“All you need for happiness is a good gun, a good horse, and a good wife” Daniel Boone, born on the 2nd of November, according to the old calendar, in 1734... Duchess Maria Antonia was born on Dan'l's 21st birthday over in Austria, unaware, of course, that she'd be known in France as Marie Antoinette, doomed queen, having been dispatched into political wedlock. Long many a year was born on Dan'l's 21st birthday, swell author Natalie Kinsey-Warnock, b. 2 Nov, quite a few years after that... http://www.kinsey-warnock.com/

Here, here's a bit o' me Dan'l Boone book in honor of the old Pathfinder:

AS LONG AS PEOPLE HAVE HAD EYES & MINDS, they've used them to gaze & wonder what they might see if they ventured out beyond the edge of town. But not everybody had the gumption or, in some cases, the misfortune to leave the familiar and chance the mysterious. Off they'd go, all sorts of hardy folks, into the woods, on rivers, across deserts, and over the seas. Thanks to them, we have stories, and one of the best is that of trailblazer Daniel Boone. He tramped many a mile, gathering up knowledge about young America's frontier, storing all that he learned behind his keen blue eyes.

We Americans are, on the whole, a restless bunch, descended from travelers. When ancestors of the folks Daniel Boone knew as "Indians" came east from Asia to North America, they might well have found paths made by who knows who or what. Over the ages, descendants of these prehistoric pioneers and newcomers from across the Atlantic Ocean crisscrossed the continent, tracing new trails. Old roads morphed and networked into canals, railroad tracks, city streets, and multi-lane highways where, nowadays, cars and trucks zip along at 70 MPH. We speed through the clouds in jets, thousands of feet above where beasts and people trudged through the wilds, following in the footsteps of Daniel Boone. We still do.

introduction to The Trailblazing Life of DANIEL BOONE & How Early Americans Took to the Road [National Geographic, 2007]

http://www.amazon.com/Trailblazing-Daniel-Americans-Harness-Histories/dp/1426301456/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1288716129&sr=8-1

Alden

So, according to my calendar & all of the dad-related hoohah in the paper, on the radio, greeting card racks, & elsewhere, this warm and steamy Sunday is not set aside for Errol Flynn's 101st birthday or noting that Louis & Antoinette of France tried to escape their pissed off subjects on this day in 1791,( to no avail). A quick scan tells me that the Brits, still in high imperial clover, got themselves a new monarch on this day in 1837: 18-year-old Victoria. Some years earlier, in 1756, furious Bengalis consigned 146 British prisoners to a "black hole" in Calcutta, India. Some say that 123 of the crammed-together captives died most dreadfully, crushed, too hot, no air... Some say, too, that the horrid deal was made up propaganda. Nasty. And Pancho Villa of Mexico was killed today, in 1923. My dad Raymond Harness, would've been 10 days past his 1st birthday, the first of some eighty birthdays. 'What do you want for your birthday?' we'd ask him. "Peace & quiet." I reckon he's got it now. Or not. Getting what he wanted wasn't his custom.

His father, Clarence Lee Harness, might have been home. Or not. He was a restless sort and full of sadness for his lot in life, abandoned by his own dad, Alden Harness. It's said that Clarence (Granpap, to us, a sly old fellow with peppermints in his pockets) would rather have pity than a new hat. Where did his old man get off to? California, maybe.... Alden Senior and his wife Sarah pretty much stayed put in Missouri until their deaths in the summer of 1884. What's left of them rests under a limestone obelisk in a Baptist churchyard outside of Chilhowee, Mo. And the bones of the fathers and the fathers? Beats me. I don't reckon it matters, really, any more than the long-gone queen of England.