When Daniel was twenty-one a call came to North Carolina for men to help the soldiers of General Braddock, who had been sent by the king of England to fight the French and Indians. The English wished to keep control of the country north and south of the Ohio River. Young Boone volunteered and was in the battle of Fort Duquesne, when Braddock was defeated and killed, and when young Major George Washington led the colonial troops, who fought Indian fashion and saved a small part of Braddock’s army from being killed and scalped. This fight proved a turning point in the life of the North Carolina soldier, for he met in the ranks a scout named John Finley, who had been on a hunting trip in the wild country south of the Ohio. Finley drew a picture of this wild region that warmed the heart of Daniel Boone. One of the chief beauties there for the born hunter was that the Indians did not inhabit the country. They only went back and forth across it, so that they did not kill or scare away the game. Daniel went home to North Carolina and married a beautiful girl of seventeen, and they kept house in a cabin the young husband had built with his own hands. He lived there several years with his wife and little boy, near his father’s family. But he was restless, going on hunting trips farther and farther from home, until he had followed the game over the mountains into the region of the Tennessee River. The friend of the French and Indian War, John Finley, came to visit the Boones one fall, and they made him stay all that winter. “The call of the wild” was too strong to let Boone stay at home long after that. In the spring he and Finley, with four other men, on six horses, with bedding and a small cooking outfit on six packhorses, started off, early one bright morning, on their wonderful shooting and trapping trip. They were armed with hunting-knives, tomahawks and their trusty rifles. When they had crossed the mountains they hunted the bear, buffalo, elk, and deer, and trapped little fur animals with such success that they soon had quite a fortune in furs. As they prepared to start east with these, a band of Indians appeared on the scene, broke up their little camp, and captured everything they had. The savages spared the white men’s lives; but they made signs that they would kill them all if they found them there again, and they took Boone and another man prisoners. The rest of the party, badly frightened, took up their weary march for home, empty-handed. Boone, and his companion, when they escaped, only went far enough to make the Indians think they also were afraid; then they came back and hunted alone in all that wild region.