Memorials › LTC Nathaniel "Nathan" Boone

LTC Nathaniel "Nathan" Boone

2 Mar 1781 – 24 Oct 1856

Birth2 Mar 1781
Death24 Oct 1856
CemeteryBoone Family Cemetery
Ash Grove , Greene County , Missouri , USA
Added bycebug on 16 May 2022
FaGhttps://www.findagrave.com/memorial/9481558

Bio

Nathan Boone was born on March 2, 1781, at Boone's Station near Athens, Fayette Country, Kentucky, the youngest of 10 children of Daniel Boone and Rebecca Ann (Bryan) Boone. He attended a Baptist school for 18 months near Lexington, Kentucky, starting in 1795 when he was 14. The Boone family moved to present-day St. Charles, Missouri, in 1799. Those 18 months were his only schooling because Nathan preferred accompanying his father on hunting and trapping excursions, learning pioneer skills and surveying new lands. While the family moved westward, 18-year-old Nathan met and married Olive VanBibber, age 16, on September 26, 1799, at LIttle Sandy in eastern Kentucky. Nathan and Olive were the parents of 14 children and were married for 57 years. During the War of 1812, At age 31, Nathan rose to the rank of Captain in a company of Missouri Cavalry volunteers. His company patrolled a 2,000 square mile prairie known as the St. Charles District of Missouri, now part of the city of St. Charles, a northeastern suburb of St. Louis. After leaving the service and the end of the war in 1815, he returned home to Greene County in Missouri. There he surveyed private and federal lands and roadways being built toward the west. In 1820, Charles County elected him to serve in the Missouri Constitutional Convention. In 1832, Nathan Boone returned to service at Fort Gibson in today's northeastern Oklahoma as Captain of a Ranger Company. It was designated Company H of the 1st Regiment of U.S. Dragoons in March 1833, the first mounted regiment in the United States. In the summer of 1834, he accompanied Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Watts Kearney and Lieutenant Colonel Henry Dodge, visiting the Kiowa, Comanche, and Wichita Native American tribes in what is now southern Oklahoma. This was the first mounted military expedition in U.S. history. Conditions on the prairie were unbearably hot; many Dragoon soldiers suffered heat exhaustion and others died. Famed American artist accompanied the expedition and identified Boone as one of the leading Dragoon officers. During the spring of 1835, Captain Boone led Company H of the U.S. Dragoons on a 10-week mounted reconnaissance with two other companies into Sioux Indian territory, visiting rural lands of present-day Iowa, part of which was named Boone County in 1871 to honor him. In 1837, Boone moved his family to a new home on a farm at Ash Grove in southwestern Missouri near present-day Springfield. Today, it is the site of the Nathan Boone Homestead State Historic Site. Boone served only minimally in the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848 due to advancing age and intermittent illness. He retired in 1853 after receiving promotions to Major of the 1st Dragoons and then Lieutenant Colonel of the 2nd Dragoons. Much of the latter part of his military career was spent dealing with the problems of the Native Americans occupying lands that later became the states of Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Wisconsin. He retired after spending 20 years of service in the Army. Nathan Boone passed away on October 8, 1856, at age 75 on his farm, his final home in Ash Grove, Missouri. The United States Army's Dragoon regiments and other mounted regiments were all renamed "Cavalry Regiments" by 1861, just prior to the Civil War. Information from the original memorial. Extensive additional information from the October 2024 issue of Trail Tales, the publication of the Boone County (Iowa) Historical Society. Edited and submitted by Boone County Historical Society member Angela, Member #48520699.

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