♪♪ bob drury and tom clavin talk about their book "blood & treasure: daniel boone and the fight for america's first frontier." they examine america's westward expansion and brutal conflicts with native americans through the eyes of daniel boone. water mark books and cafe of wichita, kansas, hosted this event, and provided the video. >> i want to read a couple of paragraphs from a pitch letter

from the executive editor at saint martin's press about this book and he says, for years bob drury and tom clavin have been taking forgotten pieces of history and turning them into compelling narratives that illuminate the subjects, making the hysterical figures or events leap off the page. and i concur. with daniel boone, they have found the perfect subject for their unique brand of history. he's a well known historical adventurer shrouded in legend. this fast-paced inspiring narrative fueled by contemporary diaries and journals, newspaper reports and eyewitness accounts is -- a stirring chronicle of the conflict over america's first frontier that places the reader at the center of this remarkable epic and it is a gripping tale of courage and

sacrifice. bob drury and tom clavin are the number one new york times best-selling authors of the heart of everything that is, lucky 666, halsey's typhoon, last man out and the last stand of fox company, which won the marine corps heritage foundation's general wallace m. green jr. award. they just learned today that the book is on "the new york times" bestseller list, and it is number one at the cafe on our bestseller list. so i just want to give you both a warm welcome, and i will turn the virtual stage over to you. bob? >> thank you, sarah. thank you so much. thank you so much. and thank you to lauren and thanks to everyone at watermark. i have never been there, as you know. tom has, and he just sings your praises.

so it's not only a pleasure to be here tonight with all of you but it is an honor. thank you all to everybody who is out there. i thought we might have a brady bunch screen in front me, but i can only see tom and you. it's probably better that way, i get distracted easily. i guess i will kick it off by saying both tom and i are well aware that the four most important words in any public speakers vocabulary are and so in conclusion. so, we will try to make this as short and as sweet and i hope as informative as possible. i suppose i want to start tonight -- or i should start tonight, we've been getting -- as sarah mentioned, we have been getting some terrific reviews on the book and one of them sang the praises. but towards the end the reviewer said i feel like one of those whatever those warnings are before a cable show. i cannot disagree with the

reviewer's injunction that "blood and treasure" is not for the faint of heart. the narrative opens with daniel boone's 16-year-old son, james, bleeding out, he's been gut shot from an indian ambush, cherokee, delaware shawnee and he's about to die anyway. and the leader of the ambush, a shawn knee named big jim, who actually had died eating at the house is just gratuitously plucking out one by one his fingernails and then his toenails. and then we come almost full circle to later in the book very late in the book where daniel boone's son -- his other son -- one of his other sons, israel, dies in boone's arms. he's got an indian musket ball lodged in his heart. in his dying breath, he's

spewing gouts of blood. so, yes this book is not for the faint of heart i suppose. one historian called the era that we write about in the mid 18th century, mid 1700s, i want to get this straight, a whirlwind of blood and carnage. this was the era when the first stirrings of what was later to be called manifest destiny were sprouting up among the colonists who were stuck on the east coast by the appalachian mountains, the appalachians as they call them down there. they were anxious to complete what they thought was their own manifest destiny, a phrase by the way which wasn't even coined for 50 years. and the book series i spoke of earlier was par for the course in the era.

disembowments and scalping and burning at the stake was big, and both sides. both sides. one of the reasons for that is because the white people wanted the red people's treasure. the blood i already told you about, the treasure was the land. and indigenous people who had been in the north american continent for millennia were not about to give it up without a fight. in a way, this led even -- a preacher, cotton mathers, the famous boston preacher, he would preach about extinguishing the red sons of satan. and such luminaries as thomas jefferson proposed exterminating the savages, quote, unquote, between the atlantic coast and the mississippi so there would be room for white settlers. now, this did not shock tom and i, the fact that there was a

butcher's bill that ran on both sides. we knew that from the first moment the white emigrants from europe reached the fatal shores of the new world, there had been constant conflict between native americans and whites. it's no coincidence that for the jamestown colony with john smith and the plymouth rock pilgrims with myles standish hired soldiers of fortune to be their leaders and adversaries. but once again, i want to emphasize because i think there's been a bit of a dignified occasion and the savages as they would call them. the butcher's bill ran both ways so for every white infant that was scalped or every white militia man that was made to dance for

when his fingers were cut off -- every time a soldier -- there was one scene where they capture one of george washington's best friends and burn him alive at the stake. and after filleting him and a witness describes the brain bubbling in his nose until his nose starts whistling like a tea kettle. but once again, for every indian atrocity there was a white atrocity. you had them running down with packs of bloodhounds and then when they were cornered they would release packs of wolfhounds to tear them apart. you had the virginia militia men pennsylvania militia men, falling on villages, killing men, women, and children. including one delaware village where all 96 men, women and children had converted to the moravian faith which meant they couldn't take up arms.

so they sang hymns and prayed while the militia men bashed them in the head with mallets in order to save musket balls. you had a british general with blankets purposefully infected with the small box in hopes that it would spread throughout. this was a peace delegation. vermin for vermin is the way he put it. it goes on and on. just as an aside, the same governor general would pay the equivalent of ten dollars of any indian scalp man or women over 10 years old. how they knew the scalps were over 10 years old, i do not know. but it back fired because when he would send out militias to raid indian villages, they would spend less time fighting and more time digging up the indian graveyards so they could scalp the corpses. so we kind of expected this kind of blood in our book "blood and treasure".

what we did not expect was that daniel boone would be such a central figure of it. tom and i did not start out to write a biography of daniel boone. in fact, we don't feel we did. there are many fine biographies out there. what we feel we have written and hope we have written is the biography of an era of the mid-18th century when as i said before, the first stirrings of manifest destiny started to show themselves in the white colonists who were hemmed in by the appalachians along the east coast. and we hope that that era where the colonies transformed themselves from 13 colonials -- actually people don't know there were 15 colonies, there was east and west florida but they declined to take part of the revolution. but that era got us digging into it. and we didn't -- the

disneyfication of daniel boone, and we blame walt disney for casting the actor as davie crockett. let me dispel to myths right now. one he didn't die at the alamo that was davie crockett. and number two he hated coonskin caps. he was an average size man for his era, he was 5'7", 5'8". all of his cousins were gigantic. 6'2, 6'3", 6'4". daniel always thought he was short. and he felt wearing a coonskin cap made him look shorter. so he wore a tall hunter's cap. and once again keeping in mind this isn't so much a biography of daniel boone but the era we are using daniel boone as our guide. the man was just everywhere. everything that happened, every big historical event either

boone or his family was there. now, daniel boone was also a man out of his time. he did not believe the indians were heathens, were savages. and when i say that he had a 21st century sensibilities, it came as a bit of a shock to tom and i. and i think tom is much more erudite at explaining that than i am. so if you don't mind, they're probably don't know what i'm talking about, so i'm leaving it up to you to clean up my mess. >> i will do what i can. something that you referred to about daniel boone as our main character, but this is not a biography of him, maybe i can invite the viewers behind the curtain a little bit to what writers and certainly us two as writers experienced. daniel boone was not our first thought by any means to be a main -- a main character, the main character in this book.

we had -- you know, one of our books, perhaps the book that we've gotten over the years the most feedback about is called "the heart of everything that is". i know it's been for sale at watermark books. and the main character is the sioux leader, red cloud, and the only indian leader to win a war against the government, not just the battle, but the war. and for the most part, to sum it up very quickly, the story is in the 1850s, 1860s to 1870s when you have the final battles between the explorers and business communities and the indian tribes of the plains, and basically they had been backed up -- there was no place else for them to retreat to. so that's why they were forced, by mandate, to go onto

reservations in montana, the dakotas, wyoming, for example. when we finished that book, to me there was always a lingering poignance about that. and also had us thinking, in a lot of ways, we talk about the end of the story. if we get a chance it would be interesting to go back to the beginning of the story. where was the template first established, where was the blueprint created of the white settlers pushing west and the indigenous people who live there, where the intruders were showing up, that many times they were either defeated in battle or, bob referred to these, you know, smallpox infested blankets, disease that the indians had no immunity to ran rampant and killed probably millions over the course of the 300 years or so since the white

men arrived. so many were killed or died off, but you also had many of them left. you had earlier in the united states even before, the option of backing up so to speak, of retreating, of getting out of harm's way, because there was always more west to go to. across the mississippi and then across the missouri. so we wanted to -- we had a couple of the books, some people may be familiar with after we did "the heart of everything that is," we did a world war ii story called "lucky 666". and then in 2018, we sort of returned to the early days of america where we wrote, "valley forge," but that was with the revolution on the east coast and the battles in virginia and new jersey and manhattan and long island and places like that.

so, it kept bothering me that there was a story to tell about how the blueprint was established and once we determined that we were going to do a story about the early days sort of earlier days of the relationship and interactions between the -- you know, white settlers and explorers and hunters who were unable to restrain themselves from going west and, you know, establishing farms and small communities and forts, and the describes who were there, who got to experience first -- a century earlier what the plains indians were going to experience. so that was the story -- that was the or gin nation of the book. and that we wanted to tell the story and have our main character be an indian, as red

cloud had been. but we ran into a couple of problems. one of them being unlike with red cloud who was born in 1821 didn't die until 1909 was a long thread of his existence to draw from, and his experiences. in the case of a lot of the chiefs -- i use the term chiefs loosely -- a lot of the chiefs of the ohio valley of the upper midwest of what became kentucky and tennessee, they usually didn't last too long. they either were defeated in battle, they died, they were killed, they left the area. said, i'm getting out of here. there were some very fascinating indian characters who are in our book. cornstalk, the shawnee who was a chief in the diplomatic sense and the military sense.

little turtle, hanging maw, dragging canoe, some of them had more colorful names, but they didn't -- there was wasn't a strong enough or lengthy enough thread for us to latch the whole story onto. then when we thought of daniel boone, a challenge that we faced was, well, what if daniel boone -- everybody knows daniel boone by name. they know the figure daniel boone. as bob mentioned before, some people think he died at the alamo, so they think they know daniel boone. then they know of the name because he was in the television show for several years playing the trusty loyal sidekick. but we thought what if he doesn't measure up. but as bob had said, he was everywhere it seems.

he kept showing up at the battles here and french and revolutionary war and the adventures, rescuing his daughter and two friends from being kidnapped and there were other exploits that he was involved in. but we did a deep dive from to find out for that story would he measure up, and that was one of the delights was to find out that a lot of what has been passed down was based on the truth. the coonskin cap was one of the fictions or exaggerations about daniel boone. but in his earlier life he had regular interactions with indians and came to admire and

respect and emulated them them in the way he dressed with the survival skills and everything like that. and he seemed to have this kind of natural ability to lead people. people turned to daniel boone. he was the one that when lord dunnmore's war was to start, he was the one that said we've got people all across the frontier, surveyors, settlers, hunters, other people, that they have no idea the indians are gathering to begin a large-scale attack on the frontier. they're so vulnerable, they'll be killed. hundreds might be killed. it was daniel boone they asked and said you are the guy that can get through to the entire woodlands and the front and warn these people, which he did and saved many lives. he was the one that led the boonsborough, named after him,

first built in 1775. by the time of 1778 when this large british army -- indian ally and british led army was going to cut through kentucky and go through the mountains, how they could get into virginia and north carolina and start a two-front war that probably would have doomed the american revolution, it was daniel boone who was the leader of that -- the fort that everybody turned to for leadership. and they survived that siege, that if boonesborough had fallen we might write a different history of the outcome of the american revolution. and most people, we understand, who think they know daniel boone, have no idea what a pivotal role he played in the american revolution. that -- he seemed to have a way to show up. there was daniel boone serving

with george washington in 1755 when the british general braddock, during one of the biggest defeats the british suffered, and there's boone and washington, they barely med it out with their lives. and he also find humor with daniel boone. he was a man with a good sense of humor. he would like to tell a good story. and one of the stories that already people who read the book already, even though it only was published yesterday are citing is the one where boone is gone for a year on an expedition and when he comes back, his wife rebecca, who he's totally devoted to, presents him with a daughter. he does the math. he was not a schooled person, but he could do the basic math. if i'm gone for a year, it takes nine months for basic gestation, said there's something wrong

here. and his wife said, if i'm being honest, i thought you were dead and sought comfort in your brother's arm. and boone said i'm glad you kept it in the family. he also understood, which says a lot about his character. he said i married a full-blooded woman not a portrait of a saint. another incident where again he's gone for a long time, comes back christmas eve or christmas day and there's a dance in the community where his family is, and his wife is part of the dance with other community members and he's been gone for a long time, he has hair covering his face, his hair is long, looks like somebody who had been in the forest for a year. and he comes walking in and he asks this -- rebecca boone for a dance, she's horrified, who is this -- probably didn't use the word bum, but who is this bum.

and is appalled this guy would come off the street, basically. he starts laughing, cackling, thinking it's a joke, and she recognizes her husband's laugh and starts dancing with him despite his appearance. i think the viewers would be interested to know that boone was a process for us. we didn't start at the beginning of this period, the two or three years we worked on the book, say, let's set out to write a book on daniel boone. boone was actually late to the party. but when we did explore his life, we found such a fascinating character that he does provide that thread -- when i first began my talk, he does provide that thread that we needed to hang the story on. he's just a remarkable character. i hope one of the things our book does is offer that opportunity to people who think they know boone to find out the real daniel boone. back to you.

>> tom, listening to what you're saying, the thing that jumped out at both of us, as we were lucky enough there was a near contemporaneous historian who travels 50,000 miles by horseback interviewing -- he didn't interview daniel boone himself. but he interviewed people who had hunted and fought men by this point, hunted and fought and pioneered with daniel boone and his contemporaneous papers were so useful, so worthwhile for us in our research. and tom and i would go back on the phone saying, do you believe this, do you believe this? i mentioned before, cotton mathers, exterminate the heathens. daniel boone had an empathy and a sympathy, there is a difference between the two. he had both for the indigenous people who populated this continent.

for instance, he told his first biographer, a schoolteacher named john fillson, he said i'm not a religious man but i have as much esteem for the shawnee or cherokee great spirit as i do for the christian god. it seems to me they're both the same people. he had a feeling, perhaps naively, that the 21st century sensibilities on the years, but his quote, if we could make the indians more white, we could live with them instead of having to exterminate them. he was a captive for four months, adopted by a shawnee head man, he tried too convince him, you have to get the cattle, and do this. but he didn't want to but at least daniel boone was out there trying. instead of picking up a rifle and blowing off the head of an indian before he could get their own head blown off.

that's one of the things that really struck me about boone, he was a man out of his time. tom and i have seen stories now about, i guess, there's stay chews of daniel boone that have been defaced or there's petitions to take them down. there's graffiti in the daniel boone national forest. daniel boone was not one of nose men. he had his faults, he was a man of his era, like washington, jefferson, and john hancock and benjamin franklin. like 46 of the 51 signatories to the declaration of independence. later in life, daniel boone did own slaves, he owned black human beings, he bought seven black females and their children to work in his trading post. so he was not a saint by any means. but there was something about the man out of his time that coincided with the forest gump

type, he's there for the french, indian war, the american revolution, he's here for the -- i mean, he was just everywhere. that made him the perfect guy, just like he was a path finder in his own time. he was a path finder for us looking through, as we tried to write this biography of an era. all that said, i get a sense that sarah is in the back somewhere with one of those hooks that she wants to put around my neck and pull me off the stage. so let me beat her to the punch by uttering those four words i told you about, and so, in conclusion. we're about to wrap it up. you know, what tom and i -- what we tried to do, what we contend is that the characters who inhabit "blood and treasure" both white and native american, they constitute a generation that are the core values of the united states. what we hope we accomplished with this book is to make the

familiar strange and the strange familiar. not long ago there was a visiting chinese people's army general lecturing at the army war college. and he just offhandedly happened to mention, the longest war in recorded history is the european/american war against the native indigenous people and the army officers there were like, whoa, what are you talking about? we've been in afghanistan for 20 years now but europe had the 30 years war, the 100 years war, what are you talking about? and the chinese general explained, i'm talking about your 300 year war against the native americans. and many of the officers came around to agree with him. and there was one history professor, my desk is such a mess, but here it is. peter mazlovski he wrote, they

waged a war against indians in order to acquire their land and its resources. the proof is in the numbers, of the 330-odd-million native american indians, a good 46 million -- we didn't even talk about the cumberland gap, claim their ancestors came through the cumberland gap. the gap that was not discovered by daniel boone, the indians were there for centuries, but he was the one who hacked through it. it was called boone's trace for 30 years before it became known as the wilderness road. talking about coming full circle. i started out this with the perhaps macabre scene of 16-year-old james boone as he's bleeding to death, being tortured to death by big jim.

decades later, boone is 52 years old, on his last indian war fight and they ride across the ohio, fighting the shawnees and hears the baying of indian hounds he knows this means indians are escaping. so he and a small platoon of men turn their horses from the main forest and see the indians escaping across the meadow. and one of them turns, aims his kentucky long rifle, fires, the soldier -- the militia men blows him out of the saddle. boone spurns his horse, getting closer to the indian, frantically reloading, it's big jim. big jim who tortured and killed his son. boone looks at big jim. big jim looks at boone, they look at each other, boone is shocked, finally, is this my time for revenge, he pulls out

his saber, which is where the origin of the long knife, that's where the indians started calling the americans long knife. he pulls out his saber, big jim is reloading, boone spurs his horse. what happened next was -- well, if you want to know what happened next, you have to read the book. thank you to everyone who tuned in tonight we really appreciate it. i'm sorry to leave you hanging here, but tom is the scholar. i'm the shtick meister. >> i love a cliff-hanger. i have a couple questions and then i have some questions from people who are attending. but first of all, the entire title of the book is "blood and treasure: daniel boone and the fight for america's first frontier". you explained to all that he wasn't the primary, but where did the blood and treasure come

from? >> tom, i'm going to ask you to take this one because while you were talking i spilled tea all over my sweater. i'll be right back. >> the joys of doing in-home zoom interviews. towards the end of his life when boone was being interviewed, and bob alluded to the fact that there was people that went to interview boone and ask about his life and experiences. he does make a reference, says he's looking back on -- you know, he's at that point in his later years living a life of contentment. he would live to almost 86 years old and die in his daughter's house with her husband and children around him. but he looks back and said what took him on this journey cost him so much in blood and treasure. he's referring to blood, he's talking about he lost two

sons and a brother to violence. and with treasure, over and over again, daniel boone found himself bankrupt. he was not a good businessman. and i guess treasure too he's talking about property he lost. he didn't end his life as a successful man, even though he had done so much and had so many adventures. that's where the quote comes later in life referring to blood and treasure. >> you refer to, in my introduction, i think, you know, you used newspapers, original documents, journals, all sorts of sources for your information, and i wonder how -- what was the -- was there a single primary -- when i say "primary," i mean was there a dominant area where you got -- and how do you research together and how do you divide up the writing?

>> i can begin the answer and if bob wants to -- bob made a reference to it. there were a lot of sources that we used, if anyone cares to look at the bibligraphy, we didn't put everything in there but it's expensive. referred to lyman draper, a sad character. he went 50,000 miles -- did all this research -- collected all these notes -- >> on horseback. >> -- spent years and years to be able to write this opus about one of the most remarkable characters in american history and he started writing and at a certain point developed writer's block and couldn't write anymore. and he died leaving his book unfinished. thankfully, his notes and interviews and everything are available to researchers and that was an enormous help to us. >> it was. sarah, it was a pile.

i'm trying to think, it was 130,000 pages, something like that. it's at the wisconsin historical society. and you asked what our -- our system is, i guess is basically what you're asking, how do two people -- tom likes to say he writes one sentence, i write the next, he writes one sentence, i write the next. but what happened is we developed a very henry ford like assembly line. tom is -- you could send me into the library of congress or the national archives and i probably would come out with what i'm looking for. you probably have to send out a miner's party with lights on the hats to find me. but tom is so adapt. he was born to be a researcher. i cannot compare. when it comes to lyman draper, it was all tom. writing books about people still alive, i'm good at interviewing them.

but tom will point me in the right direction, give me the research, i'll start to write. i'm not going to say i write a chapter and send it to him, but i'll write a hunk, a chunk with a million questions in it, need this, need this, how do we expand on this, too much of this, i'll send it back to tom and he's as good an editor as a researcher and he'll send it back to me, so we have an assembly line going back and forth, so far it's worked for us. >> probably a lot of trust there. >> i don't trust tom at all. >> no. we'd never turn our back on each other. wouldn't do it on screen right now. >> so one of the things that is very compelling is all these descriptions of the landscape and the woodsmen, you know, life and going out and the smells and the look and everything. but it's also nice to get a

bird's eye view, so you've included some really great maps in the book. they're so helpful. did you decide -- did you know -- you could have probably put lots of maps in, but how did you decide which maps -- >> i'm the map guy. i'm the map guy. since tom and i started collaborating, we both sensed -- we innately sensed that the kind of books we write, people want to see where it happened. where did that typhoon start and how did it sweep across the western pacific. how did that hill near the chosen reservoir. how did the marine perimeter get smaller and smaller and smaller every night when tens of thousands of chinese were attacking a couple of hundred marines. we know valley forge, how did washington almost win the battle

of germantown and then was turned back at the last moment. because here's the militia men deceived by the fog of war -- the literal fog of war when the british set the cornfields on fire and they couldn't see through the smoke. we know the books we write the more maps the better. maps cost money and publishers have been very good to us when we've argued for maps, maps, maps and more maps. >> i think they're well appreciated. >> good. >> and i know how hard it is to break up that text and put something in there and then move on. >> this was our first book where i actually wrote captions for the maps. >> good. >> i don't know -- well, we won't discuss inside baseball here whether it worked or not but we never had captions on our maps before, they were always kind of self-explanatory.

and i just felt, in this case -- i don't know, some of the things confused me. when you get off the boone trace and the wilderness trail and got on the old indians warrior path, i felt it needed a little more explanation and caption. and st. martin's press was just, yeah, if that's what it needs, that's what it needs. our editor was just -- couldn't have been more accommodating. >> i don't know if you were working -- i think you had this book finished before covid -- >> yes. >> are you working now on something, and how did that affect everything for you? i'm going through people's questions here. >> it's funny -- >> yeah, we were working. we're back in world war ii, a story mindset, and it was -- it was -- we've been working on the book for, it's got to be, over a year.

well over a year that we've been working on it. and it definitely presented some challenges. we're not the only authors who had to confront this. but trying to -- for example, a very good source for us of holding of documents we want to look at is at the army war college in carlisle, pennsylvania, and they were in complete shutdown from march on in 2020. so they're open now a limited capacity, but it's something where, you know, what could you do? you couldn't say to people, listen, i really need this. we're not going fo put people's lives at risk because i need the journal of a private in the second ranger company. you know? >> yeah. >> so you just have to be patient and take your place in line. and i think people who are in these positions at these research facilities, respond to and appreciate that kind of cooperative, you know, rapport that you have. and they've done the best they can, we've done the best we could to get as much information

as available. >> i still have a $500 deposit with a guy to take me through the forest on the german/belgian border. that's the one thing tom and i like to do is get out on the road for researching. for "blood and treasure" i followed boone down from pennsylvania into the blue ridge, into eastern tennessee and very western virginia, not west virginia, my wife flew down into knoxville and we spent the night at cumberland gap at a b&b. and then she flew back. and then tom and i both traversed the dakotas, wyoming, nebraska, montana. i remember tom telling me stories. i'm driving my rented ford fiesta 80 miles on a dirt road so i can eyeball the site of the battle of crazy woman's fork. and tom is in these societies

that some of the diaries they're bringing out you can't touch with your hands. they were on some kind of vellum where the oil on your hands, they bring them out in a plexiglass box, and tom is -- he's telling me -- he's turning the pages with like tweezers. and that almost -- several of our books we've actually interviewed the soldiers who were involved. but other times when we're going back to the 19th and 18th century, when tom can find diaries where a 12-year-old girl is writing, she made it across the oregon trail in utah and writing back to st. louis, well, paul got killed in wyoming and the next wagon train through said that wolves or indians had dug up his grave so we're going to have to go back and rebury him, that's almost like you're interviewing somebody. >> that's amazing.

that would be the fun of it, too. it's like -- i mean, you're providing armchair travel experiences to all of us that aren't going out because your descriptions are so vivid. there's a question that -- about rebecca. and, you know, most women are overlooked. most women's stories are overlooked, especially during this period. and, you know, in the shadow of this great man. how did you find out about her? >> well, rebecca boone, unlike many women who a lot of times did not have very long lives because they died in childbirth or from disease or endless hardship. rebecca boone lived into her 70s and she and daniel were married for 56 years. she came from a family her maiden name was bryan b-r-y-a-n,

so they became a prominent -- there was a lot of bryan family members and a rather prominent family. there's graveyards of bryans that can be found in missouri, for example, and certainly some parts of kentucky and elsewhere. so, you know, we didn't have nearly, of course, the kind of information about rebecca that we had about daniel because let's face it, not too many people are interested in interviewing rebecca, daniel was the star of the family but there was information there, and we also had one source of information which was very good, helpful to us was the reminiscents of nathan boone, their youngest child. and in his later life he was interviewed by lyman draper and he talked about the dynamics between his parents.

there was an extremely strong attachment to them over the decades that was put to the test by daniel's long absences but nathan revered both of his parents. >> and he turned over what papers there were to lyman draper which we got ahold of in the wisconsin historical society. tom told you that great story about he fathered the child it's all in the family, so much the better. another good one. not the little girl who daniel boone rescued after she was kidnapped by indians. and james finmore cooper took it for the headlines. but there's another story about suzie boone, an older daughter. she's one of two women when boone first hacked his way through the boone trace, the gap, kentucky, she's one of two

women there, this young irishman -- suzie was 16 or 17, a young irishman came to boone and said i want to ask for your daughter's hand in marriage. and daniel very diplomatically tried to dissuade the irishman. let's say, suzie was -- what's a good way to put it. she was a sporting girl, suzie was. but anyway, the irishman would not be dissuaded. they married and a few weeks later he's complaining about suzie's frolics and waves with other men. and daniel looks at him, son, i think i told you, you got a trot father, a trot mother and you expected a pacing colt. i don't think you're going to get one. so anyway, that's a -- just another example of daniel

boone's philosophy towards life. i'll take anything you throw at me. >> yeah. >> you kidnapped my daughter, i'm going to get her. kill my two sons i'm going to rebound. we talked about his brother, at one point they're coming back from another indian war, netty, the younger brother, and daniel brace off to do some hunting and netty looks so much like daniel, it's one of the reasons that rebecca fell in love with him and had a child with him. so daniel is chasing this bear, and he hears shots and he runs back to where they're watering horses and there's three shawnee over netty and they're sawing off his head. they thought they killed daniel boone. they want to bring the head back to their village. we killed the great daniel boone. so, of course, boone gets into a gun fight with them. but the point is, as tom mentioned, my footsteps have been traced by blood.

and i have lost much blood and treasure two sons and a brother have i lost. but he just never lost that -- that confidence that life would turn out okay. >> remarkable. remarkable. i want to thank you both for taking the time to be with us. and i want to thank you on -- congratulations on "the new york times." the book is "blood and treasure" and it's available, watermarks book and cafe. it's in the chat link. and i hope we get to welcome you back to wichita in person. >> i'm going to get there there. i promise. i promise, sarah, i will be there. >> i know, come rain or whatever weather. i want to say, either for the paperback of this or whatever it is next you're working on, i wonder if you started on that? >> we have. we have. as you know, because of several

reasons, covid being among them, the publication of "blood and treasure" was postponed three months and then another three months so we just got to work on the world war ii book. as tom said we need to get down to the army war college, i need to get over to europe still to tour the battlefield. but we'll get out there. we'll get out there. i'll tell you what, sarah, i'm going to let you in on a secret. if i'm out there with tom and we're giving a presentation, you have to get me a coffee cup, i got to be honest with you, there's not tea in this coffee cup. >> i knew that. i knew that. it's a pretty big cup, i noticed. >> it's called "blood and treasure". >> there you go, "blood and treasure". thank you for tuning in, everybody. independent bookstore day is saturday. we appreciate your time and look forward to seeing you again.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ on may 10th, 1869, railroad tycoon leland stanford hammered in a golden spike to mark the linking of the central pacific railroad from the west and the union pacific railroad from the east at promontory summit in utah territory. this ceremony completed the transcontinental railroad. next, stanford university professor richa