Daniel Boone and the American Frontier

Across thousands of brutal, untamed miles. A different breed of founding fathers. Fight a revolution all their own. Fire! Fire! For more than 70 years, they push into the unknown, driven by the hope that this vast land holds a fortune that could be theirs, if they survive. They fight for a dream. To transform a wilderness into a nation. The United States of America. I I I I I I I I I I I I I I Deep in the vast, uncharted wilderness known as the Kentucky Territory, Daniel Boone is running for his life. He spent the last two years here, hunting and fur trapping. But he's on land claimed by the Shawnee Tribe. By the early 1770s only a handful of non-natives have dared to venture this far west. Those that do find both danger and opportunity. The allure of the frontier is it's a place where people who have nothing could go and make a lot of money trapping beaver and river otter and hunting for Or deer hides. Our term today, like when you say a dollar or a buck, a buck comes from the value of a deer hide. At the same time, you're in constant danger of being killed. And there's always a very good chance that you could fail catastrophically. Boone's lucky to be alive, but every pelt he planned to sell to feed his family is gone, and he returns home to North Carolina in debt. In 1773, North Carolina is one of 13 British colonies ruled by King George III. Ten years earlier, he made it illegal for colonists to permanently settle west of the Appalachian. though hunting was permitted. That area is home to over 2 million Native Americans from over 300 competing tribes, and Britain wants no trouble with them. The Crown's restriction infuriates colonists eager for land. And it doesn't stop men like North Carolina judge Richard Henderson. He's just bought 20 million acres, nearly the whole area of modern Kentucky. He plans to profit by selling it to settlers, and he doesn't care what law he breaks, or if it's claimed by Native American tribes. I think people were tired of constant rules and regulations. Americans wanted to strike it rich. They wanted to make a killing in land and real estate. The American frontier always meant dollar signs. Some of the great famous names of the American Revolution, Ben Franklin, George Washington, were engaged in buying up land in the West. But you still have, of course, the Native American tribes, who were not about to just accept all these Americans flooding over the Appalachian Mountains. If Henderson's going to settle his land, he needs to find someone brave enough to lead the way. And by sheer coincidence, he's about to meet him. Mr. Boone promised to settle his debt as soon as he returned. And yet here he is, refusing to make good on his promise. After his recent disastrous hunting trip, Boone is facing debtor's prison. Your honor, I have every intention of settling my debts. Boone returned from two years in the wilderness. He was poorer than when he set out. There are tribes all over Kentucky. I spent two years there. But he lived on hope. He lived on the sense that things were going to break for him. I tracked enough Pell's to pay him back ten times over before the Shawnee tracked me. Henderson sees a way to solve both of their problems. The meeting of Daniel Boone and Richard Henderson is one of these coincidences that makes history. Henderson needs a guy like Daniel Boone, the essential frontiersman, and he thinks Boone, who is down on his luck, he's in serious debts, is so desperate that he would actually take on this crazy scheme. Mr. Boone? I recently purchased a large parcel of land right around here. The judge offers Boone a choice. Work off his debt in a hard labor camp, or blaze a trail into the Kentucky wilderness. For Daniel Boone, it'll be the greatest challenge of his life. He'll defy British law and lead 30 settlers farther west than he's ever been. Straight into Shawnee territory. As Boone prepares to challenge the crown. In New England, another rebellion is brewing. After nearly a decade of growing anger at repressive British taxes, Boston rebels are throwing a tea party. The idea of freedom and liberty... mattered to the colonists and their concern was they were on a slippery slope to having the rights and privileges eroded by a tyrannical government across the seas tensions between crown and colonies are escalating As Boone sets out on a mission that will shape the future of America. Daniel Boone's foray into the backcountry at that time would be the equivalent of landing on the moon. It was opening up a whole new frontier. This is before anyone had any knowledge about how far and expansive this frontier truly was. It was an opportunity for Americans to move into this region and to discover in that process great wealth and also opportunity. To reach Henderson's claim, Boone and his men must cut a trail through a notch in the Appalachian Mountains, the Cumberland Gap. There were mountains that had to be gone around, streams that had to be crossed. The woods were full of Shawnees and other Indians prowling. After a grueling 400 mile journey, Boone arrives at the edge of an untapped wilderness. If I had access to a time machine, I would go back. And be with Boone the first time he went through the Cumberland Gap and dropped down into the Kentucky hunting grounds. I mean this was the promised land that he had been striving for as a frontiersman his entire life. The trail Boone blazes will come to be known as the Wilderness Road. And over the next four decades, some 300,000 pioneers will follow it west. Daniel Boone really was an iconic figure, even in his own time. I mean, these were individuals who could and had to do it all. There certainly is something about Americans that they were always driving forward, relentlessly in search of land that they could own, living by their own self-reliance. It was their idea of the American dream. It's an American dream that's about to be born in fire. Just two weeks after Boone's arrival, colonial rage explodes. In the small town of Lexington, Massachusetts, it's the shot heard round the world. And on April 19th, the battles of Lexington and Concord erupt, leaving 49 colonists dead. The first casualties in what will soon be a revolution. The rebels that were fighting were ordinary people. They were farmers, just everyday folks that wanted freedom and they wanted liberty. And they were willing to fight for it against this great superpower. And they were willing to die for this. 400 miles west on the Kentucky frontier, that same patriotic spirit inspires Daniel Boone. He and his men are building a permanent settlement in defiance of the British crown. Keep those nice and tight as they go up, yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Good work, boys. At the same time Lexington and Concord is raging in the east, here is Daniel Boone and this small ragtag group of men cutting through and establishing this settlement. These seemingly disconnected events in some sense are wedded as Americans are beginning to fight for independence, you also have this process of expanding what will become the American nation.. Boone knows they're on Shawnee soil, and throughout the spring of 1775, he races to complete defenses. Living on the frontier was extremely dangerous. Daniel Boone's own son was tortured to death by Indians a couple years earlier, and they knew that if they were going to survive, they needed to live in a fortified settlement. Well, just imagine you arrive in the woods of Kentucky. You have an axe and you have a few cross-cut saws. Every log has got to be chopped, it's got to be sawed, it's got to be notched, it's got to be rolled. So we're talking about real hard work. After four weeks of hard labor, the fort is christened Boonesboro. The settlement is the largest ever established on the frontier. And it quickly expands, triggering a new wave of pioneers, drawn west by the promise of owning land. America is the land of dreams. And you can just go out, and if you have your axe and your gun and some guts, alright, you go out there and maybe you're gonna get killed in the wilderness, but you got a shot at making your claim. That did not exist in Europe. All the land was taken. It was all owned by these nobles and lords and rich guys. There was no opportunity. But in America, there was an opportunity. Among the new arrivals at Boonesboro are Boone's wife and eight children, including his 14-year-old daughter, Jemima. Jemima Boone was Daniel Boone's favorite child. Boone took a personal hand in training Jemima as a marksman, as a woodswoman. You might look at Boone's decision to move his family into the Kentucky wilderness now and think of it as this really reckless, dangerous thing. But I think he probably looked at it as this was his chance to have the American dream, where here's his promise of acquiring a large chunk of land, that not only that he could farm and settle, but that future generations ...creations of boons will be able to farm and settle and live off the fat of the land. By the end of 1775, the number of settlers in Kentucky has tripled, and settlements now cover more than half a million acres of land. A move that alarms native tribes, including the Shawnee. For the last century, they've been pushed relentlessly west. Now they see each new settlement as an invasion. One they're determined to stop. In Kentucky, the Shawnees were already thriving before the arrival of Europeans. In fact, they were one of the more kind of influential, powerful people in that region. When strange settlers began to build, lodges of their own, cabins and such, then Native people began to realize this was more of a permanent situation. This is Shawnee territory. It had to be defended. And so you go to war. Among the most powerful Shawnee leaders in Kentucky is a war chief named Blackfish. In 1776, he decides to strike back. Blackfish was a well-known war leader of the Chillicothe group of the Shawnee Nation. He was a very respected leader who drew people to him. From Blackfish's perspective, that land was Shawnee land. And so Blackfish believed, as many other Shawnees believed, that a definitive stand had to be made to stop losing ground to the whites. Deep in the Kentucky wilderness, a Shawnee war party abducts three young women near Boonesboro. Among them is Daniel Boone's 14 year old daughter, Jemima. You three, with me. Ready your weapons and stay alert. Man the wall. He's up! As Americans expand beyond the Appalachians, understandably, conflict is going to erupt between the Native Americans and these frontiersmen who have intruded upon their lands. The warning is clear. No outsider who sets foot on Shawnee land is safe. But Jemima Boone is uniquely equipped to survive. Now Boone's daughter starts tearing little bits of fabric from her apron or dress and leaving along the trail. So here's someone, she's getting abducted and she knows that she's gonna be taken to these distant Indian villages and possibly tortured and killed and she has the presence of mind to be leaving evidence of their passage along the way. We'll keep our distance till nightfall. Spread out. The story of the abduction of Jemima went, as we would say, viral. Almost everything Daniel Boone did burned his reputation. He was the kind of figure around whom stories collect. Come on, come on. People felt, how dumb could you be to kidnap the daughter of Daniel Boone? The Jemima story fits in with many stories of young women getting captured by Native Americans at the time. This was a kind of great fear and anxiety that just proliferated throughout every single colony. The idea that we got her back thanks to Daniel Boone's heroism is the kind of reassurance for women to go out there who would of course be part of the essential building blocks of any society and that was really important. Within weeks of Boone's return home to Boonesboro, the colonies move past rebellion to revolution. When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another. In July 1776, the colonies declare independence. That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And the United States of America is born. It's built on the ideals of freedom and self-reliance. Values personified by frontiersmen. Within a month, copies of the Declaration of Independence reach remote outposts like Boonesboro. When Daniel Boone gets word of the Declaration of Independence, he had to be aware that, in some sense, he was on the advance guard, the front edge of the movement for independence. Daniel Boone understood that liberty was the freedom to do exactly what he had been doing, to traverse the West, to provide for his family, to have a life independent of some dictatorial power. The colonists know the price of independence is war. But Britain's generals have no doubt they will crush the revolution. Their plan is simple. Hit eastern cities by sea. Then send troops down from Canada to attack northern forts. By November 1776, the British take New York. Then chase the Continental Army into Pennsylvania. Things were going very badly for the American cause. Great Britain entered the war. We're believing that they could easily suppress us because at this point the United States military was small and generally not very efficient. And the British are the most powerful Empire in the world. They had the most powerful army. It was well-trained, well-organized. With the Continental Army on the run, the British devise a new trap. They'll open a western front in the war by attacking settlements like Boonesboro. Their strategy relies on unlikely allies. Consider them a gift. British allied with the Native Americans during the Revolutionary War because the Native allies were useful in terms of scouting, providing information, simply as a fighting force. Shawnees had conflict with white settlers coming into their land so they were fighting this war alongside the British. In 1777 Britain starts arming the Shawnee and other Native American tribes to fight the settlers. In exchange, they promised to return native lands. These native people, they had no doubt what was in store for them if the Americans won. They faced removal. On the other hand, the British promised rewards in land. Now the Shawnee and Daniel Boone are on a collision course that will help decide the new nation's future. By late 1777, the Shawnee are British allies. Part of a strategy to open a Western front in the Revolutionary War. The British, in the time of the Revolution, they were arming Indian tribes to attack settlements. They promised the Indians... that once they drove the settlers out of Kentucky, they could recover their territory. The British could then attack the colonies from the West. That was part of their plan to put down this rebellion. In Boonesboro, Daniel Boone has no idea of the coming danger. And the settlement has a different problem. They're running dangerously low on salt. Salt was so important to the settlers of Boonesboro. The diet of the people was almost entirely game. It was hunted meat. Because Indians were attacking settlers regularly, they stayed in that fort as much as possible. And there was very little farming going on. So salt was the only way that settlers had to preserve meat. To get salt, Boone and two dozen of his men must head 50 miles from the safety of their fort to a distant river rich with mineral deposits. Today we don't really spend a whole lot of time thinking about salt. But it was a big undertaking because they wouldn't go to the store and buy it. They would go to what they call a salt lick. And this is just a spring where the water coming up out of the spring has a high salt content. Keep that energy up, boys! You'd have to boil down five or six hundred gallons of water to end up with a 50 pound bushel of salt. Boone and his men can extract about 500 pounds of salt a day. But they need 15,000 pounds before winter. The work leaves them exposed in the wilderness for nearly a month. Boone and all of his men are taken by the Shawnee. The British will pay a hundred dollar bounty for each captured settler. The Shawnees and the settlers in Kentucky were at war. And when the Shawnees discovered Boone and his men making salt, this was a sudden crime of opportunity. They took them as prisoners of war. These would have been valuable assets. First, they have to survive a brutal Native American rite called the Gauntlet. Running the gauntlet was a test of one's strength and mettle. And the gauntlet was also a way of terrorizing your enemy. In fact, many people did not survive. Fighting as British allies, the Shawnee have captured Daniel Boone and his men. To prove his worth, Boone is forced to run the gauntlet. Daniel Boone running the gauntlet and kind of withstanding all these hits earns him the respect of Blackfish. And he's then able to convince Blackfish not to assault anybody else. It certainly added to the legend of Daniel Boone. Boone and his men may be alive, but they're prisoners of war in a rebellion that's on the brink of failure. By 1778, the exhausted Continental Army is in full retreat. But it can't escape the most brutal winter in a century. In the winter of 1777-1778, the British had occupied Philadelphia. Washington's Continental Army is starving and freezing to death at Valley Forge. It's a very dark time for the American revolutionary cause. By February, 2,500 Continental soldiers die of exposure, disease, and starvation. more than double the casualties of any single battle. Back in Boonesboro, Boone and his men have been missing for months. Most settlers fear the worst, including Boone's wife, Rebecca. Say bye to your sister. Bye. Goodbye. Bye. The people of Boonesboro assumed the men had been killed. They had to. But Jemima stayed after Rebecca took the rest of the family back to North Carolina. She believed that her father would come back. And she was going to be there to greet him. Hundreds of miles from home, Boone has survived months of captivity. Now Chief Blackfish is marching Boone's men to the British stronghold of Fort Detroit. It's the central staging ground for attacks from the West. Part of Britain's plan to work with their Native American allies to crush the colonies from all sides. The British established a major headquarters at Detroit. It became the most important fort in that region, and it was out of Detroit that they sent the militias and the supplies for the Indians to attack. That would become a front in the war. These prisoners were valuable assets for the Shawnee. They could trade them with the British as a symbol of their support for the British side. Unfortunately, some of them actually were forced into the British military. What's gonna happen to those men? Where are you taking them? To be questioned. Those men are not rebels. They're just hunters and farmers settled in Kentucky. What's your name? Daniel Boone. Of Boonesborough? Yes, sir. You think that's your land? Boonesborough has not declared loyalty to the Crown. As such, I've been ordered to take it by force. Blackfish will lead a war party to take the fort. You will go with him to help negotiate the surrender. Please, let me... That is what's going to happen. Boonesborough is the most important frontier settlement. If it falls, the loss could be catastrophic to the American cause. Well, you can only imagine what was going through Boone's mind. He realizes that the Shawnee are going to attack Boonesboro, facing what seemed to be insurmountable odds. Vastly outnumbered. His family is there. So he decides that he's going to risk it all and try to escape. Zoe! Zoe! Let's get in! Daniel Boone is on the move, making a daring escape. From his Shawnee captors, he has to warn Boonesboro that an attack is imminent. See what the sea. Mr. Lee. Mr. Lee. Alone on foot. Boone must cover 150 miles faster than the Shawnee or the fort will fall allowing the British and their allies to attack the colonies from the west. Because he was an expert tracker, Boone knows very well the kind of things you do if you don't want someone to follow you. So Boone would do things like step only on rocks to not leave the trail. And you cut zigzags and circles and anything you can do to confuse your pursuer. When Boone escaped from the Shawnees, he was not prepared for a hundred mile journey. His feet blistered and bloody. Guys like Daniel Boone who are on these endurance journeys, you'd have to be in extremely good shape. That's just a testimonial to how tough these guys were. He managed to do it in four days. In order to do that, he drew on incredible resources in his body. This is an extraordinary story. I mean, we're talking about four marathons in four days without shoes, through the wilderness, not even running on streets. It builds on this reputation of Daniel Boone, the superhero who can do anything. BOOM! BOOM! Home for the first time in months. There's no time to rest. The Shawnee are coming. Gather our weapons. Muskets, ammunition, gunpowder, get everything you can. Everything they needed, essentially, they had to produce themselves. Everything they consumed, everything they drank, all the gunpowder that they used, the lead bullets that they cast, everything had to be made from materials that were at hand. Combining leftover sulfur, charcoal from the campfire, and bat dung, the settlers race to make gunpowder. It was a desperate time. They were short of men, they were short of ammunition, sort of supplies. Yet people of Boonesboro were really a part of the defense, as it turned out, of the American Revolution. Blackfish and his 450 Shawnee warriors outnumber the people of Boonesboro seven to one. Fearing a massacre. Boone makes a last-ditch effort to get reinforcements and sends for the local militia. They're stationed over 300 miles away in Virginia. There's no telling if they'll arrive in time or at all. Deep in the Kentucky wilderness, Daniel Boone braces for an attack. 450 Shawnee warriors are marching toward Boonesboro under British orders to capture the fort. If it falls, the blow to the colonial cause could be devastating. To understand what was going on at Boonesboro, you have to consider it in the context of the revolution. The British were encouraging Indians to attack the Kentucky settlements. Boonesboro was the biggest one, so they felt if they could bring that down, they could probably overrun Kentucky and drive the settlers out, and then attack from the west against the colonies. Boone sent word to the Virginia militia, hoping for help. But they're more than 300 miles away. And he has no idea if they're coming. They're here! A force of hundreds of Indians shows up. They want to wipe Boonesboro off the map. Turn your phones! But Boone doesn't want to engage him in a fight. He's aware that Shawnee could possibly massacre them all, so he negotiates with Shawnee. I'm coming out! I have a question for you. What is the answer to the question of the dead? Do right by her people. Surrender and no harm will come to them. You have until sundown. I need more time to discuss it with the others. Elachi hiwa wisatuta nihita. Oxymo kalaki. You have until sundown. Enoki! Fire at will. Even though they were vastly outnumbered by the Indians, the frontiersmen who are in Boonesboro, they used good fortifications, they had stockpiles of weaponry. And remember, Boone and a force of just 60 settlers fight off the first attack. The Shawnee suffer heavy casualties, but Blackfish refuses to give up. The frontier story has been told many times, almost always, with the settlers as the heroes of the story. But American Indians are Americans too. Shawnee people were defending what they considered to be their homeland. The Battle of Boonesboro is just beginning. The first major battle on the Western front of the Revolutionary War, Boonesborough, is under siege. After taking heavy casualties, Shawnee leader Blackfish changes tactics, unleashing a barrage of surprise attacks on the settlement. The Native Americans were using hit-and-run tactics, and these are quite devastatingly effective because those on the frontier feared that they could be attacked at any time, at any place. This, as in every combat, is a test of wills. They were vulnerable and exposed. Bullets were flying. There was gun smoke, sometimes so thick you couldn't see anything. This went on day after day after day. With the fort surrounded, the settlers are trapped. There was human waste, animal carcasses, and rotten meat laying around. Everyone's clothes are in tatters. I mean, this place is a miserable cesspool. The only thing worse than being in here would be to step out of there and be tortured and killed. Bone refuses to surrender. The settlers stand their ground. Attacks continue for nine straight days, but Blackfish still can't take the fort. Blackfish was in a very complicated situation there. He knew that unless Boone surrendered the fort, it was unlikely he could take it. And in a well-built fort, with those big logs with rifles, he could not take the fort. Blackfish and the Shawnees just decided if we can't bring them over, if we can't capture them, we'll simply do whatever we can to destroy them. Stop! Boonesborough is now a battlefield in the Revolutionary War. Armed by the British, the Shawnee mount a fierce attack. But after ten days of relentless fighting, the fort still stands. The siege of Boonesboro was terrifying for the people inside the fort. Gunfire was so loud, women were screaming, children were crying. They knew the Virginia militia was on its way, but they didn't get there in time. So the people of Boonesboro simply assumed the fort was falling. At a very important moment, a rainstorm came and doused the flames. Had it not rained at that time, Boonesboro could have been taken. The Shawnees'attack fails. And when a scout returns with word that the Virginia militia is coming, Blackfish has no choice but to retreat. They knew there were more men there, more rifles, more powder, more supplies, and psychologically, this was so discouraging to the Indians and Blackfish. And the next morning, they were gone. After 11 days of brutal round-the-clock fighting, the Battle of Boonesborough is finally over, securing a badly needed colonial win. It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of the victory at Boonesborough for the colonies at this time. It was a desperate time. 1778. was a bad year for the Americans. So even this little battle and way off in Kentucky was important. The British make a major miscalculation in dealing with Boonesboro and the American frontier. By supporting Native American attacks against the colonists in the West, that only infuriates and increases the hatred of the British in the East. This was the deepest anxiety that these English colonists had, and for the British to now just push that button, it's the height of stupidity. Just days after the Shawnee retreat...... The Virginia militia finally arrives. They've come with a new mission to escalate the war on the frontier by striking back against Britain and its allies. Their first target is Chillicothe, the home of blackfish, and an opportunity for revenge. Boone was opposed to exterminationist raids. These raids north of the Ohio were aimed at destroying the Indian homeland. Burning villages, burning cornfields, attacking women and children, killing indiscriminately. This was just not Boone's style. I don't know where their village is. The remarkable thing about Boone is that Boone doesn't turn into an Indian hater. He doesn't give his life over to hate and vengeance. He still has it in him the capability to seek peace with these people. It's kind of remarkable, because I think that if most people imagine that situation, the hate would define you for the rest of your life. I do. It's right here. North of the Ohio River. Boone's refusal to fight at Chillicothe causes a rift between him and the other settlers. Fall of 1778, Daniel and Jemima Boone leave the settlement he founded. He goes on to join American forces fighting the British on the Western Front. And though he never again sets foot in Boonesboro, the settlement survives. And Kentucky will become America's 15th state. Boone remains a seductive figure in the American imagination. I think we all like to fancy that in those circumstances we would be that brave and that resourceful and that capable to live. and do the things that he did. But also throughout his life, he seems to just have remained a good guy. Boone still stands out as this likable figure who treated people fairly, wanted the best for people. And he had that rugged individualism as the embodiment of American frontiersman. With Boone gone, in May 1779, Virginia's militia marches on Britain's allies, the Shawnee. Chillicothe is home to 3,000 Shawnee. Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah! For the Shawnee people, the loss of a beloved leader in Blackfish was a serious event. Blackfish loomed large because of his stature and reputation as a war leader. The loss of Blackfish was the loss of yet another hero. From those that survive, a new Shawnee hero will emerge. The adopted son of Blackfish, 11-year-old Tecumseh, who will soon rise to lead his people in the fight to reclaim the frontier. One year after the death of Chief Blackfish, the Continental Army begins to turn the tide of the war. The success of the settlers in defending Boonesboro was just one incident in a long series of fights and battles. Eventually the French come into the conflict as the allies of the Americans. And in many ways that indeed was the turning point in the Revolution. In September 1783, Britain signs the Treaty of Paris, formally recognizing the sovereignty of the United States of America and ending the war. People might not realize this, but the Treaty of Paris was actually signed by this new United States, the British Empire, and the French Empire. France provided troops, provided navies, and funded the American Revolution. Britain figured France was actually its bigger enemy in the long run. So Britain surrendered pretty much all the lands west of the Appalachians to the Mississippi River to make an ally of the new United States. The new country nearly doubles in size, gaining more than 250,000 square miles of land, stretching from Florida to Canada, and from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. The big surprise of the Treaty of Paris was that the British conceded control of the entire Trans-Appalachian West. It was an incredible bounty for the new nation. Free from British rule. American settlers race to claim their piece of the frontier. Over the next decade, thousands of settlers flood west along the trails blazed by men like Daniel Boone. But they will soon learn a hard lesson. While the British Army had surrendered, the Native people in the West never surrendered. Native Americans still claim this land, and Tecumseh, now grown, is about to reignite the fight for the frontier. Music Next time on The Men Who Built America Frontiersman. As the new nation pushes relentlessly west, the frontier becomes a bloody battleground. Tecumseh recognizes that if the natives are to survive, they need to band together. Surrounded by enemies, Thomas Jefferson makes a bold move. That could cost him the presidency. The Louisiana Purchase was the greatest real estate deal in the history of the world. He launches one of the most daring expeditions in American history. If you want to get a sense for how mysterious the western lands were to the Lewis and Clark expedition. It was as strange to them as it would be for you or me to step foot on Mars. Then, as a new generation of frontiersmen emerges, Andrew Jackson stares down an empire. Fire!

Across thousands of brutal, untamed miles. A different breed of founding fathers. Fight a revolution all their own.

Fire! Fire! For more than 70 years, they push into the unknown, driven by the hope that this vast land holds a fortune that could be theirs, if they survive.

They fight for a dream. To transform a wilderness into a nation. The United States of America. I I I I I I I I I I I I I I Deep in the vast, uncharted wilderness known as the Kentucky Territory, Daniel Boone is running for his life.

He spent the last two years here, hunting and fur trapping. But he's on land claimed by the Shawnee Tribe. By the early 1770s only a handful of non-natives have dared to venture this far west. Those that do find both danger and opportunity. The allure of the frontier is it's a place where people who have nothing could go and make a lot of money trapping beaver and river otter and hunting for Or deer hides.

Our term today, like when you say a dollar or a buck, a buck comes from the value of a deer hide. At the same time, you're in constant danger of being killed. And there's always a very good chance that you could fail catastrophically. Boone's lucky to be alive, but every pelt he planned to sell to feed his family is gone, and he returns home to North Carolina in debt.

In 1773, North Carolina is one of 13 British colonies ruled by King George III. Ten years earlier, he made it illegal for colonists to permanently settle west of the Appalachian. though hunting was permitted.

That area is home to over 2 million Native Americans from over 300 competing tribes, and Britain wants no trouble with them. The Crown's restriction infuriates colonists eager for land. And it doesn't stop men like North Carolina judge Richard Henderson. He's just bought 20 million acres, nearly the whole area of modern Kentucky.

He plans to profit by selling it to settlers, and he doesn't care what law he breaks, or if it's claimed by Native American tribes. I think people were tired of constant rules and regulations. Americans wanted to strike it rich.

They wanted to make a killing in land and real estate. The American frontier always meant dollar signs. Some of the great famous names of the American Revolution, Ben Franklin, George Washington, were engaged in buying up land in the West. But you still have, of course, the Native American tribes, who were not about to just accept all these Americans flooding over the Appalachian Mountains.

If Henderson's going to settle his land, he needs to find someone brave enough to lead the way. And by sheer coincidence, he's about to meet him. Mr. Boone promised to settle his debt as soon as he returned.

And yet here he is, refusing to make good on his promise. After his recent disastrous hunting trip, Boone is facing debtor's prison. Your honor, I have every intention of settling my debts. Boone returned from two years in the wilderness. He was poorer than when he set out.

There are tribes all over Kentucky. I spent two years there. But he lived on hope. He lived on the sense that things were going to break for him. I tracked enough Pell's to pay him back ten times over before the Shawnee tracked me.

Henderson sees a way to solve both of their problems. The meeting of Daniel Boone and Richard Henderson is one of these coincidences that makes history. Henderson needs a guy like Daniel Boone, the essential frontiersman, and he thinks Boone, who is down on his luck, he's in serious debts, is so desperate that he would actually take on this crazy scheme. Mr. Boone?

I recently purchased a large parcel of land right around here. The judge offers Boone a choice. Work off his debt in a hard labor camp, or blaze a trail into the Kentucky wilderness. For Daniel Boone, it'll be the greatest challenge of his life.

He'll defy British law and lead 30 settlers farther west than he's ever been. Straight into Shawnee territory. As Boone prepares to challenge the crown.

In New England, another rebellion is brewing. After nearly a decade of growing anger at repressive British taxes, Boston rebels are throwing a tea party. The idea of freedom and liberty...

mattered to the colonists and their concern was they were on a slippery slope to having the rights and privileges eroded by a tyrannical government across the seas tensions between crown and colonies are escalating As Boone sets out on a mission that will shape the future of America. Daniel Boone's foray into the backcountry at that time would be the equivalent of landing on the moon. It was opening up a whole new frontier.

This is before anyone had any knowledge about how far and expansive this frontier truly was. It was an opportunity for Americans to move into this region and to discover in that process great wealth and also opportunity. To reach Henderson's claim, Boone and his men must cut a trail through a notch in the Appalachian Mountains, the Cumberland Gap. There were mountains that had to be gone around, streams that had to be crossed. The woods were full of Shawnees and other Indians prowling.

After a grueling 400 mile journey, Boone arrives at the edge of an untapped wilderness. If I had access to a time machine, I would go back. And be with Boone the first time he went through the Cumberland Gap and dropped down into the Kentucky hunting grounds.

I mean this was the promised land that he had been striving for as a frontiersman his entire life. The trail Boone blazes will come to be known as the Wilderness Road. And over the next four decades, some 300,000 pioneers will follow it west. Daniel Boone really was an iconic figure, even in his own time.

I mean, these were individuals who could and had to do it all. There certainly is something about Americans that they were always driving forward, relentlessly in search of land that they could own, living by their own self-reliance. It was their idea of the American dream.

It's an American dream that's about to be born in fire. Just two weeks after Boone's arrival, colonial rage explodes. In the small town of Lexington, Massachusetts, it's the shot heard round the world.

And on April 19th, the battles of Lexington and Concord erupt, leaving 49 colonists dead. The first casualties in what will soon be a revolution. The rebels that were fighting were ordinary people.

They were farmers, just everyday folks that wanted freedom and they wanted liberty. And they were willing to fight for it against this great superpower. And they were willing to die for this. 400 miles west on the Kentucky frontier, that same patriotic spirit inspires Daniel Boone. He and his men are building a permanent settlement in defiance of the British crown.

Keep those nice and tight as they go up, yeah? Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Good work, boys.

At the same time Lexington and Concord is raging in the east, here is Daniel Boone and this small ragtag group of men cutting through and establishing this settlement. These seemingly disconnected events in some sense are wedded as Americans are beginning to fight for independence, you also have this process of expanding what will become the American nation.. Boone knows they're on Shawnee soil, and throughout the spring of 1775, he races to complete defenses.

Living on the frontier was extremely dangerous. Daniel Boone's own son was tortured to death by Indians a couple years earlier, and they knew that if they were going to survive, they needed to live in a fortified settlement. Well, just imagine you arrive in the woods of Kentucky. You have an axe and you have a few cross-cut saws.

Every log has got to be chopped, it's got to be sawed, it's got to be notched, it's got to be rolled. So we're talking about real hard work. After four weeks of hard labor, the fort is christened Boonesboro.

The settlement is the largest ever established on the frontier. And it quickly expands, triggering a new wave of pioneers, drawn west by the promise of owning land. America is the land of dreams. And you can just go out, and if you have your axe and your gun and some guts, alright, you go out there and maybe you're gonna get killed in the wilderness, but you got a shot at making your claim.

That did not exist in Europe. All the land was taken. It was all owned by these nobles and lords and rich guys. There was no opportunity. But in America, there was an opportunity.

Among the new arrivals at Boonesboro are Boone's wife and eight children, including his 14-year-old daughter, Jemima. Jemima Boone was Daniel Boone's favorite child. Boone took a personal hand in training Jemima as a marksman, as a woodswoman. You might look at Boone's decision to move his family into the Kentucky wilderness now and think of it as this really reckless, dangerous thing.

But I think he probably looked at it as this was his chance to have the American dream, where here's his promise of acquiring a large chunk of land, that not only that he could farm and settle, but that future generations ...creations of boons will be able to farm and settle and live off the fat of the land. By the end of 1775, the number of settlers in Kentucky has tripled, and settlements now cover more than half a million acres of land. A move that alarms native tribes, including the Shawnee. For the last century, they've been pushed relentlessly west. Now they see each new settlement as an invasion.

One they're determined to stop. In Kentucky, the Shawnees were already thriving before the arrival of Europeans. In fact, they were one of the more kind of influential, powerful people in that region.

When strange settlers began to build, lodges of their own, cabins and such, then Native people began to realize this was more of a permanent situation. This is Shawnee territory. It had to be defended. And so you go to war.

Among the most powerful Shawnee leaders in Kentucky is a war chief named Blackfish. In 1776, he decides to strike back. Blackfish was a well-known war leader of the Chillicothe group of the Shawnee Nation.

He was a very respected leader who drew people to him. From Blackfish's perspective, that land was Shawnee land. And so Blackfish believed, as many other Shawnees believed, that a definitive stand had to be made to stop losing ground to the whites.

Deep in the Kentucky wilderness, a Shawnee war party abducts three young women near Boonesboro. Among them is Daniel Boone's 14 year old daughter, Jemima. You three, with me. Ready your weapons and stay alert. Man the wall.

He's up! As Americans expand beyond the Appalachians, understandably, conflict is going to erupt between the Native Americans and these frontiersmen who have intruded upon their lands. The warning is clear.

No outsider who sets foot on Shawnee land is safe. But Jemima Boone is uniquely equipped to survive. Now Boone's daughter starts tearing little bits of fabric from her apron or dress and leaving along the trail.

So here's someone, she's getting abducted and she knows that she's gonna be taken to these distant Indian villages and possibly tortured and killed and she has the presence of mind to be leaving evidence of their passage along the way. We'll keep our distance till nightfall. Spread out.

The story of the abduction of Jemima went, as we would say, viral. Almost everything Daniel Boone did burned his reputation. He was the kind of figure around whom stories collect. Come on, come on.

People felt, how dumb could you be to kidnap the daughter of Daniel Boone? The Jemima story fits in with many stories of young women getting captured by Native Americans at the time. This was a kind of great fear and anxiety that just proliferated throughout every single colony.

The idea that we got her back thanks to Daniel Boone's heroism is the kind of reassurance for women to go out there who would of course be part of the essential building blocks of any society and that was really important. Within weeks of Boone's return home to Boonesboro, the colonies move past rebellion to revolution. When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.

In July 1776, the colonies declare independence. That among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And the United States of America is born.

It's built on the ideals of freedom and self-reliance. Values personified by frontiersmen. Within a month, copies of the Declaration of Independence reach remote outposts like Boonesboro.

When Daniel Boone gets word of the Declaration of Independence, he had to be aware that, in some sense, he was on the advance guard, the front edge of the movement for independence. Daniel Boone understood that liberty was the freedom to do exactly what he had been doing, to traverse the West, to provide for his family, to have a life independent of some dictatorial power. The colonists know the price of independence is war.

But Britain's generals have no doubt they will crush the revolution. Their plan is simple. Hit eastern cities by sea. Then send troops down from Canada to attack northern forts.

By November 1776, the British take New York. Then chase the Continental Army into Pennsylvania. Things were going very badly for the American cause.

Great Britain entered the war. We're believing that they could easily suppress us because at this point the United States military was small and generally not very efficient. And the British are the most powerful Empire in the world. They had the most powerful army. It was well-trained, well-organized.

With the Continental Army on the run, the British devise a new trap. They'll open a western front in the war by attacking settlements like Boonesboro. Their strategy relies on unlikely allies.

Consider them a gift. British allied with the Native Americans during the Revolutionary War because the Native allies were useful in terms of scouting, providing information, simply as a fighting force. Shawnees had conflict with white settlers coming into their land so they were fighting this war alongside the British.

In 1777 Britain starts arming the Shawnee and other Native American tribes to fight the settlers. In exchange, they promised to return native lands. These native people, they had no doubt what was in store for them if the Americans won.

They faced removal. On the other hand, the British promised rewards in land. Now the Shawnee and Daniel Boone are on a collision course that will help decide the new nation's future.

By late 1777, the Shawnee are British allies. Part of a strategy to open a Western front in the Revolutionary War. The British, in the time of the Revolution, they were arming Indian tribes to attack settlements.

They promised the Indians... that once they drove the settlers out of Kentucky, they could recover their territory. The British could then attack the colonies from the West. That was part of their plan to put down this rebellion.

In Boonesboro, Daniel Boone has no idea of the coming danger. And the settlement has a different problem. They're running dangerously low on salt. Salt was so important to the settlers of Boonesboro. The diet of the people was almost entirely game.

It was hunted meat. Because Indians were attacking settlers regularly, they stayed in that fort as much as possible. And there was very little farming going on.

So salt was the only way that settlers had to preserve meat. To get salt, Boone and two dozen of his men must head 50 miles from the safety of their fort to a distant river rich with mineral deposits. Today we don't really spend a whole lot of time thinking about salt.

But it was a big undertaking because they wouldn't go to the store and buy it. They would go to what they call a salt lick. And this is just a spring where the water coming up out of the spring has a high salt content.

Keep that energy up, boys! You'd have to boil down five or six hundred gallons of water to end up with a 50 pound bushel of salt. Boone and his men can extract about 500 pounds of salt a day. But they need 15,000 pounds before winter.

The work leaves them exposed in the wilderness for nearly a month. Boone and all of his men are taken by the Shawnee. The British will pay a hundred dollar bounty for each captured settler.

The Shawnees and the settlers in Kentucky were at war. And when the Shawnees discovered Boone and his men making salt, this was a sudden crime of opportunity. They took them as prisoners of war. These would have been valuable assets. First, they have to survive a brutal Native American rite called the Gauntlet.

Running the gauntlet was a test of one's strength and mettle. And the gauntlet was also a way of terrorizing your enemy. In fact, many people did not survive. Fighting as British allies, the Shawnee have captured Daniel Boone and his men. To prove his worth, Boone is forced to run the gauntlet.

Daniel Boone running the gauntlet and kind of withstanding all these hits earns him the respect of Blackfish. And he's then able to convince Blackfish not to assault anybody else. It certainly added to the legend of Daniel Boone. Boone and his men may be alive, but they're prisoners of war in a rebellion that's on the brink of failure.

By 1778, the exhausted Continental Army is in full retreat. But it can't escape the most brutal winter in a century. In the winter of 1777-1778, the British had occupied Philadelphia. Washington's Continental Army is starving and freezing to death at Valley Forge.

It's a very dark time for the American revolutionary cause. By February, 2,500 Continental soldiers die of exposure, disease, and starvation. more than double the casualties of any single battle.

Back in Boonesboro, Boone and his men have been missing for months. Most settlers fear the worst, including Boone's wife, Rebecca. Say bye to your sister.

Bye. Goodbye. Bye. The people of Boonesboro assumed the men had been killed. They had to.

But Jemima stayed after Rebecca took the rest of the family back to North Carolina. She believed that her father would come back. And she was going to be there to greet him.

Hundreds of miles from home, Boone has survived months of captivity. Now Chief Blackfish is marching Boone's men to the British stronghold of Fort Detroit. It's the central staging ground for attacks from the West. Part of Britain's plan to work with their Native American allies to crush the colonies from all sides.

The British established a major headquarters at Detroit. It became the most important fort in that region, and it was out of Detroit that they sent the militias and the supplies for the Indians to attack. That would become a front in the war.

These prisoners were valuable assets for the Shawnee. They could trade them with the British as a symbol of their support for the British side. Unfortunately, some of them actually were forced into the British military.

What's gonna happen to those men? Where are you taking them? To be questioned. Those men are not rebels. They're just hunters and farmers settled in Kentucky.

What's your name? Daniel Boone. Of Boonesborough? Yes, sir. You think that's your land?

Boonesborough has not declared loyalty to the Crown. As such, I've been ordered to take it by force. Blackfish will lead a war party to take the fort. You will go with him to help negotiate the surrender.

Please, let me... That is what's going to happen. Boonesborough is the most important frontier settlement.

If it falls, the loss could be catastrophic to the American cause. Well, you can only imagine what was going through Boone's mind. He realizes that the Shawnee are going to attack Boonesboro, facing what seemed to be insurmountable odds. Vastly outnumbered. His family is there.

So he decides that he's going to risk it all and try to escape. Zoe! Zoe!

Let's get in! Daniel Boone is on the move, making a daring escape. From his Shawnee captors, he has to warn Boonesboro that an attack is imminent.

See what the sea. Mr. Lee. Mr. Lee.

Alone on foot. Boone must cover 150 miles faster than the Shawnee or the fort will fall allowing the British and their allies to attack the colonies from the west. Because he was an expert tracker, Boone knows very well the kind of things you do if you don't want someone to follow you. So Boone would do things like step only on rocks to not leave the trail.

And you cut zigzags and circles and anything you can do to confuse your pursuer. When Boone escaped from the Shawnees, he was not prepared for a hundred mile journey. His feet blistered and bloody. Guys like Daniel Boone who are on these endurance journeys, you'd have to be in extremely good shape. That's just a testimonial to how tough these guys were.

He managed to do it in four days. In order to do that, he drew on incredible resources in his body. This is an extraordinary story. I mean, we're talking about four marathons in four days without shoes, through the wilderness, not even running on streets.

It builds on this reputation of Daniel Boone, the superhero who can do anything. BOOM! BOOM! Home for the first time in months.

There's no time to rest. The Shawnee are coming. Gather our weapons. Muskets, ammunition, gunpowder, get everything you can. Everything they needed, essentially, they had to produce themselves.

Everything they consumed, everything they drank, all the gunpowder that they used, the lead bullets that they cast, everything had to be made from materials that were at hand. Combining leftover sulfur, charcoal from the campfire, and bat dung, the settlers race to make gunpowder. It was a desperate time.

They were short of men, they were short of ammunition, sort of supplies. Yet people of Boonesboro were really a part of the defense, as it turned out, of the American Revolution. Blackfish and his 450 Shawnee warriors outnumber the people of Boonesboro seven to one. Fearing a massacre.

Boone makes a last-ditch effort to get reinforcements and sends for the local militia. They're stationed over 300 miles away in Virginia. There's no telling if they'll arrive in time or at all. Deep in the Kentucky wilderness, Daniel Boone braces for an attack.

450 Shawnee warriors are marching toward Boonesboro under British orders to capture the fort. If it falls, the blow to the colonial cause could be devastating. To understand what was going on at Boonesboro, you have to consider it in the context of the revolution.

The British were encouraging Indians to attack the Kentucky settlements. Boonesboro was the biggest one, so they felt if they could bring that down, they could probably overrun Kentucky and drive the settlers out, and then attack from the west against the colonies. Boone sent word to the Virginia militia, hoping for help.

But they're more than 300 miles away. And he has no idea if they're coming. They're here!

A force of hundreds of Indians shows up. They want to wipe Boonesboro off the map. Turn your phones! But Boone doesn't want to engage him in a fight. He's aware that Shawnee could possibly massacre them all, so he negotiates with Shawnee.

I'm coming out! I have a question for you. What is the answer to the question of the dead? Do right by her people.

Surrender and no harm will come to them. You have until sundown. I need more time to discuss it with the others. Elachi hiwa wisatuta nihita.

Oxymo kalaki. You have until sundown. Enoki! Fire at will. Even though they were vastly outnumbered by the Indians, the frontiersmen who are in Boonesboro, they used good fortifications, they had stockpiles of weaponry.

And remember, Boone and a force of just 60 settlers fight off the first attack. The Shawnee suffer heavy casualties, but Blackfish refuses to give up. The frontier story has been told many times, almost always, with the settlers as the heroes of the story. But American Indians are Americans too. Shawnee people were defending what they considered to be their homeland.

The Battle of Boonesboro is just beginning. The first major battle on the Western front of the Revolutionary War, Boonesborough, is under siege. After taking heavy casualties, Shawnee leader Blackfish changes tactics, unleashing a barrage of surprise attacks on the settlement. The Native Americans were using hit-and-run tactics, and these are quite devastatingly effective because those on the frontier feared that they could be attacked at any time, at any place. This, as in every combat, is a test of wills.

They were vulnerable and exposed. Bullets were flying. There was gun smoke, sometimes so thick you couldn't see anything. This went on day after day after day. With the fort surrounded, the settlers are trapped.

There was human waste, animal carcasses, and rotten meat laying around. Everyone's clothes are in tatters. I mean, this place is a miserable cesspool.

The only thing worse than being in here would be to step out of there and be tortured and killed. Bone refuses to surrender. The settlers stand their ground.

Attacks continue for nine straight days, but Blackfish still can't take the fort. Blackfish was in a very complicated situation there. He knew that unless Boone surrendered the fort, it was unlikely he could take it.

And in a well-built fort, with those big logs with rifles, he could not take the fort. Blackfish and the Shawnees just decided if we can't bring them over, if we can't capture them, we'll simply do whatever we can to destroy them. Stop!

Boonesborough is now a battlefield in the Revolutionary War. Armed by the British, the Shawnee mount a fierce attack. But after ten days of relentless fighting, the fort still stands. The siege of Boonesboro was terrifying for the people inside the fort. Gunfire was so loud, women were screaming, children were crying.

They knew the Virginia militia was on its way, but they didn't get there in time. So the people of Boonesboro simply assumed the fort was falling. At a very important moment, a rainstorm came and doused the flames. Had it not rained at that time, Boonesboro could have been taken. The Shawnees'attack fails.

And when a scout returns with word that the Virginia militia is coming, Blackfish has no choice but to retreat. They knew there were more men there, more rifles, more powder, more supplies, and psychologically, this was so discouraging to the Indians and Blackfish. And the next morning, they were gone. After 11 days of brutal round-the-clock fighting, the Battle of Boonesborough is finally over, securing a badly needed colonial win. It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of the victory at Boonesborough for the colonies at this time.

It was a desperate time. 1778. was a bad year for the Americans. So even this little battle and way off in Kentucky was important.

The British make a major miscalculation in dealing with Boonesboro and the American frontier. By supporting Native American attacks against the colonists in the West, that only infuriates and increases the hatred of the British in the East. This was the deepest anxiety that these English colonists had, and for the British to now just push that button, it's the height of stupidity. Just days after the Shawnee retreat......

The Virginia militia finally arrives. They've come with a new mission to escalate the war on the frontier by striking back against Britain and its allies. Their first target is Chillicothe, the home of blackfish, and an opportunity for revenge.

Boone was opposed to exterminationist raids. These raids north of the Ohio were aimed at destroying the Indian homeland. Burning villages, burning cornfields, attacking women and children, killing indiscriminately.

This was just not Boone's style. I don't know where their village is. The remarkable thing about Boone is that Boone doesn't turn into an Indian hater.

He doesn't give his life over to hate and vengeance. He still has it in him the capability to seek peace with these people. It's kind of remarkable, because I think that if most people imagine that situation, the hate would define you for the rest of your life.

I do. It's right here. North of the Ohio River. Boone's refusal to fight at Chillicothe causes a rift between him and the other settlers. Fall of 1778, Daniel and Jemima Boone leave the settlement he founded.

He goes on to join American forces fighting the British on the Western Front. And though he never again sets foot in Boonesboro, the settlement survives. And Kentucky will become America's 15th state. Boone remains a seductive figure in the American imagination. I think we all like to fancy that in those circumstances we would be that brave and that resourceful and that capable to live.

and do the things that he did. But also throughout his life, he seems to just have remained a good guy. Boone still stands out as this likable figure who treated people fairly, wanted the best for people. And he had that rugged individualism as the embodiment of American frontiersman. With Boone gone, in May 1779, Virginia's militia marches on Britain's allies, the Shawnee.

Chillicothe is home to 3,000 Shawnee. Ah! Ah! Ah! Ah!

Ah! Ah! Ah!

Ah! For the Shawnee people, the loss of a beloved leader in Blackfish was a serious event. Blackfish loomed large because of his stature and reputation as a war leader.

The loss of Blackfish was the loss of yet another hero. From those that survive, a new Shawnee hero will emerge. The adopted son of Blackfish, 11-year-old Tecumseh, who will soon rise to lead his people in the fight to reclaim the frontier.

One year after the death of Chief Blackfish, the Continental Army begins to turn the tide of the war. The success of the settlers in defending Boonesboro was just one incident in a long series of fights and battles. Eventually the French come into the conflict as the allies of the Americans. And in many ways that indeed was the turning point in the Revolution.

In September 1783, Britain signs the Treaty of Paris, formally recognizing the sovereignty of the United States of America and ending the war. People might not realize this, but the Treaty of Paris was actually signed by this new United States, the British Empire, and the French Empire. France provided troops, provided navies, and funded the American Revolution.

Britain figured France was actually its bigger enemy in the long run. So Britain surrendered pretty much all the lands west of the Appalachians to the Mississippi River to make an ally of the new United States. The new country nearly doubles in size, gaining more than 250,000 square miles of land, stretching from Florida to Canada, and from the Atlantic to the Mississippi.

The big surprise of the Treaty of Paris was that the British conceded control of the entire Trans-Appalachian West. It was an incredible bounty for the new nation. Free from British rule. American settlers race to claim their piece of the frontier.

Over the next decade, thousands of settlers flood west along the trails blazed by men like Daniel Boone. But they will soon learn a hard lesson. While the British Army had surrendered, the Native people in the West never surrendered.

Native Americans still claim this land, and Tecumseh, now grown, is about to reignite the fight for the frontier. Music Next time on The Men Who Built America Frontiersman. As the new nation pushes relentlessly west, the frontier becomes a bloody battleground. Tecumseh recognizes that if the natives are to survive, they need to band together.

Surrounded by enemies, Thomas Jefferson makes a bold move. That could cost him the presidency. The Louisiana Purchase was the greatest real estate deal in the history of the world.

He launches one of the most daring expeditions in American history. If you want to get a sense for how mysterious the western lands were to the Lewis and Clark expedition. It was as strange to them as it would be for you or me to step foot on Mars.

Then, as a new generation of frontiersmen emerges, Andrew Jackson stares down an empire. Fire!

Transcript for:Daniel Boone and the American Frontier

Transcript for:
Daniel Boone and the American Frontier