Daniel boone was the son of Pennsylvania Quakers. He was a man of many talents and professions: hunter, trapper, scout, gunsmith, soldier, surveyor and Virginia legislator.

 

His actual life was more interesting and more colorful than the legends and stories about him. Though he was portrayed as a frontiersman wearing a coonskin cap, he always wore a wide-brimmed, Quaker-style felt hat.

 

Boone may be the leading trailblazer in American history. He led large groups into Kentucky in 1775 and 1779, and when he moved to the wilderness of Missouri in 1799 many Americans followed him. The road he and his sons made there became the beginning of both the Santa Fe and the Oregon trails.