Daniel Boone

Daniel Boone was born in Pennsylvania to a Quaker family and grew up a skilled hunter and woodsman. His family moved to the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina, and he served as a wagon driver in the French and Indian War. Fascinated by stories of Kentucky, he made long hunting trips there in the late 1760s. In 1775, working for the Transylvania Company, he led a party of axmen who cut the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap and founded the settlement of Boonesborough on the Kentucky River. The road became the main route by which tens of thousands of settlers crossed the Appalachian Mountains. During the American Revolution, Shawnee warriors captured Boone in 1778 and adopted him into their tribe, but he escaped to warn Boonesborough of an attack, and the fort held. He later served as a militia officer and state legislator, but lost most of his land in disputed claims. In 1799 he moved west to Spanish Missouri, where he hunted into old age. A popular 1784 book made him a frontier legend in his own lifetime. He died in Missouri in 1820.

Faith: Raised in an English Quaker family. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica