With this poor heritage go the few incidents of a meager and in some cases uncertain personal history, the main facts of which have been given above. There is even uncertainty, or rather discrepancy, regarding the date of his death. One writer states that he died at the age of eighty-four, in the year 1818. The date of his death was really September twenty-sixth, 1820, he being at that time eighty-six years of age.
In his later years Boone kept up those practices that had endeared themselves to him in his earlier lifetime. In a mild way he was a trapper, and always he was a hunter. Even when he had passed his eightieth year he went regularly each fall in pursuit of the deer, the turkey, the elk or the furred animals, or followed his simple pastime of squirrel hunting, in which he was very expert. It was his custom on these excursions to exact a promise from his attendant that, in case of his death, his body should be properly cared for. He long kept his coffin under his bed at his home, near Charette, Missouri. Once, taken sick in camp, he marked out the place for his grave, and told his negro servant (some say his Indian friend or servant) what should be done with his body.
From this indisposition, however, he recovered, and went on several other hunts later. Failing gradually, though not from any specific disease, Boone met the great and final enemy with the same fortitude that had been with him all his life. He had said farewell to all earthly ambitions, and was ready to die when the time might come. He kept the coffin under his bed not in any bravado, but in a simple wish for complete preparedness. His personal habits remained sweet and simple as of old.
Boone seems to have wandered a little farther to the West than his home near St. Louis. It is said that he "saw the mouth of the Kansas River," and that he noted, with the impatient longing of an old man, the passing up-stream, into the mysterious Northwest, of those early parties of fur traders, the voyagers who were now heading the far Western American migration. It was now too late in the closing years. It is said that he trapped on the Kaw and the Osage, and he is said to have made one journey "up the Missouri, and to have reached the mouth of the Yellowstone", whence he was driven back by savages.