Daniel Boone? Chester Harding? Margaret Eliot White? Gene Tunney? Apocryphal?

Question for Quote Investigator: Daniel Boone was a famous U.S. pioneer and frontiersman. Boone’s hunting and tracking skills were celebrated. Boone has been credited with the following humorous response to a question about his adventures:
“During your long hunts have you ever been lost?”
“No, I have never been lost, but once I was bewildered for three days.”
I do not know the precise phrasing of this dialogue, and I have not seen a solid citation. Would you please explore this topic?
Reply from Quote Investigator: Daniel Boone died in 1820.The U.S. portrait painter Chester Harding met with Boone when the latter was approaching the end of his life. Boone posed for Harding who created the only known portrait of the frontiersman painted from life.
Chester Harding died in 1866, and near the end of his life, he gave his autobiographical notes to his daughter Margaret Eliot White. She arranged the notes and weaved them together to yield a work playfully titled “My Egotistigraphy” by Chester Harding.
In this 1866 book Harding described his encounter with Boone. Boldface added to excerpts by QI:1
He was ninety years old, and rather infirm; his memory of passing events was much impaired, yet he would amuse me every day by his anecdotes of his earlier life. I asked him one day, just after his description of one of his long hunts, if he never got lost, having no compass. “No,” said he, “I can’t say as ever I was lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.”
Harding’s estimate of Boone’s age was somewhat inaccurate. Boone died when he was 85 years old. The passage above is the primary citation supporting the ascription of the quotation to Boone. The accuracy is dependent on the trustworthiness and fidelity of Harding.
Interestingly, Boone’s use of the word “bewildered” fit the original literal definition of the word as presented in the Oxford English Dictionary:2
bewildered adjective:
Lost in pathless places, at a loss for one’s way; figurative confused mentally.
Readers have found the quotation ascribed to Boone comical because the figurative definition has largely displaced the original literal definition of bewildered in modern times.
Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.
Continue reading “Quote Origin: I Have Never Been Lost, But I Was Bewildered Once for Three Days”