ENOUGH!!!!!!!!!!!,
signed Daniel Boone
Daniel Boone suffered similar body-snatching shenanigans as did Will Rogers and Chief Sitting Bull, but with a twist: He appears to have ended up in two graves.
Historians agree that Boone died at his son's home near Defiance, Missouri, in 1820. History also agrees that he was buried nearby in Marthasville (about 14 mi. west), near the grave of his wife, Rebecca. But then the story gets muddled. The folks in Frankfort, Kentucky, would have you believe that Rebecca and Daniel were exhumed 25 years later and reinterred in Frankfort Cemetery. The marker near Defiance mentions the reinterment, but...
According to Defiance, Frankfort dug up the wrong body. The grave next to Rebecca's was already occupied when Daniel died, they say, so he was buried at her feet. Daniel's relatives were angry at Frankfort and didn't tell them about his true burial plot. They let Frankfort cart away the body next to Rebecca's, the body of a stranger.
Scientific scrutiny seems to support Defiance's claims. A forensic anthropologist studied a plaster cast of the skull in Frankfort's "Daniel Boone" grave in 1983 and said that it really belonged to a large black man. Frankfort, of course, pooh-poohed those allegations.
"Davey Crockett and five or six others were captured when the Mexican troops took the Alamo at about six o'clock that morning, even though Santa Anna had ordered that no prisoners be taken.
The general, infuriated when some of his officers brought the Americans before him to try to intercede for their lives, ordered them executed immediately. They were bayoneted and then shot. Crockett's reputation and that of the other survivors was not, as some have suggested, sullied by their capture. Their dignity and bravery was, in fact, further underscored by Peña's recounting that "these unfortunates died without complaining and without humiliating themselves before their torturers."
From diary of Lt. José Enrique de la Peña. Susanna Dickinson,qv wife of Almaron Dickinson,qv an officer at the Alamo, 1975
Coincidentally, a work mostly of fiction masquerading as fact had put the truth of Crockett's death before the American public in the summer of 1836. Despite its many falsifications and plagiarisms, Richard Penn Smith's Col. Crockett's Exploits and Adventures in Texas...Written by Himself had a reasonably accurate account of Crockett's capture and execution.
