>From "Daniel Boone, Master of the Wilderness", by John Bakeless; Copyright 1939, Pages 243-245: "Early in 1780 he set off for Virginia to buy state land warrants, which had to be secured before surveys of new land claims could proceed. The original warrants of the Transylvania Company had now been worthless for some time, and all land would in future have to be held from the State of Virginia ....... Everyone in Kentucky wanted to get warrants as soon as he could." "Boone is said to have carried about twenty thousand dollars of his own money. Part of it he had raised by selling the Kentucky land he already owned to get funds to buy warrants for more land. Nathaniel Hart have him L 2946.10 .......... Many of his other friends gave him such funds as they could scrape together. Altogether he must have had in his saddle bags between forty and fifty thousand dollars. It was all currency. There was no way to get checks and bank drafts." "However skillfully he could elude the wily Shawnee, Daniel Boone was no match for the still wilier rogues of civilization. With one companion, he halted for the night at an inn in James City, Virginia. When the two men went to sleep, they carefully locked the door and placed the saddle- bags at the foot of their bed........." ".......When the two men woke in the morning the bags were gone, and the door was unlocked. Boone's papers were scattered about, his clothing had been thrown into the garden, and the saddle-bags had been dropped at the foot of the stairs." "A search of the inn revealed a little of the paper money hidden in some jugs in the cellar. None of the rest was ever found nor was it possible to identify the thief." "The victim himself always believed that the theft was planned by the landlord and actually carried out by an old woman who hid in their room before they entered and then crept out to rob them in the night. Presumably both travelers had been drugged. Otherwise it is hard to imagine why the alert woodsmen, used to waking at the slightest noise in the forests, failed to hear the movements of the thief." ******* Many years later the Continental Congress after much discussion granted "by special act of Congress, February 10, 1814" a total of 1,000 arpents of land to Daniel Boone. The award was signed by President Madison. On Page 382, Bakeless writes, "Securing the land didn't help much at that. Two or three Kentuckians who had read in the papers about the grant to Boone hurried out to Missouri. They wanted to be first with their claims. Wearily, the old man set to work to settle those demands. He sold the whole thousand arpents in May, 1815, and most of the funds thus raised must have gone to satisfy the creditors." "Last of all came another man with a clam that was too much even for the patience of Daniel Boone. Years before, in entire good faith and simply out of kindness, he had given a tract of Kentucky land to an orphan girl. Like so many of his other claims, it turned out to be worthless. Her husband arrived just after the other claimants. He wanted Boone to replace the gift land with money, after all these years. By that time Boone probably had no money left, or at least very little. It was too much. "You have come a great distance to suck a bull," said Daniel, inelegantly. "And I reckon you will have to go home dry." ***** Daniel Boone died September 26, 1820. Barbara Gill, Director The Boone Society Websites you might want to check about The Boone Society are: http://booneinfo.com/society http://booneinfo.com/society/compass1.html http://members.aol.com/BarForum/Bsociety.htm A source for information on the BOONE lineage: http://booneinfo.com/