Close to Boone

On a mild Saturday recently, with winter budging loose at last, I felt the need to get out — out of the house, out of town, out of the usual.

An afternoon only gives you so many miles. But miles aren't the only distance. There's also time. Sometimes I manage to go backward in it. I've done it here in these counties many times.

When that desire hits, I often head "across the river" — to the Warren County and St. Charles County side, where I grew up.

The memories are deep there. And all around. It's easy to drive down a blacktop road and almost sense the rumble and dust from my childhood, when that road was gravel. Moments from my young years play on fast-forward behind my eyes. Sometimes, for an instant, deep in my ears, I hear long-gone voices.

Not "living in the past." Just taking a drive through it.

Through my personal past. The more distant past of local history is harder to get to.

On this Saturday I headed up the Femme Osage Creek valley, a stretch of farmland that's only changed a little since my first sightings of it half a century ago — and maybe only a little more since the previous century.

When I'm in that valley, I try to conjure its older days. I imagine a big iron tractor, practically a locomotive, pushing across a field. Farmers walking behind mules. Families in horse-drawn buggies passing one another, one heading into the small town of Femme Osage, the other returning home to one of the white, two-story farmhouses that still stand in the valley today.

But the images don't snap fully into focus. And they don’t come with sound. They're just fiction, not memory.

That valley is so quiet and still. I rarely see another car there, much less a person. It can feel like a place where nothing has ever happened.

I arrived at the Daniel Boone Home, the day's destination: that ghost town of old buildings gathered near Nathan Boone's stone house.

Those buildings do feel like places where things happened. You know those logs and limestone blocks didn't cut themselves. You know people once passed through those doors daily, into and out of every kind of weather. You know those chimneys were rarely idle.

But that communal circle of old buildings is partly fiction, too. The buildings were taken apart at their original sites and reassembled here. They were never a village, or at least not this village. They give me a taste of previous time, but with a tang of "re-enactment."

I know a stronger taste of the past is possible.

I joined the one-hour tour of the old Boone house itself. My guide was Dennis Leakey, a retired teacher from Wentzville. Even talking fast, he gives you the feeling he could go on for hours. The uninhabited house fills up with incident, personality, the clamor and clutter of a large family.

I looked at the staircase and imagined a white-haired man climbing it — then all but felt the boots of Daniel Boone thumping onto the same floorboards under my feet. 

I gazed at the bed he died in, placed next to a window, and thought: This little square of America was Daniel Boone's last view.

Then came the stories of Nathan Boone — Daniel's youngest son — and his wife, Olive: the young newlyweds making the long horseback trip from Kentucky, their pack horse going lame, arriving too late for the Spanish land grant they had come to claim, but managing to buy 700 acres in the Femme Osage valley for "a horse, a saddle, and a bridle." 

How Nathan cleared the land, built a house with logs, and later raised the massive stone house now called the Daniel Boone Home. How the place would have swarmed with children and work — 14 children in all, water carried three times a day from spring or creek, trees cut, stumps removed, local stones quarried and shaped.

The big house, with its large, sparsely furnished rooms, had seemed empty and quiet at first. By the end of the tour it felt packed and noisy. I felt like I'd just watched a mini-series. 

I strolled through the uninhabited village trying not to let it conjure more lives and voices, trying instead to see that stretch of open ground as woods, the way Nathan and Olive would have seen it when it first became theirs.

I came to a line of trees I thought marked the Femme Osage Creek, but an opening took me through to another field, with another line of trees beyond that. No walkway for visitors there. It felt like the backlot of a movie set, the re-created village behind me now, just pure non-fiction ahead.

I heard the creek before I saw it, heavy and constant and murmuring, like a marching regiment. Brown and almost topping its banks, drowning foliage on both sides, shoving urgently past, little whirlpools and foam piles riding the surface. While I watched, a black tree branch swam past, chin first, bound for who can say where?

The strip of woods alongside the creek was waist-deep in weeds. I stepped into them, imagining 1799, my back tingling. I saw a young couple standing in the foliage a few yards ahead, facing the creek, holding hands. I heard the woman say, "This is ours, Nathan."

A moment later I was back, standing in the weeds of today.

Another world right alongside.