Boone then gathered together five companions and set out on a hunting and exploration trip. After a long, weary march they reached the heights overlooking the plains of Central Kentucky, and observed the huge herds of buffalo and deer, and felt amply rewarded for the hardships endured in getting there.
They erected a cabin and passed a happy and busy summer hunting and exploring. A few days before Christmas the camp was broken up through the capture of Boone and a companion while out hunting. They were suddenly surprised by fifteen Indians and taken prisoners.
Boone and his companion made their captors believe they were happy in their experience and promptly accepted the Indian manner of doing things.
In the middle of the night Boone awakened his companion, grabbed their rifles and escaped.
When they arrived at their cabin it was deserted. The two men realized they were the only white men west of the mountains, but they remained and resumed their hunting.
Some days later Squire Boone, a brother of Daniel, and a friend, arrived at Daniel’s camp. The neighbor who accompanied Squire soon grew homesick and returned to North Carolina. Boone’s other companion was killed by the Indians, and only the brothers were left alone in that wilderness of Kentucky.
They hunted all winter, and in the spring Squire tramped back home for a supply of powder leaving Daniel alone. Three months later Squire returned with powder, lead, horses and the happy tidings that all was well at home.
The following spring Daniel and his brother made a trip home. A year later he sold his farm and planned to make his home in Kentucky. Several neighbors decided to join him, and soon five families, forty in all, with cattle and household goods, were tramping toward the western country.
Suddenly the men driving the cattle were fired at from ambush and six of them killed, one of whom was Daniel Boone’s eldest son. This so saddened the emigrants that Daniel Boone led them back to the Clinch River, where they remained until 1774.
Dunmore, the Royal Governor of Virginia, employed Boone to rescue a party of surveyors, and he made a round trip of 800 miles, to the Falls of the Ohio and back to Virginia in sixty-two days, bringing the men back without a mishap.