GETTING LOST, The Real Daniel Boone

"I can't say as ever I was lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.” The words were written by Daniel Boone. And if Daniel were to wake up from his current sleep, he would be bewildered again. And when he found out that most of him was back in Kentucky, he would be very angry. Because once he was dead, this man who kept moving his entire life to avoid “people” finally fell into the clutches of the "people" he hated the most - politicians and their close kin in the real estate business, lawyers.

Daniel Boone was not who you think he was. He never wore a coonskin cap. He was born in Pennsylvania, the sixth child of Quaker parents. As an infant he was a victim of religious intolerance when his parents were forced to sell their land and leave their faith after two of their elder children married outside the “Society of Friends”.  Their fellow friends forced them out of the church.

Daniel reached adulthood in North Carolina. There he showed such natural talent as a hunter, he  dropped out of school to take it up professionally. Most of what he killed was sold in public markets. A sister-in-law taught him to read and write, and other men would later follow him because he could regal them with readings from the “Bible” and “Gulliver’s Travels”. 

When he was 21 years old he married 16 year old Rebecca Bryan. They had ten children - although when they found the time I have no idea, Daniel was away from home so much.

Daniel was a short and shy man, and taciturn except when surrounded by his family. He was not the first white man in Kentucky. He was however one of the first Europeans who managed to walk out of Kentucky alive.  

He was not a great Indian fighter, and in his old age insisted, “I never killed but three”, adding, “I am very sorry to say that I ever killed any, for they have always been kinder to me than the whites.” 

And when he walked back into Kentucky it was as the supervisor of forty lumbermen, hired to cut a trail through the forest. Boonsboro was named after him because he was in charge of the crew who built the fort.  It was not his fort.

In 1799, after being cheated out of his property by Kentucky lawyers, he took his family completely out of the United States, settling in what was then the Spanish territory of Missouri.   He returned to Kentucky only once, in 1810.  Missouri had changed hands twice by then, once to the French and then to the Americans. To placate the Kentucky lawyers who could now harass him, Daniel returned only long enough to pay off his debts. He immediately returned to Missouri.

It was there, surrounded by their children, grandchildren and great-grand children that Rebecca died, in 1813. And it was there that Daniel Boone died in September of 1820, after eating too many sweet potatoes and suffering indigestion. He was 85.

The funeral service was preached by a son-in-law of Daniel’s son, and was held in a barn because so many extended family members wanted to pay homage to a man who had never been wealthy but had always been loved. He was buried in a coffin he built by himself, next to his beloved Rebecca, in a family graveyard on Teuque Creek.

But as was common with frontiersmen and women, the graves (above) were unmarked until the 1830’s.

Then, beginning in the mid-1840’s, as the Boone legend was created by novelists (and with hundreds of trees baring marks supposedly carved by Daniel, which increased the property value) investors in Frankfort, the new capital of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, decided that the late Daniel was just the draw they needed to attract new customers (and investors) to their new municipal cemetery.  

One booster wrote that it was “…fitting that the soil of Kentucky should afford the final resting place for his remains, ….that the generation which was reaping the fruits of his toils (should)…have in their midst…the sepulcher of this Primeval Patriarch whose stout heart would be watched by the cradle of this now powerful Commonwealth.”

Kentucky appealed to Daniel’s only surviving son, Nathaniel, describing their offer of the “Most beautiful cemetery in the west…” and assuring him that “$10,000 will be expended on the grounds and improvements”. But the answer from Nathaniel, who knew how his father felt about Kentucky, was a firm and short “no”.

So Frankfort officials dispatched an aging nephew of Daniel's, who still lived in Kentucky, William Linville Boone, along with two more animated representatives to speak to the family. Jacob Swigert was a longtime country court Judge in Frankfort, and Clerk for the Kentucky Court of Appeals for the last twenty years. Thomas L. Crittenden (above) was the 26 year old son of the American Secretary of State, and was being groomed to join the power structure in Kentucky. .

Unfortunately (or fortunately) the trio arrived in Missouri while Nathaniel was away on militia duty. So the trio descended upon Harriet Boone Barber and Panthea Boone Boggs, granddaughters of Daniel, through his deceased son Jesse. Whatever the two women told the Kentuckians, the trio decided it meant they had agreed to the Daniel’s removal to the Commonwealth.

The next morning, 17 July, 1845, the determined delegation appeared at the front door of Harvey Griswold, who now owned the graveyard. Harvey argued, but the lawyers from Kentucky answered every protest, promising to erect a monument to replace the missing relics of Daniel and Rebecca. And with the "approval" of the two grand daughters, it appeared the law was on the Kentucky side. Three local black men had been hired to disinter the graves; King Bryan, Henry Augbert, and Jeff Callaway. Jeff had been a slave for the Callaway family, and now as a free man he was digging up the father of his one time owner, Mrs. Flander Boone Callaway.

The work attracted a crowd of thirty to forty people, most of them related to Daniel and Rebecca. As the three men worked and the crowd grew angry, Thomas Crittenden distracted the crowd, assuring them that all was being done legally and properly (it was not) and that Kentucky was going to erect a memorial to the great man on this spot. They never did. Meanwhile the three black men continued to dig. The coffins had long since rotted into the soil, but the workers did not realize this until they struck bone and shrouds.

Wrote a St. Louis newspaper, “Some bones crumbled when hands tried to lift them, but the three black men put what they could in pine boxes.” Another observer noted that the bones were handled “as carelessly as if they belonged to an ordinary mortal.” The St. Louis reporter observed that “A number of local people picked up teeth and bits of bone…” and kept them as personal mementos, along with the silver cuff links from Daniel’s best shirt. The next day landowner Harvey Griswold found either a jaw bone laying on the ground. It is hard not to describe what the officials from Kentucky achieved as less of a removal, and of a hurried desecration.

On Friday, 12 September, 1845, the “remains” of Daniel and Rebecca Boone laid in state in the (old) State House. That night, the skeletons were arraigned on a table to be examined as if they were paleontology exhibits. Daniel’s skull, minus his jaw, was passed around, examined even by eight year old John Mason Brown. When the skull had finally been examined by a phrenologist, all the bones were reloaded into two elaborate coffins and finally allowed a measure of peace.

On Saturday, 13 September,  a grand procession of bands and marchers followed the hearses, each pulled by four white horses up the hill to the cemetery on a bluff overlooking the Kentucky River. Speeches were made, and prayers were said, and then a brisk business was made selling burial plots near the now sacred site where Daniel Boone’s bones now rested.

But the cemetery never allotted money to build the promised monument, and it was not until 1860 that the state of Kentucky approved $2,000 to build one. Once it was, it was not well cared for. And it was not until after years of damage by souvenir hunters that the Daughters of the American Revolution convinced the state legislature to repair the monument and erect a fence around it. What a shock; the politicians had lied to Daniel, even after he'd been dead for 25 years.

Needless to say, Kentucky never allotted money to erect the promised monument on the original grave site in Missouri. And in July of 2008, a thief stole the bronze plaque bolted to a boulder which had been placed there in 1915 (again by the D.A.R.) to mark the humble spot where Daniel had wanted to rest in peace. It is estimated it would cost the state of Missouri $10,000 to replace that plaque. It does not seem likely any modern politicians, who see no advantage in investing in America’s future, will be willing to invest that amount of cash in our past.

It puts a lie to one of the most insightful things that the self educated hunter Daniel Boone ever said, “Curiosity," he wrote, "is natural to the soul of man, and interesting objects have a powerful influence on our affections”.  Evidently, Daniel, that is true only if there is money to be made out of those objects, and then, everything is for sale, even the soil feed by our earthly remains.

- 30 -

ANGER MANAGEMENT - Wanting To Kill Kennedy

I’ll bet Officer Lester Free had no trouble spotting the ten year old bulbous, toothy Buick Roadmaster, even in holiday traffic. It hesitantly appeared at the peak of the bridge across Lake Worth, and passed him, sulking onto the palm tree lined boulevard of Royal Poinciana Way.

As the patrol car blended into traffic under the warm December sun, Officer Free (above)  noted the interloper’s New Hampshire plates matched the alert, and he called it in. Once his back up arrived, Free judged where best to make his standard traffic stop. What Officer Free could not know was that he was already four days too late.

Five days earlier, on Saturday, 10 December 1960, the old man spent almost an hour in the parking lot of his West Palm Beach motel, wrapping seven sticks of dynamite around four large cans of gasoline. He then inserted blasting caps into the sticks, and wired the infernal machine to the Buick's cigarette lighter. When he pushed the lighter in, the bomb would be powerful enough to, as a Secret Service Agent  later admitted, “level a small mountain.”

Early the next morning, Sunday, 11 December, the old man crossed the nearly deserted bridge and drove quietly across the narrow island. He pulled his Buick into the brush flanking Monterey Road. Ahead of him was the nondescript intersection with North Ocean Boulevard, and the hidden entrance to the estate at 1095.

The old man knew that beneath its clay tile roof and white stucco walls (above), there were 7 bedrooms in the two-story 11, 000 square foot home. And although he could not see the Atlantic Ocean, the 73 year old knew it was just a few hundred feet beyond the house. People who could afford ocean front property on Palm Beach Island were not interested in sharing what they had, not even the view. And man the old man had come here to kill, was living in that estate.

The old man, Richard Pavlick, knew his target would be going to Sunday Mass. It was Richard’s intention to crash his car into the target’s car, and then set off his infernal machine, killing them both. Richard was thus ready, just before ten that morning, when the target car edged out of the driveway from 1095. His hand was on the Buick’s ignition key.

But as Kennedy's  car edged onto the street, in the back seat of the limousine, Richard saw a woman with dark hair.  It had to be the target’s wife, which meant the target’s two children were probably in the car too. Richard waited. What stopped him at that crucial moment was not the police nor the Secret Service, but some shred of sanity floating free in Richard’s unhinged mind.

There would be another time. Not today, but soon. Soon, this target must die. In Richard’s eyes, this man had used his privilege and wealth to steal the office of President of the United States.

In a nation that seems obsessed with being more partisan than ever before, the presidential election of 1960 shouts for attention. According to the history books, the election was settled on Tuesday, 8  November. But in fact, the decision dragged out for weeks, with lawsuits in 11 states.

On Tuesday, 11 December,  a Federal judge in Texas rejected a Republican lawsuit asking for a recount, and two hours later the state awarded all 27 of its electors to Kennedy. That put John Fitzgerald Kennedy over the top, and it was not until the next day, 12 December, that the state of Illinois rejected a similar Republican lawsuit, and awarded its 24 electors to Kennedy.

Still, the margin of victory was slim; by one tenth of one percent of the 68 million votes cast. It is still accepted by many partisans that the election was stolen by voter fraud in Chicago and Texas (both Democratic strongholds in 1960) and even earlier, when Joe Kennedy spent the equivalent of $100 million to secure the election of his second son, John.

But even if Kennedy had lost Illinois, he still would have won where it really counted, in the electoral collage. And in Texas, which Kennedy carried by only 46,000 votes, 2% of all votes cast, there were at least two precincts which showed more Democratic votes than registered voters. But an examination of all Texas voting records (as well as Illinois) show similar errors for both candidates through out most states.  In an election casting, counting and recording 68,000 million votes in one day, errors will always occur.

So, in an election in which six states were decided by less than 1%, and 3 more states by less than 2%, and seven more states by less than 3% of their totals, partisan conspiracy theories were certain to spring up.  In every case, a second look at the evidence shows that no fraud actually occurred. 

But, in the case of the partisan Richard Pavlick, there was another reason to suspect John Kennedy of stealing the election that trumped all others.

Kennedy was the first Catholic elected president of the United States. Writing for the newspaper The Texas Baptist Standard, L.R. Elliot warned, that Catholicism followed “a consistent pattern of seeking and using all the power and control it can gain to advance its agenda"  – a charge strikingly similar to later charges laid against Muslims.

And Richard Pavlick was well known, in his home town of Belmont, New Hampshire - “The best town by a Dam site” - for his anti-Catholic rants at public meetings. He was also a rabid letter writer to the local paper on the same issue, and obsessed with proper etiquette in displaying the American flag. One of Richard's few friends in Belmont had been Thomas Murphy, Richard’s old boss and the Postmaster for Belmont. And it had been Postmaster Murphy who had warned the Secret Service about Richard’s behavior since the election.

After the November election, Richard had signed over his farm to a neighboring youth camp, packed up his remaining belongings in his car, and left town. Murphy later received a card from Pavlick postmarked Hyanis Port, on Cape Cod, where the Kennedy family had a home. And when Murphy received a similar card from Pavlick post marked from Palm Beach, where he knew Kennedy was staying during the post election transition, Thomas Murphy immediately notified the Secret Service.

The Secret Service were charged with the security of the President, but were not yet with protecting candidates or the President-elect,. Still they began interviewing people around Belmont. They learned Richard had bought dynamite, and once had a rifle confiscated after threatening a water meter reader.  This inspired them to alert to the Palm Beach police chief Homer Large. And upon hearing Officer Free’s call for back up, Chief Large ordered that all units were to converge on the suspect’s car.

They stopped the Buick in the middle of the street, and asked the driver to step out. They found Richard to be pleasant and cooperative, readily producing his New Hampshire drivers license.

Richard explained that he had been living out of his car since he got to Florida, and that this morning he was headed for St. Edward’s Catholic Church (above), on North Country Road, because, he said, he wanted to see where the new President went to church. The conversation was going along pleasantly, and the officers’ had begun to drop their guard, when Officer Free called out the single word, “Bomb”. That ended the polite conversation.

In some ways Richard Pavlick seemed relieved that he had been caught. He watched impassively while the bomb was disabled, and his car carefully searched. And later, when questioned at the police headquarters on South County Road, Richard explained, “I had the crazy idea I wanted to stop Kennedy from being president.” But he also added, “The Kennedy money bought him the White House. I wanted to teach the United States the presidency is not for sale.”

At the end of January 1961, Richard was committed to Public Health Service Hospital in Springfield, Missouri.   In March he was indicted in Palm Beach for threatening the life of John Kennedy. It would not be a federal offense to threaten the life of the President until after 22 November, 1963. Charges against Richard were still pending at that time, but they were dropped in December of 1963. However Richard was not released from the hospital until 13 December, 1966. He died unnoticed to the public, at the V.A. hospital in Manchester, New Hampshire on Veterans Day, 1975.

It can be argued that his mad man was inspired by the anti-Catholic rhetoric of politicians, or the bigotry of the pundits of his day. But that is the way it is with madmen. They receive far too little discouragement, until we actually see them coming over the rise in the bridge. By then it is far too late.

- 30 -

WHY NOBILITY DIED OUT - Richard the Lionheart Killed it.

I offer you the poster child for why history has regulated noble blood to the dust bin: Richard Plantagenet, the biggest fool in Europe at a time when Europe was simply overflowing with fools. To know Richard was to despise Richard. The better you knew him, the better you despised him. He was the kind of violent lunatic thug that only a mother could love, and she had her moments of doubt. If he had been born in the twenty-first century Richard would have been confined in a mental institution as a child, or a Republican Congressman.  But he was born in the Middle Ages, so they made him a King.

Physically, Richard was gorgeous. He spoke fluent French. He even wrote poetry in French. In fact he didn't speak English at all. He was tall and athletic, with red hair and soft grey eyes. He also had a passion for violence and poetry that was the romantic ideal in the 12th century. And most of the press in the English speaking world remains enamored of Richard even now - but then he only spent 6 months in England in his entire life, so they never got to know him in person.

Richard was the favorite and eldest( living) son of Eleanor of Aquitaine, one of the smartest, most lovely, most duplicitous women of her age and clearly one of the worst mothers ever born. This woman should never have given birth to a living human child. Doctor Phil could have done an entire series of shows on her.  

Richard was also the second son of Henry II, the smartest of the smart and violent Plantagenet Kings. Richard was like his father in every way, except he was more violent and less smart.

With the help of his mother, Richard finally cornered his sick and elderly father and took him prisoner. Richard then had the satisfaction of hearing his father call him “a bast-rd” from his death bed. And you thought you didn't get along with your old man. But it was the entitlement of nobility that raised Richard's simple neuroses to the level of a full blown psychosis.

Placing a crown on his head instantly converted Richard Plantagenet into Richard I, King of England, Duke of Normandy, Aquitaine and Gascony, Lord of Ireland and Cyprus, Count of Anjou and Nantes and Overlord of Brittany, also known as Richard Coeur de Lion, or Richard the Lion Heart.

Richard celebrated his coronation in June of 1189 by having the local Jews, who had showed up bearing gifts for him, whipped and flogged. He followed this by a general massacre of all the Jews in London and in York. Baldwin d’Eu, the Archbishop of Canterbury, summed up Richard's theory of nobility this way, “If the King is not God’s man, he had better be the devil’s”. And Baldwin should know, being the son of a liaison between an Archdeacon and a nun.

The first thing the new King did, after cleaning up all those Jewish corpses, was to lay heavy taxes on everybody to pay for a Third Crusade, to rescue the Holy Land from the Muslims, because they were so bad compared to Christian Kings like Richard. To pay for that war Richard announced “I would have sold London if I could have found a buyer." Of course Richard's loyal subjects in England never heard that particular royal comment.

In May of 1191 Richard’s army of 40,000 knights and 40,000 footmen arrived on the island of Cyprus, where Richard threw the local Christian ruler into a dungeon in chains, pillaged the island for even more money and slaughtered any Christian who objected. Being on crusade not only cleaned up Richard's past sins, it earned him a pass on any sins he might commit while on crusade; the Pope had said so. And evidently, Richard was going to put that pronouncement to the test.

After annexing Cyprus as his personal property, Richard then moved on to the Holy Land, where he joined the King of France and other European nobility in slaughtering Muslims, Christians and Jews without discrimination as to race, religion, age or sex. During the siege of Acre, Richard fell ill and had servants carry him about the fortifications in a sedan chair while he took pot shots at the defenders with a crossbow.When Acre fell, (and while its citizens were being slaughtered) Richard’s banner and that of Phillip of France were planted on the cities’ walls. But so was the banner of Leopold V, of Austria, who figured he was entitled as the sole representative on this crusade of the actual Holy Roman Emperor, who had died en route.

Richard however, disagreed and had Leopold’s banner torn down. Well, Leopold already had a problem with Richard because Leopold was related through his mother to the ruler of Cyprus, whom Richard had overthrown and imprisoned. And the instant his banner fell to the gutters of Acre, Leopold pulled his entire army out of the Crusade and sailed for home.

Within a month Phillip of France had also gotten fed up with Richard's ego and he sailed for home, leaving the Lion Heart with only about a third of his army left, and burdened with more than 3,000 Muslim prisoners captured at Acre. The Muslim leader, Saladin, wasn't willing to pay the ransom Richard was demanding, so Richard had all the prisoners executed. That little faux paux ensured that Saladin, who had been trying to negotiate a peace treaty with the Christians, would continue the war just to make Richard bleed as much as possible. At the same time Richard’s overbearing rule even at a distance had produced a rebellion back on Cyprus, which eventually forced him to sell his island  conquest for cheap to a cousin.

Richard's arrogance and ignorance also led to the election of an anti-Richard crusader, Conrad de Montforrat, as the new King of Jerusalem. That made Conrad the leader of the Christian army, which made him Richard’s boss. And Richard did not like bosses. Richard's participation in the crusades came to a bloody end on 28 April, 1192, when Conrad was stabbed to death on the streets of Tyre by two Muslim assassins. So low had Richard’s reputation fallen that everyone assumed (and still assumes, I must add) that Richard had financed the murder. It was all based on flimsy evidence, but with Richard it was always the wise choice to believe the worst. His ego had finally run out his string.

In September 1192 Saladin finally decided to provide Richard with enough of a fig leaf to cover his escape. Salidin agreed to allow Christians to visit Jerusalem at anytime of year, something he had secretly negotiated with Conrad de Montforrat, before Conrad had been murdered. Richard could now claim he had secured the religious freedom of the Holy Land, even if nobody outside of Richard's sycophants believed that he was responsible for it.

Richard had gone on Crusade with a full war chest, 80,000 men and strong allies in France and the Holy Roman Empire. That money was now gone and most of the army was dead. Richard was leaving the holy land with just a handful of personal bodyguards and with every political power broker in Europe gunning for him. He had to sneak back home. And he didn't make it.

Just before Christmas 1192, at an inn outside of Vienna, his old fr-enemy Leopold V caught up with him. Richard was arrested while dressed as a lowly pilgrim. And it is interesting to note that there was not even a rumor that "the Lion Heart" so much as slapped the men who captured him.

Richard was hustled off to Durnsetin castle, high above the Rhine River. And once he was safely under lock and key Leopold set the price for his release at 65,000 pounds of silver. Who, the nobility of Europe must have wondered, would pay three times the annual income of the English crown to free the most pompous, most arrogant and most violent English King there was?

His mommy, that’s who; Eleanor of Aquitaine laid out her personal fortune, and put the squeeze on English churches, English nobility, English merchants and peasants from the white cliffs of Dover, to the mountains of Scotland. Of course, at the same time, Richard’s own younger brother, John, together with Phillip the king of France, were offering 80,000 pounds of silver if Leopold would just hold on to Richard for another year. I guess you could say that Eleanor won this contest, in that, in February of 1194, King Phillip sent brother John the following terse note, “Look to yourself. The devil is loose.”

And so he was. Richard might have wanted to pay back the entire continent for his bad treatment, but his huge ransom and his own boorishness and love of destruction had bankrupted him. He could no longer afford to make war on his neighbors. For the last five years of his life Richard the Lion Heart had to be content with butchering his own subjects, slaughtering them with all the zeal and blood lust he had once displayed on the international stage.

So it was that in the spring of 1199 Richard heard a rumor that a cache of Roman gold had been discovered in the Limousin region of the Aquitaine, a region so wealthy (before Richard) that luxury autos of a later age would later be named for it. There was no gold, and everybody told him so. But Richard the Lion Heart, Richard the Dunder-Head, Richard the Rush-in-where-angels-fear-to-tread, laid siege to the walled city of Charlus anyway and demanded payment of the non-existant gold. And it was during that pointless siege that a brave young defender named Bertrand de Gurdon pierced Richard’s shoulder with a crossbow bolt.

You know how you say to yourself about violent and dangerous lunatics, "I wonder why somebody doesn't just shoot him?" Well, somebody finally shot Richard. Gangrene set in and the arrogant nobleman was finally dead on Tuesday 6 Apri, 1199, dying in his mommy's arms. As a final insult they buried the "bas-ard" at his father's feet, in Rouen Cathedral at Fontefrault.

On his deathbed Richard had insisted that the young crossbowman Bertrand was to be pardoned and set free with 100 shillings, but of course he didn't mean it. In his whole life Richard never chose nobility over violence. And it didn’t happen here, either. Instead, one of Richard’s captains had the sure-shot cross-bowman skinned alive and hanged. That man's horrible death was a fitting legacy for one of the most violent lunatics of the middle ages, a raving psychotic who had been made a King, as the thinking at the time insisted, by the grace of God.

But I think that God must have been rolling over in her grave when she heard that phrase applied to Richard.

- 30 -