his hunting companions by reading to them around the campfire. Hunter, husband, and soldier The French and Indian War (1754–1763) broke out between the French and the British, along with their respective Indian allies, and Boone joined a North Carolina militia company as a teamster and blacksmith. In 1755, his unit accompanied General Edward Braddock’s attempt to drive the French out of the Ohio Country, which ended in disaster at the Battle of the Monongahela. Boone, in the rear with the wagons, took no part in the battle, and fled with the retreating soldiers. He returned home after the defeat, and he married Rebecca Bryan, a neighbor in the Yadkin Valley, on August 14, 1756. The couple initially lived in a cabin on his father's farm, and eventually had ten children, in addition to raising eight children of deceased relatives. In 1758, conflict erupted between British colonists and the Cherokees, their former allies in the French and Indian War. After the Yadkin Valley was raided by Cherokees, the Boones and many other families fled north to Culpeper County, Virginia. Boone saw action as a member of the North Carolina militia during this "Cherokee Uprising," periodically serving under Captain Hugh Waddell on the North Carolina frontier until 1760. Boone supported his growing family in these years as a market hunter and trapper, collecting pelts for the fur trade. Almost every autumn, despite the unrest on the frontier, he would go on "long hunts", extended expeditions into the wilderness lasting weeks or months. Boone went alone or with a small group of men, accumulating hundreds of deer skins in the autumn, and trapping beaver and otter over the winter. When the long hunters returned in the spring, they sold their take to commercial fur traders. On their journeys, frontiersmen often carved messages on trees or wrote their names on cave walls, and Boone's name or initials have been found in many places. A tree in Washington County, Tennessee reads "D. Boon Cilled a. Bar on tree in the year 1760". A similar carving is preserved in the museum of the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Kentucky which reads "D. Boon Kilt a Bar, 1803." The inscriptions may be genuine, or part of a long tradition of phony Boone relics. According to a popular story, Boone returned home after a long absence to find that Rebecca had given birth to a daughter. Rebecca