In Search of Fess Parker

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Clutching my yellow senior citizen admission ticket in my hand I entered the grounds of Fort Boonesborough, one of Kentucky’s great state parks. Age has its privileges. I hadn’t been here since I was a kid. Back then, there was another reason to venture out here: the popularity of the TV series Daniel Boone. If you’re around my age or older you know that theme: “Daniel Boone was a man, yes a big man.” And, of course, that was TV. According to the information at Fort Boonesborough, the real Daniel Boone didn’t wear a coonskin cap (“from the coonskin cap on the top of ol’ Dan to the heel of his rawhide shoes”). The TV Daniel Boone did, however, thanks to another coonskin cap hero: Davy Crockett. This time around, I was more interested in the history of my home state than searching for Fess Parker (although I did jokingly ask the lady at the ticket office if Fess (who died in 2010) was around. Of course, thanks to the popularity of that TV series (1964-70) they couldn’t overlook it, so one of the cabins had an exhibit on Daniel Boone in popular culture...including comic books, jigsaw puzzles, a 45 of the theme song, and an autographed photo of Parker as Boone. Daniel Boone helped carve out the Wilderness Road on the Cumberland Gap, opening up the frontier west of the mountains. And, as you know, things were a little more difficult back then without the ol’ Waze app on their iPhones. Part of the fascinating self-guided tour through the fort (which is based more on the TV series than real life, given the “18th-century” cabins were much bigger than the replica of Abraham Lincoln’s birth cabin a hundred miles or so away in Hodgenville) is seeing how things were done then. Cabins had well-educated craftsmen and women making candles, lye soap, spinning yarn, and a blacksmith, showing the “by hand” approach. The woman who made the soap said it was a boring, tedious process of collecting lye (a byproduct of ashes) and mixing it with animal fat (lard in the case of the soap she had made). It’s amazing how our ancestors knew this process, even if they didn’t know all the fancy scientific names for it (saponification, which she joked was pronounced as “soap on a vacation” ). The leaves haven’t started to change yet, but still the drive was great. And I found Fess Parker. Or a picture of him, anyway. More importantly, I found the real world of Daniel Boone. Here’s that theme song: