Dan'l and Rebecca

A few years ago, we were traveling through Missouri on the I-44. At St. Clair, we decided to get off the thruway and avoid St. Louis altogether by winding our way up to the I-72 in western Illinois. It's complicated and you'd need a map to understand just what we did.

Anyway, as we were on SR 47 and near Washington, we saw signs indicating that a brief side-trip would bring us to the original gravesite of the world-famous American hero, Daniel Boone. Thus it was that we stayed on 47 until just before reaching Marthasville, we turned north on Boone Monument Road. This is not a superhighway, and in fact, after viewing the monument and snapping a couple of pictures, we found the road almost too narrow to accomplish a turn-around.

There would be little point in relating any of the myriad tales and legends about this bigger-than-life explorer, for you doubtless know more of them than I, and better, too. Fact, though, is that Daniel and his wife Rebecca were parents to ten children, and Mr. Boone lived the last twenty years of his life in this area of Missouri. At age eighty-five he took a hunting excursion, it is said, to the Yellowstone. He was described by someone who saw him on this trip as a "sturdy man, about five-foot seven in height." Boone died before his eighty-sixth birthday.

Rebecca and Daniel were both buried on this site in Missouri. Much later, the bodies were exhumed and transported to Kentucky where they are interred. Maybe. Missouri claims that the Kentuckians dug up the wrong body, and that Dan'l is still in Missouri. To which, one assumes, the KYians say, "Poppycock."

Daniel Boone 1734-1820
Rebecca Bryan Boone 1739-1813