I should have known that Daniel Boone was not the first in poetry to cry the words, “Elbow room!”
Sure enough, it was not my childhood hero in the Arthur Guiterman poem titled Daniel Boone. Lo, it was more likely King John in Act V, Scene VII of William Shakespeare’s play of the same name.
Since about age 10, I have stood on hilltops and exclaimed to myself and generations of dog pals, “‘Elbow room,’ cried Daniel Boone.”
That’s a refrain from the Guiterman poem, which I think I first encountered somewhere between the third and fifth grades. But it wasn’t until age 75, the current era, that I learned Shakespeare probably wrote it first.
I’m not sure how I discovered this history of two of my most important and longest-held watchwords. I have, however, learned that Chrysti M. Smith, a Belgrade, Montana, writer, wrote about the correct Shakespeare attribution in her Chrysti the Wordsmith column for the Bozeman Chronicle on Jan. 16, 2015. (She also has a radio program: https://wordsmithradio.org/tune-in/) Maybe I read about it in her column online. I don’t know. That’s the year that I entered a chemo and radiation fog.
“Guiterman was not the first bard to use this expression” Smith the wordsmith wrote. “To appreciate the rich heritage of the phrase, we need to look back more than four centuries and examine the dialogue of Shakespeare’s 1597 play “King John.” In the final act of the drama, the dying king is carried out into the orchard, situated on the castle grounds. Breathing the fresh air, King John says, “Ah…now my soul hath elbow room.”
The next time I am expressing my soul to the wind on a mesa top, I imagine I will still be dressed in buckskins and not Venetian breeches and an Elizabethan ruff. Hopefully, I will not be laid out on a litter like King John. And there will be no coonskin cap.
The racoon sky piece with the dangling tail — although I admit owning a cheap replica as a kid — apparently is Fess Parker stuff. I have read that Boone himself preferred more conventional headgear.
Hats off, at any rate, to William Shakespeare, once again
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dream ranch 