Finally, however, among these hunters one arose whose wanderings were to bear fruit; who was destined to lead through the wilderness the first body of settlers that ever established a community in the far west, completely cut off from the seaboard colonies.  This was Daniel Boon.  He was born in Pennsylvania in 1734,[6] but when only a boy had been brought with the rest of his family to the banks of the Yadkin in North Carolina.  Here he grew up, and as soon as he came of age he married, built a log hut, and made a clearing, whereon to farm like the rest of his backwoods neighbors.  They all tilled their own clearings, guiding the plow among the charred stumps left when the trees were chopped down and the land burned over, and they were all, as a matter of course, hunters.  With Boon hunting and exploration were passions, and the lonely life of the wilderness, with its bold, wild freedom, the only existence for which he really cared.  He was a tall, spare, sinewy man, with eyes like an eagle’s, and muscles that never tired; the toil and hardship of his life made no impress on his iron frame, unhurt by intemperance of any kind, and he lived for eighty-six years, a backwoods hunter to the end of his days.  His thoughtful, quiet, pleasant face, so often portrayed, is familiar to every one; it was the face of a man who never blustered or bullied, who would neither inflict nor suffer any wrong, and who had a limitless fund of fortitude, endurance, and indomitable resolution upon which to draw when fortune proved adverse.  His self-command and patience, his daring, restless love of adventure, and, in time of danger, his absolute trust in his own powers and resources, all combined to render him peculiarly fitted to follow the career of which he was so fond.

Boon hunted on the western waters at an early date.  In the valley of Boon’s Creek, a tributary of the Watauga, there is a beech tree still standing, on which can be faintly traced an inscription setting forth that “D.  Boon cilled a bar on (this) tree in the year 1760."[7] On the expeditions of which this is the earliest record he was partly hunting on his own account, and partly exploring on behalf of another, Richard Henderson.  Henderson was a prominent citizen of North Carolina,[8] a speculative man of great ambition and energy.  He stood high in the colony, was extravagant and fond of display, and his fortune being jeopardized he hoped to more than retrieve it by going into speculations in western lands on an unheard of scale; for he intended to try to establish on his own account a great proprietary colony beyond the mountains.  He had great confidence in Boon; and it was his backing which enabled the latter to turn his discoveries to such good account.