“Elbow Room“- Currently at the West End Gallery
Alone he trod the shadowed trails;
But he was lord of a thousand vales
As he roved Kentucky, far and near,
Hunting the buffalo, elk, and deer.
What joy to see, what joy to win
So fair a land for his kith and kin,
Of streams unstained and woods unhewn!
” Elbow room! ” laughed Daniel Boone.
–Arthur Guiterman, Daniel Boone
“Elbow room!” cried Daniel Boone.
This phrase always comes to my mind whenever the name of Daniel Boone or the phrase elbow room comes up.
This doesn’t come about often but it happens.
I think I must have read or heard the poem from Arthur Guiterman, whose verse is shown above, as kid. Guiterman (1871-1943) was an American poet who wrote mainly humorous verse that often dealt with those things that are lost in the rush of modern progress.
Things like elbow room.
For example, here’s his On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness:
The tusks that clashed in mighty brawls
Of mastodons, are billiard balls.The sword of Charlemagne the Just
Is ferric oxide, known as rust.The grizzly bear whose potent hug
Was feared by all, is now a rug.Great Caesar’s bust is on my shelf,
And I don’t feel so well myself.
I think knowing the Daniel Boone poem from an early age ingrained the idea of elbow room in me, that desire for wide open spaces or forests free from the encroachment of people. It certainly shows up in my work, even in the title of piece at the top. I know when I was considering a title for this painting after it was completed, that line “Elbow room!” cried Daniel Boone immediately entered my thoughts.
I don’t want to get into the reality or the myth of Daniel Boone this morning. I don’t know or care if he killed a b’ar (that’s bear, for those of you who didn’t know the old TV series and song) when he was just three though I kind of think that this particular claim might be bordering on myth. I just bring him up for his place in this poem and the idea of elbow room.
He and I share an affinity for that.
I will end with the last lines of the final verse of Guiterman’s poem on the man. In the afterlife, this poem has him frolicking among the heavens in what feels like a weird sci-fi scenario, one that made me laugh out loud when I read this poem again for the first time in probably 50 years:
He makes his camp on heights untrod,
The steps of the shrine, alone with God.
Through the woods of the vast, on the plains of space
He hunts the pride of the mammoth race
And the dinosaur of the triple horn,
The manticore and the unicorn,
As once by the broad Missouri’s flow
He followed the elk and the buffalo.
East of the sun and west of the moon,
” Elbow room! ” laughs Daniel Boone.
Old Dan Boone out hunting unicorn on the plains of outer space.
Strange and a little politically incorrect? Yeah. But that’s what you get when you mix together myth, reality and a little elbow room.
” Elbow room! ” laughs Daniel Boone.
Redtree Times 