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Daniel Boone’s North Dakota connection

M L Berg

Minot

With the building of a Teddy Roosevelt library in the offing, readers might like to know that Roosevelt wrote a four-volume history about the settlement of the west, which he titled ‘The Winning of the West’.

He wrote part of it, while residing on his Elkhorn Ranch in Billings county. His history begins with the settlement of Tennessee and Kentucky, and it ends with the explorations of Lewis and Clark, and Zebulon Pike after the Louisiana Purchase had been made.

One major historical figure appears in all four volumes.

This is Daniel Boone. He pioneered settlement of Kentucky, but he spent the last years of his life in Missouri, where he moved in the 1790s. He was given a job as the local magistrate in the area where he lived by none other than Meriwether Lewis.

While in Missouri, Boone also took several trips up the Missouri River to do some hunting and trapping, two activities that had been second nature to him all his life. One of these trips ended up being a six-month sojourn taking him as far northwest as the Yellowstone River system in what is today Montana.

Daniel Boone died in Missouri in September, 1820.

Jesse Boone, his fourth son, died in the same year, in December, 1820. As it happens, one of Jesse’s sons, Albert Gallatin Boone, was the first person to take the censuses of Morton and Billings counties in June, 1880. (In 1880, Morton county did not included Mandan, which was still located in Burleigh county.)

Teddy Roosevelt was in Billings county at census time, residing on his ranch, but his name does not appear in the census records, although his ranch is listed as one of the businesses being carried out in Billings County at the time. It seems unlikely that Albert and Teddy ever met in person.

That’s a pity, since Daniel Boone was one of Teddy’s heroes.

Albert Boone died at his daughter’s home in Denver in 1884, four years after his census work in west-central Dakota Territory (which included both present-day North and South Dakota).

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