Big Muddy Speaker Series – April 2026

Daniel Boone’s Overlooked Role in American and Missouri History, presented by Ken Kamper, historian, for the Big Muddy Speaker Series, hosted in St. Charles County by Greenway Network — 7:00p.m. presentation (6:00p.m. social hour) at Bike Stop Cafe, 701 S Riverside Drive, St. Charles, MO 63301

Daniel Boone lived in Missouri for 21 years, longer than he lived in Kentucky. During Ken Kamper’s research, he found that Boone’s biographers mostly ignored 52 years of his adult life, even though those years were just as important and exciting as the 34 years in Pennsylvania and Kentucky. Boone was in the lead and marked the trails from North Carolina to Missouri, and his son Nathan marked the trails across Missouri that “everyone” followed, except a very few, for the first 50 years when America’s settlers migrated from the East Coast to Missouri. Some of what he did besides the trails turned out to be an amazing part of America’s most important early westward history. Kamper will provide a quick overview of Daniel Boone’s life and discuss his important overlooked role in American and Missouri history, as well as the vast amount of important Missouri history that’s still unknown to the public.

Ken Kamper is a retired professional engineer who spent 50 years tracking down the factual history of Daniel Boone. Kamper located most of Boone’s trails and history-related sites in the 7 states where he lived and documented Boone’s 22 home sites. He’s a former historian for the Boone-Duden Historical Society, former Historian for the Boone Family Association of California, Historian for the National Boone Society, Historian for the Daniel Boone and Frontier Research Association, and former Historian in Residence for the Historic Daniel Boone Home and Park, near Defiance, MO. In 2006 Kamper received the Daughters of the American Revolution’s Certificate of Award for Historic Preservation. Kamper is currently writing “The Boone Book” to tell the accurate and complete account of Daniel Boone’s life.