I'm fairly familiar with the history, although it's been a long time since I've read about Boone. I suspect he is famous, in part, because he happened to live through it all when so many (including a brother and two sons) died in the Indian wars. I had two major issues with the book. (1) The whole white man evil, Indian good theme that the authors harped on every chance they got was annoying. There was plenty of evil on both sides to go around, and there is simply no way that vast stretches of wilderness could have remained pristine hunting grounds for a small population of Indians. The settlement of the land was inevitable. (2) While fairly well written for the most part, the authors occasionally felt the need to consult their thesaurus and come up with some over-flowery, overly verbose sentences that clunked hard.