Blood and Treasure: Daniel Boone and the Fight for America's First Frontier (CD only)

The explosive true saga of the legendary figure, Daniel Boone, and the bloody struggle for America's frontier, by two bestselling authors at the height of their writing power.
It is the mid-18th Century, and in the 13 colonies founded by Great Britain, anxious colonists desperate to conquer and settle North America’s “First Frontier” beyond the Appalachian Mountains engage in a never-ending series of bloody battles. These violent conflicts are waged against the Native American tribes whose lands they covet, The French, and finally against the mother country itself in an American Revolution destined to reverberate around the world.

This is the setting of “Blood and Treasure” and the guide to this epic narrative is none other than America’s first and arguably greatest pathfinder Daniel Boone—not the coonskin cap-wearing caricature of popular culture but the flesh-and-blood frontiersman and military hero whose explorations into the forested frontier beyond the great mountains would become the stuff of legend. Now, thanks to painstaking research by two award-winning authors, the story of the brutal birth of the United States is told through the eyes of both the ordinary and larger-than-life people who witnessed it.

The characters who inhabit this panoramic world are a mixture of the legendary and the forgotten—the young George Washington, whose violent expedition into what was then “the west” sparked the conflagration known as the French and Indian War; the adventurous Indian fighters Simon Kenton and Joseph Harrod whose names were legend across the Trans-Appalachian territory; and of course the myriad indigenous war chiefs including the fabled Tecumseh, the Mohawk leader Joseph Brant, and the Shawnee warriors Cornstalk and Blackfish, whose refusals to cede their lands to the European-Americans resulted not only in tragedy for their peoples, but set the blueprint for the white domination of the Indians that would play out as “Manifest Destiny” for a century to come.

Striding tall through all their stories is Daniel Boone, whose uncanny knack for partaking in the key moments of America’s expansion is breathtaking. Here is Boone rescuing his daughter from Indian kidnappers, a tale co-opted by James Fenimore Cooper in his best-selling “The Last of the Mohicans". And here is Boone playing a key role in the American Revolution when he and the inhabitants of his eponymous Kentucky settlement of Boonesborough repel a siege by Redcoats and their Native American allies in a British attempt to open up a western front in the war.

This fast-paced and fiery narrative, fueled by contemporary diaries and journals, newspaper reports, and eyewitness accounts, is a stirring chronicle of the conflict over America’s “First Frontier” that places the listener at the center of this remarkable epoch and its gripping tales of courage and sacrifice.