Vision

Struggle

Book cover

Maple Sugar

Cabin in the Clearing

Taken together these posts on books about Daniel Boone offer glimpses into different ways the subject and the larger topic of frontier times have been treated from the fanciful to the textbook to the canonical. In addition to these are the flagrantly commercial and the downright cartoon, examples which we'll see later.