Nothing could change the purpose of Boone to enter into Kentucky, and to make his home there. Although obliged from the sentiment of his friends to withdraw for a time, he looked upon the check as only a temporary one, and was confident that before long he would be firmly fixed in what he called the "land of promise."
Boone was not to be an idle spectator of the famous Dunmore War going on around him. In the month of June, 1774, he and Michael Stoner were requested by Governor Dunmore of Virginia to go to the falls of the Ohio, for the purpose of guiding into the settlement a party of surveyors, sent out some months before.
Boone and his friend promptly complied, and conducted the surveyors through the difficult and dangerous section without accident, completing a tour of eight hundred miles in a couple of months.
Shortly afterward Boone rejoined his family on Clinch river, and was there when Governor Dunmore sent him a commission as captain, and ordered him to take command of three contiguous garrisons on the frontier, during the prosecution of the war against the Indians.
Boone, who had proven his coolness and intrepidity many a time, was equally prompt in discharging the responsible duty with which the governor honored him. It is believed that the pioneer was present at the famous battle of Point Pleasant, which perhaps was the most furious contest ever waged with the Indians on Virginia soil.
The Shawanoes, Delawares, Mingoes, Wyandots and Cayugas, to the number of 1500, and under the leadership of such famous chiefs as Logan, Cornstock, Elenipsico, Red-Eagle and others, made a fight against General Lewis and his brave Virginians, not only with bravery, but with a skill which came within a hair's-breadth of annihilating the entire force of whites as utterly as was that of General Custer more than a century later.
Finally, however, the sanguinary fight terminated in favor of the Virginians, by a skillful maneuvre at the proper moment, and the savages were completely routed. Not long afterward a treaty of peace was made in which the Indians surrendered all claim to Kentucky. As the Six Nations had done the same six years before, it may be said that all the aboriginal title to Kentucky was extinguished when Boone settled there.
Dunmore's War having terminated with the utter overthrow of the combined tribes, the militia that had been called into service were discharged, and Boone returned to his family on Clinch River.
He had already become known as a hunter and explorer possessing great daring and shrewdness, and those were the days when such men were needed in wresting the Western wilderness from the grasp of the wild Indian, who was sure to fight the advancing hosts of civilization with the treacherous fierceness which the barbarian always displays in defending its young.
Boone, therefore, had been home but a short time, when he received a request from a company of North Carolinians, who proposed purchasing a large tract of land lying to the south of Kentucky River from the Cherokee Indians, to attend their treaty to be held at Wataga in March, 1775, with a view of negotiating with them, and determining the boundaries of the purchase.