Daniel Boone Might Have Been Reburied To Another Grave

At the residence of his son Nathan Boone on Femme Osage Creek in Missouri, Boone passed away on September 26, 1820. Rebecca, who had passed away on March 18, 1813, was laid to rest next to him. The burials were close to Jemima (Boone) Callaway's house on Tuque Creek, about two miles (three kilometers) from Marthasville, Missouri, but they weren't marked until the middle of the 1830s.

The Boones' remains were exhumed and reinterred in a brand-new cemetery in Frankfort, Kentucky, in 1845. Over time, Missourians' animosity at the disinterment grew, and a rumor that Daniel Boone's remains had never left the state began to circulate. According to one tale, Boone's gravestone in Missouri was accidentally erroneously placed over the wrong grave, and the mistake had not been fixed. Disgruntled with the Kentuckians who came to exhume Boone, Boone's Missouri family remained quiet about the error and permitted the Kentuckians to dig up the incorrect remains.

Although there is no current proof that this actually happened, a forensic anthropologist speculated in 1983 that a crude plaster cast of Daniel Boone's skull created before the Kentucky reburial might be the skull of an African American. There were also black slaves interred at Tuque Creek, so it's likely that the incorrect remains were unintentionally retrieved from the busy cemetery. Boone's remains are allegedly located in the Old Bryan Farm cemetery in Missouri and the Frankfort Cemetery in Kentucky.