Daniel Boone was born on November 2, 1734, under the modern calendar, in Pennsylvania’s Oley Valley near present-day Reading. He was the sixth of eleven children born to Squire Boone and Sarah Morgan Boone. His father, an English immigrant, worked as a weaver and blacksmith as well as a farmer; his mother belonged to a Welsh Quaker family. The Boones lived within a close religious community, but their farm stood near the edge of European settlement. Daniel’s childhood therefore combined the routines of a large working household with the mobility, uncertainty, and cultural contact of the Pennsylvania frontier. Boone received little formal schooling. Family tradition holds that he learned basic reading and writing from relatives, but the woods became his more influential classroom. He encountered Native people and European settlers who depended upon hunting, trapping, and knowledge of the landscape. While still young, he learned to track game, handle a rifle, and travel confidently through forests. By his mid-teens he had acquired a local reputation as an unusually capable hunter. Later stories exaggerated his youthful exploits, and some—such as the tale of his calmly shooting a leaping panther—belong more to legend than verifiable biography. They nevertheless grew from genuine skills developed early in life. Religious conflict also affected the family. Two of Boone’s older siblings married outside the Quaker meeting, bringing disciplinary action against the household, and Squire Boone was eventually expelled from the Society of Friends. In 1750 the family left Pennsylvania and moved south, reaching the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina the following year. Daniel was about sixteen. The migration exposed him to a new frontier and reinforced habits of movement and self-reliance. Before he became famous as an explorer of Kentucky, Boone had already been formed by a large Quaker-descended family, limited schooling, repeated migration, and years of practical experience as a hunter in contested borderlands.