Daniel Boone
by James Daugherty
Summary
Daugherty traces Daniel Boone's life from a childhood in 1740s Pennsylvania through the years that made him famous, his explorations through the Cumberland Gap into what was then still contested frontier territory, his role leading settlers into Kentucky, his capture and later escape from Shawnee captivity, and his part defending the settlement at Boonesborough, before following him into old age and his final years in Missouri, where he died in 1820. The book is written as a celebratory, almost mythic account of frontier expansion, presenting Boone as a heroic figure whose courage and skill in the wilderness embody a larger story of American settlement pushing steadily westward, and it treats that expansion as an unambiguous triumph rather than a more complicated history involving the people whose land it was. Daugherty both wrote and illustrated the biography himself, and his bold, energetic drawings match the sweeping, adventurous tone of the prose, action heavy and confident throughout.
Read now, the book asks real caution of an adult reading it aloud rather than simple enjoyment: its treatment of the Native nations Boone came into conflict with leans on caricature and the era's frontier mythology rather than on the more even handed history modern readers expect, and the children's literature scholar Debbie Reese, founder of American Indians in Children's Literature, has specifically flagged the book's racist depictions in both its text and its illustrations, concerns other reviewers of the same edition have echoed regarding how casually it treats violence against Native people as simple adventure. The book is now out of print, a rare fate among Newbery Medal winners and one that reflects how directly that history has caught up with it.
Historical Context & Significance
The Viking Press published Daniel Boone in January 1939, and it won the 1940 Newbery Medal a year after Daugherty had already won a Caldecott Honor for his illustrations in Andy and the Lion. No committee citation survives from this era, but that year's runners up were Kate Seredy's The Singing Tree, Mabel Robinson's Runner of the Mountain Tops, Laura Ingalls Wilder's By the Shores of Silver Lake, and Stephen W. Meader's Boy with a Pack.
The book has had almost no positive afterlife by comparison with most Newbery winners; where other medal books from this era have drawn renewed attention for outdated attitudes readers can still discuss around otherwise good stories, later critics, Debbie Reese among them, have described this one as too thoroughly built on its own prejudice, in both word and image, to be separated from it, and it has gone out of print rather than been reissued with an editorial note the way some of its era's other winners have.