Drawn west by opportunities for new land, Daniel Boone, his wife Rebecca Bryan, several children, and family friends moved in 1799 to Spanish-owned Missouri. At age sixty-five, Boone received a land grant along the Missouri River, but it was eventually sold to cover debts he owed to patrons in Kentucky. In Missouri, Daniel and Rebecca Boone lived primarily with their children, and Daniel spent his final days at the home of his youngest child, Nathan Boone. Surrounded by loved ones, Daniel Boone died there in 1820, three weeks before his eighty-sixth birthday. Nathan Boone, eighteen when he and his new bride, Olive Vanbiber, joined his father in Missouri, lived in a four-story limestone home constructed over seven years from 1803 to 1810, where Olive gave birth to fourteen children, most of whom grew up in the large stone house. In 1837, seventeen years after his father's death, Nathan Boone moved his family to Ashgrove, Missouri. Nathan Boone became an instrumental figure in Missouri history as a veteran of the War of 1812, a delegate to the 1820 Missouri Constitutional Convention, a land surveyor, and a businessman. After arriving in Missouri, Daniel Boone was appointed by the Spanish governor as Syndic and Commandant, giving him judicial and military authority over the Femme Osage settlers. Known as a fair and honest judge, he often held court outdoors beneath what became known as the Judgment Trees, one of which stood on Nathan Boone's property.
