Blood and Treasure: a well-researched and enjoyable history book

Blood and Treasure by Bob Drury and Tom Clavin focuses on Daniel Boone and his role in the fight for America’s first frontier. In the mid-18th century, the drive to conquer and settle the area beyond the Appalachian Mountains, North America’s “first frontier.” That drive would commence a series of bloody battles against the Native American tribes, the French and lastly British as the fight for independence intensifies. Drury and Clavin provide an epic narrative of Daniel Boone, as America’s first and great pathfinder, whose explorations would become legend, while tearing down the coonskin cap-wearing caricature that many Americans are familiar with. Blood and Treasure is more than just Daniel Boone’s story. It is the story of the ordinary and the extraordinary men and women, colonists and Native, who witnessed the road that led to the birth of the United States. The reader is placed in the middle of America's first frontier and the tales of courage and sacrifice that occurred there. 

I have been interested in Daniel Boone’s story ever since I discovered that his older sister, Sarah Boone Wilcoxson (1724-1815) is my 14th great grandmother on my paternal grandfather’s side. I dived into Blood and Treasure as I was eager to learn more about the man and how he became a legend. It is evident that Drury and Clavin painstakingly researched the story of Daniel Boone and the events surrounding his life. Boone was a man born with wanderlust and the perfect individual to explore the unexplored. While the information seemed overwhelming, and it took me a few days as I carefully read, Drury and Clavin are able to take a complicated history and provide a fast-paced, fiery narrative and honest depiction of the frontier. What I liked about the book is, while the main focus is on Daniel Boone, his contemporaries were allowed to have a voice and help provide a bigger picture of the events than just through Boone’s own recollections. Blood and Treasure provides a clearer picture of who these men and women really were, the good, the bad and the ugly, and not the just pedestal heroes that we have been led to know.  I highly recommend Blood and Treasure. 

Blood and Treasure is available in hardcover, eBook, and audiobook.