There was need in Boone's case of fortitude, not only of the physical but of the moral sort. In 1792 Kentucky, which had formerly been a county of the state of Virginia, was set up as a state by itself, with courts, jails, judges, lawyers and all the appurtenances of the artificial civilization that Boone had hoped to leave forever behind him.
Then came lawsuits regarding the lapping titles. Daniel Boone, his blue eyes troubled and bewildered, found himself among the haggling officials of the law courts. It broke his heart. Stunned but not protesting, he gave up that beautiful land he had enabled all these others to find and to hold. He was old now, and had fought the main fight of his life only to find himself the loser.
He left now for the mouth of the great Kanawha, but found the hunting poor. A son of his had crossed the Mississippi River and sent back word that there was still a West, still a country where were buffalo and elk, where were otter and beaver in the streams. There was to be one more pilgrimage for Daniel Boone, a pilgrimage down the Ohio River, ending in the region, still wilderness, not far from the point that is now the city of St. Louis. Bear in mind that this latter point was not within the United States. Daniel Boone was an emigrant from the land he had founded. He was going now out from under the infant Stars and Stripes.
In token of his character, the Spanish governor of Louisiana gave Boone some sort of trifling commission. He was made commandant or syndic, an official with about the same importance as a country justice of the peace to-day. By the terms of his settlement in that country Boone was entitled to a tract of something like ten thousand acres of land. He was wrongly informed that, as he was an officer of the state, he need not settle nor improve his land. Once more a fatal mistake for the man who knew the book of nature better than the printed page.
Late in his life we find the American government, now reaching its control over this trans-Missouri country, taking up the question of Boone's tract of land and allowing him, with extreme generosity, one-tenth of that which by every right and title of justice ought to have been his own in fee simple in return for what he had done for the civilization of America. This was the poor pittance that Daniel Boone, one of the great Americans, was able to hand down to his posterity.