Daniel Boone had returned home from the …

Years: 1758 - 1758
Daniel Boone had returned home from the Braddock Expedition and on August 14, 1756, had married Rebecca Bryan, a neighbor in the Yadkin River Valley whose brother married one of Boone's sisters.

The couple initially lived in a cabin on his father's farm.

They eventually will have ten children.

Their youngest son, Nathan Boon, will be the first white man born in Kentucky.

Boone supports his growing family in these years as a market hunter and trapper, collecting pelts for the fur trade.

Almost every autumn, Boone goes on "long hunts", extended expeditions into the wilderness lasting weeks or months.

Boone goes alone or with a small group of men, accumulating hundreds of deer skins in the autumn, and trapping beaver and otter over the winter.

The hunt follows a network of bison migration trails, known as the Medicine Trails.

When the long hunters return in the spring, they sell their take to commercial fur traders.

Such frontiersmen often carve messages on trees or write their names on cave walls, and Boone's name or initials have been found in many places.

One on a tree in present Washington County, Tennessee reads "D. Boon Cilled a. Bar [killed a bear] on [this] tree in the year 1760".

A similar carving, preserved in the museum of the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Kentucky, reads "D. Boon Kilt a Bar, 1803."

The inscriptions may also be among numerous forgeries of the famous trapper, part of a long tradition of phony Boone relics.

In 1758, a conflict erupts between the British forces and the Cherokee, their allies in the French and Indian War (which continues in other parts of the continent).

After the Yadkin River Valley was raided by Cherokee, the Boones and many other families flee north to Culpeper County, Virginia.

Boone serves in the North Carolina militia during this "Cherokee Uprising".

His militia expeditions deep into Cherokee territory beyond the Blue Ridge Mountains will separate him from his wife for about two years.

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