Daniel Boone destiny
It’s not often that Daniel Boone speaks at the Kentucky General Assembly.
Perhaps that’s why every member in the state House of Representatives gave a standing ovation to Steven Caudill, dressed as Boone, when Caudill spoke there in 2016.
“I challenge you this day,” he said. “This great commonwealth needs great leaders with integrity and high morals. Our youth need role models to look up to. Our wives and our children need us to fully step up and be everything that God has created us to be.”
Going into his 20th year portraying Boone, Caudill travels 10,000 miles a year wearing authentic pioneer clothing at 30 different events. Caudill, a Boone descendant from Winchester, tells the famous pioneer’s remarkable story and explains that many of Boone’s hopes are shared by people to this day: claim a piece of land, enjoy freedom to worship and own a place called home.
“Daniel Boone is synonymous with horses, bluegrass and bourbon,” he says. “There’s not a person in Kentucky who doesn’t know who Daniel Boone is, but it’s surprising how little we know him.”
Boone never wore a coonskin hat and did not discover the Cumberland Gap. He did lead the pioneers who built the Wilderness Road on which an estimated 300,000 settlers eventually traveled, and he established Boonesborough near present-day Winchester.
Caudill got the pioneer spirit early in life. At age 11, he portrayed a settler during the opening of Fort Boonesborough in 1974. He graduated from George Rogers Clark High School, joined the Army, attended Eastern Kentucky University and served the Winchester Police Department for two decades.
Boone is literally in his blood. One of Daniel’s brothers, Squire Jr., was Caudill’s sixth great-grandfather.
To earn his living portraying Boone, Caudill founded Daniel Boone of Kentucky LLC, which has become one of America’s largest suppliers of historically accurate colonial clothing and has provided costumes to cable shows and movies from the Pirates of the Caribbean, to Turn: Washington’s Spies to several shows on The History Channel.
Caudill says, “As the years have passed, I’ve realized this is what I was destined to do.”
