Relations: The Daniel Boone Connection

In every family, stories abound about famous (or infamous) members that make you wonder if they are true.  Then when you research the names or incidents, they can become sources of pride or shame, or be totally made up! 

For instance, since I was “knee-high to a grasshopper”, I’ve been told I am related through my maternal grandparents to Daniel Boone.  While it’s a true story, the relationship is not exactly direct.  Our family-kept records show that my great-grandfather married the daughter of the nephew of “Old Dan’l”.

The research I’ve done on my Batty lineage is limited, as the earliest direct lineage I can prove is a vague reference of my great-great-great grandparents, William and Elizabeth Batty, both born in England.  They were the parents of Thomas Daniel Batty, who was born in 1832 in Illinois.  He is the man who brought his family West. 

My great-grandfather, and the man who married the daughter of the nephew of the legendary Daniel Boone, was William Clinton Batty, born March 6, 1857 in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. He had a brother Fenn and a sister Effie.  Also, some half-brothers. He settled in the Palouse country in 1880, locating on a homestead near Leitchville west of Colton, Washington.  He bought land at Wawawai, Washington in the mid-1880’s, but didn’t move down there until 1893.

1893 was the year of a stock market crash and depression that wiped out everything William had except the property at Wawawai.  He had cleared some of the land through the years and had started planting a few trees before he moved there. 

The first house they lived in was a typical homestead cabin.  Boards were nailed upright to a square frame outlining the house and then another series of boards were nailed crosswise of the first providing a double thickness of timber, but no inside wall.  There were no studs as we know them in modern housing.

William married Martha Boone on December 29, 1878 at Oakland, Oregon by the Rev. P.C. Parker, Justice of the Peace.

  

My mom’s cousin June (they were born months apart and kept in touch frequently until June passed away) was a family historian and author who loved to research the family name and history.  She wrote in a letter to Mom (dated January 24, 1984):

“One thing is for sure, the Boones and Battys were pioneers in the truest sense.  When they came to Oregon in 1845, Portland had only eight houses and 1 store near the ferry.  There were no roads, no steamboats, no trains, no sawmills, schools or churches.  Oregon was the land of plenty.  Plenty of land and an opportunity to build a great West which could be claimed by the United States and made to stick because there were so many settlers eventually that no other country could see winning a war over it.  But it was raw frontier for many of those first years.  So we are truly descendant from hardy stock!

I wish I had more exciting and detail-filled stories of the fulfilled hopes and dreams and accomplishments of my Batty ancestors, but it appears that they, like so many other pioneers in early American history were a little too busy to journal their daily lives.  It is a source of pride to me that they—as well as countless other families of those times—helped to build our nation.  And they did it with humility and anonymity.