Finding Daniel Boone by Ted Franklin Belue

Author:Ted Franklin Belue [Belue, Ted Franklin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Adventurers & Explorers, History, United States, State & Local, Midwest (IA; IL; IN; KS; MI; MN; MO; ND; NE; OH; SD; WI), South (AL; AR; FL; GA; KY; LA; MS; NC; SC; TN; VA; WV)
ISBN: 9781439671320
Google: Aj34DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Published: 2020-09-28T00:41:43+00:00

BOONE DIED THE YEAR Mason Brown graduated from Yale and his younger brother Orlando from Princeton. Mason served on Kentucky’s circuit bench. Orlando set up a law office in Alabama.

Their father divided his ten-acre lot between them and commissioned architect Gideon Shyrock, who designed the Old Capitol, to build Orlando’s home. Finished in 1835 for $5,000, its Greek Revivalist lines are a bold statement about the Enlightenment ideals the Browns, slaveholders all, selectively hewed to. Mason inherited his father’s law practice and the family estate, Liberty Hall—bordered northerly by the Kentucky, westerly by Wapping Street ribboning past the wonderfully named Love Tavern and easterly by Montgomery. Wilkinson Street fronted his five acres.

Past the slave cabin behind his home and down the riverbank—father and sons held more than thirty enslaved here and elsewhere—his wharf on the Kentucky jutted into waters so fordable that during droughts one could walk to shore. His home’s window glass was Philadelphia-made, mule-trained to the Monongahela and boated down the Ohio to his dock. Two ferries crossed nearby—one bisecting northwest past the ford; one cutting northeasterly near Fishtrap Island’s grain and sawmill.

Mason’s intellectual bent showed itself early. “It really is a pity that so promising a scholar should be checked in his literary progress for the want of books,” John wrote to Margaretta about their gifted three-year-old. Their second-floor library grew as Mason hardened into a stern-looking man with onyx eyes, a sharp nose and a soft, rounded chin that belied a grit not unlike the scaly catalpa that today still grows just out his front door—a firmness needed as secretary of state under Governor Charles S. Morehead, his coauthor on A Digest of the Statute Laws of Kentucky.

Orlando’s heart was not in lawyering. “The family darling” missed his heroic social tippling and “slippered talk with friends.” He returned home. Rakishly handsome and pale, he’s in a black cape in one portrait, clutching a red bejeweled fob to his bosom—the effect less Byronic and more emotive Emo embalmer in full goth with high tousled black hair, pouty lips and rouge-tinted nose. He’s perfectly posh and fashionable in another stylish rendering, seated on his luxurious armchair.

His calling came in editing the Commonwealth, which he cofounded with Albert Gallatin Hodges. He crusaded for Mason’s interests and would during the Civil War hurrah the Northern cause (while renting out Alexander Sanders, one of his seventeen slaves, to Company A’s 116th U.S. Colored Infantry). A lyrical yet undisciplined writer, he began a governor’s compendium that he never finished, in his editorializing and authorship completing only a ten-page pamphlet. “His legacy to the historical bibliography of Kentucky was not extensive in quantity,” read a postmortem tribute.

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