Seth I, unfortunately they don't think Boone was in Kentucky at the time Audubon claimed to have hunted with him there.
Audubon would have been about 14 when Boone went to Missouri, some say never to return to Kentucky. When Audubon came to America in 1803 Boone would have been 69, in Missouri for four years already, and helping his son build the stone mansion house. As early as 1805 Boones health was reportedly failing to the extent that family wouldn't let him make extended winter hunts alone any more.
Audubon claims to have hunted with him in Kentucky about 1810, but that's just when the 76 year old Boone was supposedly feeling well enough to head up the Missouri in the company of his old Kentucky friends Stoner and Bridges, maybe all the way to the Yellowstone. In 1811 one of Astors traders recorded that Boone had indeed recently returned from a spring hunt with 60 beaver pelts. Accordingly, there's probably no way Audubon hunted with Boone in 1810 back in Kentucky then too. So says one main school of thought anyway.
Though Boones family has always denied it, another school of thought believes Boone may have returned east to see his brother Squire "near" Kentucky about that time, and that's when Audubon met him. That legend comes with its own can of worms though too, not to mention the less than accurate purely romantic description Audubon wrote of Boone and their encounter in the Kentucky woods.
Audubon did supposedly write Boone in 1813 to ask if he would go hunting with him, but Boone turned him down. Here is an excerpt of an article describing the lengths Audubon would go to in stretching a good story about himself. This regards the true back story of a painting depicting what the naturalist wanted people to believe it was like for him when he once allegedly engaged himself in the extremely dangerous pursuit of a golden eagle specimen for his collection, one supposedly captured in the wild.
The true story, however, is that Audubon didn’t capture the eagle in the wild, didn’t crawl over the precipice with his specimen. He bought it from a friend in Boston, a bird in a cage that cost fourteen dollars. Then he took it back to his hotel room, kept it in the cage for three days, and tried to kill it by covering the cage closely with a blanket, putting a pan of burning charcoal in the room, closing the door and windows tightly, and waiting for the eagle to die. It didn’t work. After a few hours, Audubon writes, he “opened the door, raised the blankets, and peeped under them amidst a mass of suffocating fumes.” There the eagle still stood, Audubon continues, “with his bright unflinching eye turned towards me, and as lively and vigorous as ever!” The next morning, to make the fumes even more toxic, Audubon added some sulfur to the smoldering charcoal, making the indoor environment a small-scale version of $#*! itself, but again “the noble bird continued to stand erect, and to look defiance at us whenever we approached his post of martyrdom.” Finally, to finish off the defiant bird and to make the martyrdom complete, Audubon “thrust a long pointed piece of steel through his heart, when my proud prisoner instantly fell dead, without even ruffling a feather.” http://commonplace.online/article/john-james-audubon/Note: The intrepid Audubon did eventually make his way up the Missouri to the Yellowstone in 1843. Despite the facts that he sat on the deck of a steam boat most of the trip and that he was nearly 20 years younger than Boone was when Daniel went up river in boats paddled by men in 1810, Audubon, great hunter though he was, complained that it was his advanced age that prevented him from successfully shooting a buffalo from horseback.
TCA
