Reading Boone’s Writing: Issues in Backcountry Literacy

old Daniel Boone, explorer, hunter, and surveyor, had been called to provide a statement in a land dispute, and his recorded testimony was unexpectedly literary: Saith that in the yr. 1770 I encamped on Red River with five other men, and we had with us for our amusement the History of Samuel Gulever’s Travels where In he gave an account of his young master Glumdelick, careing him on a market day for a show to a town called Lulbegrud.... Alexander Neely came to camp one night and told us he had been that day to Lulbegrud and had killed 2 Brobdignags in their capital.1 Two Brobdignags? The long hunters were intrigued by Neely’s riddle, which they finally interpreted to mean that the giants of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels were incarnated in two large buffalo which he had slaughtered down by the creek. Hence they dubbed the place “Lulbegrud ” (after Swift’s Lorbrulgrud, the capital of the giants ’ land of Brobdignag). The creek name already appears on John Filson’s 1784 map of “Kentucke, ” and Lulbegrud Creek runs into Kentucky’s Red River to this day.2 Boone’