Daniel Boone had volunteered into the militia called up by North Carolina Governor Matthew Rowan
after war broke out between the French and British, and their respective native allies, servingunder Captain Hugh Waddell on the North Carolina frontier.

Waddell's unit is assigned to serve in the command of General Edward Braddock in 1755, and Boone acts as a wagoner, along with his cousin Daniel Morgan, who will later be a key general in the American Revolution.

In the Battle of the Monongahela, the denouement of the campaign and a bitter defeat for the British, Boone narrowly escapes death when the baggage wagons are assaulted by native troops. 

Boone will remain critical of Braddock's blunders for the rest of his life.

While on the campaign, Boone had met John Finley, a packer who works for George Croghan in the trans-Appalachian fur trade. 

Finley first interests Boone in the abundance of game and other natural wonders of the Ohio Valley.

Finley will take Boone on his first fateful hunting trip to Kentucky twelve years later.

Boone is of English and Welsh ancestry.

Because the Gregorian calendar was adopted during his lifetime, Boone's birth date is sometimes given as November 2, 1734 (the "New Style" date), although Boone used the October date.

The Boone family belongs to the Religious Society of Friends, called "Quakers", and had been persecuted in England for their dissenting beliefs.

Daniel's father, Squire (his first name, not a title) Boone (1696–1765) had emigrated from the small town of Bradninch, Devon (near Exeter, England) to Pennsylvania in 1713, to join William Penn's colony of dissenters.

Squire Boone's parents, George Boone III and Mary Maugridge, had followed their son to Pennsylvania in 1717, and in 1720 built a log cabin at Boonecroft.

In 1720, Squire Boone, who worked primarily as a weaver and a blacksmith, married Sarah Morgan (1700–77).

Sarah's family were Quakers from Wales, and had settled in 1708 in the area that will become Towamencin Township of Montgomery County.

In 1731, the Boones moved to the Oley Valley, near the modern city of Reading.

There they built a log cabin, partially preserved today as the Daniel Boone Homestead.

Daniel, the sixth of eleven children, spent his early years on what was then the edge of the frontier.

Several Lenape villages were nearby.

The pacifist Pennsylvania Quakers had good relations with the natives, but the steady growth of the white population had compelled many natives to move further west.

Boone had been given his first rifle at the age of twelve, as families depend on hunting for much of their food.

He had learned to hunt from both local settlers and the Lenape.

Folk tales have often emphasized Boone's skills as a hunter.

In one story, the young Boone was hunting in the woods with some other boys, when the howl of a panther scattered all but Boone.

He calmly cocked his rifle and shot the predator through the heart just as it leaped at him.

The validity of this claim is contested, but the story will be told so often that it will become part of his popular image.

In Boone's youth, his family became a source of controversy in the local Quaker community when two of the oldest children married outside the endogamous community, in present-day Lower Gwynedd Township, Pennsylvania.

In 1742, Boone's parents had been compelled to publicly apologize after their eldest child, Sarah, married John Willcockson, a "worldling" (non-Quaker).

Because the young couple had "kept company", they were considered "married without benefit of clergy".

When the Boones' oldest son Israel married a "worldling" in 1747, Squire Boone stood by him.

Both men were expelled from the Quakers; Boone's wife continued to attend monthly meetings with their younger children.

In 1750, Squire Boone sold his land and moved the family to North Carolina.

Daniel Boone did not attend church again.

He identifies as a Christian and will have all of his children baptized.

The Boones had eventually settled on the Yadkin River, in what is now Davie County, about two miles (three kilometers) west of Mocksville.

This is in the western backwoods area.

Because he grew up on the frontier, Boone had had little formal education, but deep knowledge of the woods.

According to one family tradition, a schoolteacher once expressed concern over Boone's education, but Boone's father said, "Let the girls do the spelling and Dan will do the shooting."

Boone had received some tutoring from family members, though his spelling remains unorthodox.

The historian John Mack Faragher cautions that the folk image of Boone as semi-literate is misleading, and argues that he "acquired a level of literacy that was the equal of most men of his times."

Boone regularly takes reading material with him on his hunting expeditions—the Bible and Gulliver's Travels are favorites.

He is often the only literate person in groups of frontiersmen.

Boone will sometimes entertain his hunting companions by reading to them around the evening campfire.