In 1759, a conflict erupted between British colonists and Cherokee Indians, their former allies in the French and Indian War. After the Yadkin Valley was raided by Cherokees, many families, including the Boones, fled to Culpeper County, Virginia. Boone served in the North Carolina militia during this"Cherokee Uprising", and his hunting expeditions deep into Cherokee territory beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains separated him from his wife for about two years. According to one story, Boone was gone for so long that Rebecca assumed he was dead, and began a relationship with his brother Edward ("Ned"), giving birth to daughter Jemima in 1762. Upon his return, the story goes, his wife reproved him saying, "You'd had better have stayed home and got it yourself." Boone was understanding and did not blame Rebecca. Whatever the truth of the tale, Boone raised Jemima as his own and favorite child. Boone's early biographers knew this story, but did not publish it.[8]I can't say as ever I was lost,

but I was bewildered once for three days.-Daniel Boone[9]

Boone's chosen profession also made for long absences from home. He supported his growing family in these years as a market hunter. Almost every autumn, Boone would go on"long hunts", which were extended expeditions into the wilderness, lasting weeks or months. Boone would go on long hunts alone or with a small group of men, accumulating hundreds of deer skins in the autumn, and then trapping beaver and otter over the winter. The hunt followed along a network of bison migration trails, known as the Medicine Trails. The long hunters would return in the spring and sell their take to commercial fur traders. In this business, buckskins came to be known as "bucks", which is the origin of the American slang term for "dollar."[10]

Frontiersmen often carved messages on trees or wrote their names on cave walls, and Boone's name or initials have been found in many places. One of the best-known inscriptions was carved into a tree in present Washington County, Tennessee which reads "D. Boon Cilled a. Bar [killed a bear] on [this] tree in the year 1760". A similar carving is preserved in the museum of the Filson Historical Society inLouisville, Kentucky, which reads "D. Boon Kilt a Bar, 1803." However, because Boone spelled his name with the final "e", and the inconsistency of an 1803 date east of the Mississippi after Boone moved to Missouri in 1799, these particular inscriptions may be forgeries, part of a long tradition of phony Boone relics.[11]

In 1762 Boone and his wife and four children moved back to the Yadkin Valley from Culpeper. By mid-1760s, with peace made with the Cherokees, immigration into the area increased, and Boone began to look for a new place to settle, as competition decreased the amount of game available for hunting. This meant that Boone had difficulty making ends meet; he was often taken to court for nonpayment of debts, and he sold what land he owned to pay off creditors. After his father's death in 1765, Boone traveled with his brother Squire and a group of men to Florida, which had become British territory after the end of the war, to look into the possibility of settling there. According to a family story, Boone purchased land inPensacola, but Rebecca refused to move so far away from friends and family. The Boones instead moved to a more remote area of the Yadkin Valley, and Boone began to hunt westward into the Blue Ridge Mountains. [12]

Boone first reached Kentucky in the fall of 1767 while on a long hunt with his brother Squire Boone, Jr. While on the Braddock expedition years earlier, Boone had heard about the fertile land and abundant game of Kentucky from fellow wagoner John Findley, who had visited Kentucky to trade with American Indians. Boone and Findley happened to meet again, and Findley encouraged Boone with more tales of Kentucky. At the same time, news had arrived about theTreaty of Fort Stanwix, in which the Iroquois had ceded their claim to Kentucky to the British. This, as well as the unrest in North Carolina due to the Regulator movement, likely prompted Boone to extend his exploration.[13]

On May 1, 1769, Boone began a two-year hunting expedition in Kentucky. On December 22, 1769, he and a fellow hunter were captured by a party of Shawnees, who confiscated all of their skins and told them to leave and never return. The Shawnees had not signed the Stanwix treaty, and since they regarded Kentucky as their hunting ground, they considered white hunters there to be poachers. Boone, however, continued hunting and exploring Kentucky until his return to North Carolina in 1771, and returned to hunt there again in the autumn of 1772.

On September 25, 1773, Boone packed up his family and, with a group of about 50 emigrants, began the first attempt by British colonists to establish a settlement in Kentucky. Boone was still an obscure hunter and trapper at the time; the most prominent member of the expedition was William Russell, a well-known Virginian and future brother-in-law of Patrick Henry. On October 9, Boone's eldest son James and a small group of men and boys who had left the main party to retrieve supplies were attacked by a band of Delawares, Shawnees, and Cherokees. Following the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, American Indians in the region had been debating what to do about the influx of settlers. This group had decided, in the words of historian John Mack Faragher, "to send a message of their opposition to settlement…." James Boone and William Russell's son Henry were captured and gruesomely tortured to death. The brutality of the killings sent shock waves along the frontier, and Boone's party abandoned its expedition.[14]George Caleb Bingham's Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap (1851-52) is a famous depiction of Boone.

The massacre was one of the first events in what became known asDunmore's War, a struggle between Virginia and, primarily, Shawnees of the Ohio Country for control of what is now West Virginia and Kentucky. In the summer of 1774, Boone volunteered to travel with a companion to Kentucky to notify surveyors there about the outbreak of war. The two men journeyed more than 800 miles (1,300 km) in two months in order to warn those who had not already fled the region. Upon his return to Virginia, Boone helped defend colonial settlements along the Clinch River, earning a promotion to captain in the militia as well as acclaim from fellow citizens. After the brief war, which ended soon after Virginia's victory in the Battle of Point Pleasant in October 1774, Shawnees relinquished their claims to Kentucky.[15]

Following Dunmore's War, Richard Henderson, a prominent judge from North Carolina, hired Boone to travel to the Cherokee towns in present North Carolina and Tennessee and inform them of an upcoming meeting. In the 1775 treaty, Henderson purchased the Cherokee claim to Kentucky in order to establish a colony called Transylvania. Afterwards, Henderson hired Boone to blaze what became known as theWilderness Road, which went through the Cumberland Gap and into central Kentucky. Along with a party of about thirty workers, Boone marked a path to the Kentucky River, where he establishedBoonesborough. Other settlements, notably Harrodsburg, were also established at this time. Despite occasional Indian attacks, Boone returned to the Clinch Valley and brought his family and other settlers to Boonesborough on September 8, 1775.[16]

Nouns are not describing words, adjectives describe nouns. Synonyms are words or phrases that means exactly or nearly the same as another word or phrase.

Six adjectives are:

1. talented
2. fair
3. famous
4. successful
5. confident
6. long lived

Some synonyms are:

1. Woodsman
2. hunter
3. pioneer
4. soldier
5. surveyor
6. judge