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shot it through the heart.
    In 1750, Squire Boone sold his land to relative William Maugridge and moved south. His eldest son, Israel, had married a “world-ling,” a non-Quaker, and as a result had been “read out” of the local meeting. By refusing to criticize his son’s conduct Squire was also read out. So the family made the long trek down the Owatin Creek, through Maryland and Virginia. Plodding oxen hauled the wooden wagons for more than a year until they reached North Carolina. The Boone family built their new homes in the Yadkin Valley, a few miles west of Mocksville.
    Back in the Oley Valley, Maugridge moved on to the first Boone farm but soon landed in debt. He was forced to mortgage the property for two hundred pounds to an insurance friend in Philadelphia—Benjamin Franklin.
    Adventure in the shape of the French and Indian War (internationally, the Seven Years’ War) beckoned the young Daniel Boone, and he left home in early 1755 at age twenty. He became a wagon driver in Major General Braddock’s unsuccessful campaign to clear the French from the Ohio country. It was here that he first met volunteer Colonel George Washington of the Virginia militia. Having returned home, Boone married neighbor Rebecca Bryan a year later. On his father’s farm, like his father before him, they built a log cabin for their home.
    Victories at Quebec and Montreal in 1759 turned the war in Britain’s favor. However, a pointless conflict arose in the Carolinas between settlers and their Cherokee allies. When Cherokee warriors raided Yadkin Valley in 1759—in retaliation for British executions—the Boone family and others moved north to Culpeper County in Virginia. Boone remained to serve with the North Carolina militia, for which he traveled west across the Appalachian Mountains into Tanasi (Tennessee) country. This journey set the pattern for the rest of his life.
    Through the passes of the Alleghenies, the Cumberlands, and the Shenandoah Valley lay a great unspoiled wilderness of woods and forests, hills and plains, clear streams and broad rivers. In Britain and Europe no one had been able to step through such a door for centuries. It offered both a geographic and a spiritual freedom, though a freedom with its own particular dangers and its own requirements for survival. Boone was enchanted. Still in Tennessee today is a tree bearing the deeply carved inscription: D. BOON CILLED A. BAR ON TREE IN THE YEAR 1760. He didn’t return home for two years.
    A truce and peace was arranged between the Cherokee and the colonies in 1762; three Cherokee chiefs visited Britain, and the Boones returned to their Carolina homes. The following year, the Peace of Paris saw the end of the French and Indian War, the French being forced to withdraw from most of North America so that Canada, the American colonies, and Florida were all British.
    The Carolinas were peaceful, but a northern alliance of Native Americans led by Ottawa chief Pontiac successfully rebelled againstfurther white settlement westward. The British government saw their argument, and George III’s 1763 Royal Proclamation banned colonization west of the Appalachian Mountains. This proclamation remains today the legal baseline for Native American claims in Canada and the United States.
    Daniel Boone continued commercial hunting and trapping to feed a family that eventually numbered ten children. In winter he’d travel for many months along the riverbanks, trapping beaver and otter, then returning in the spring with packhorses laden with furs. In summer he’d farm maize and, with a single-shot musket, hunt deer for their meat and skins. The buckskins, simply called bucks, were bartered and sold for cash, so that the question was asked, “How many bucks for a pound?” Buck became slang for the pound and later the dollar. Boone and the other frontiersmen were known as Long Knives and Long Hunters.
    During these trips from