His sons and grandsons were figures in Western history, always frontiersmen, travelers. A granddaughter became the wife of a governor of Oregon. His grandson, Kit Carson, was to hold fast the family traditions on many a Western trail; but there were to be no more trails for Daniel Boone. Overtaken once more by America, once more surrounded by the civilization from which he had by choice always alienated himself, he at length lay down peacefully to his final sleep beneath the trees.
Some twenty-five years after his death, the legislature of Kentucky awakened to a sense of the greatness of this man, and to the onerous nature of that debt of gratitude under which he had placed his commonwealth. By virtue of a special enactment, the bodies of Boone and his faithful wife were moved from their Missouri home, eastward across the Mississippi River, and laid at rest in the cemetery of Frankfort, close to that original stockade where, supported by an "unwavering fortitude", there first flew the hard beset flag of the west-bound. These coffins came garlanded with flowers, heralded with music, surrounded with tardy honors. They were laid away on September thirteenth, 1845. There were effusive speeches in abundance, the chief oration being pronounced by Mr. Crittenden, "the leading orator of his time," as he is called in the chronicle. Thus at last this primeval patriarch, this Father of the Frontier, this leader of the Western home-builders, came home to sleep on the soil that was by right his own.
There was long known a tree near the Cumberland which bore this quaint inscription: "D. Boon Cilled A Bar on this tree, year 1760."
There is continual discrepancy among the historians regarding these incidents. Thus another writer states that Boone and Stewart were twice taken prisoners by the savages, but that no northward journey was made by the Indians, who simply kept the prisoners at their camps, and at length dismissed them with a warning to leave Kentucky, as it was their own hunting ground and belonged to the Indians only. Again there seems confusion in the stories of the death of Neeley and Stewart. One account is that Boone saw Stewart shot down and scalped; another states that Stewart disappeared, and that no idea of his fate was obtained until years afterward, when in a hollow tree Boone found a skeleton, near which was Stewart's powder horn, which had his name inscribed upon it.