Topic: Daniel Boone

Daniel Boone (October 22 , 1734 – September 26, 1820) was an American pioneer, explorer, and frontiersman whose frontier exploits made him one of the first folk heroes of the United States. Boone is most famous for his exploration and settlement of what is now the Commonwealth of Kentucky, which was then beyond the western borders of the settled part of Thirteen Colonies (This region legally belonged to both the Commonwealth of Virginia and to the American Indian Tribes.) Despite some resistance from American Indian tribes such as the Shawnee, in 1775 Boone blazed his Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachian Mountains - from North Carolina and Tennessee into Kentucky. There he founded the village of Boonesborough, Kentucky, one of the first English-speaking settlements west of the Appalachians. Before the end of the 18th century, more than 200,000 European people migrated to Kentucky/Virginia by following the route marked by Boone.

Boone was a militia officer during the Revolutionary War (1775 – 82), which in Kentucky was fought primarily between the European settlers and the British-aided Native Americans. Boone was captured by Shawnee Indians in 1778, who after a while adopted him into their tribe, but he later left the Indians and returned to Boonesborough in order to help defend the European settlements in Kentucky/Virginia.

Boone was elected to the first of his three terms in the Virginia General Assembly during the Revolutionary War, and fought in the Battle of Blue Licks in 1782, which was one of the final battles of the American Revolution. (Lord Cornwallis and all of his army of British troops had surrendered to Washington at Yorktown, Virginia, in mid-October 1781.)