confessed that she had thought that Daniel was dead, and that his brother had fathered the child. Boone did not blame Rebecca, and raised the girl as his own child. Boone's early biographers knew the story but did not publish it. Modern biographers regard the tale as possibly folklore, since the identity of the brother and the daughter vary in different versions of the tale. In the mid-1760s, Boone began to look for a new place to settle. The population was growing in the Yadkin Valley, which decreased the amount of game available for hunting. He had difficulty making ends meet, and he was often taken to court for nonpayment of debts. He sold what land he owned to pay off creditors. After his father's death in 1765, Boone traveled with a group of men to Florida, which had become British territory after the end of the war, to look into the possibility of settling there. According to a family story, he purchased land in Pensacola, but Rebecca refused to move so far away from friends and family. The Boones instead moved to a more remote area of the Yadkin Valley, and he began to hunt westward into the Blue Ridge Mountains. Into Kentucky Years before entering Kentucky, Boone had heard about the region’s fertile land and abundant game. In 1767, Boone and his brother Squire first crossed into what would become the state of Kentucky, but they failed to reach the rich hunting grounds. In May 1769, Boone set out again with a party of five othersincluding John Findley, who first told Boone of the Cumberland Gapon a two-year hunting and trapping expedition. His first sighting of the Bluegrass region from atop Pilot Knob became "an icon of American history," and was the frequent subject of paintings. On December 22, 1769, Boone and a fellow hunter John Stuart were captured by a party of Shawnees, who confiscated all of their skins and told them to leave and never return. The Shawnee had not signed the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, in which the Iroquois had ceded their claim to Kentucky to the British. The Shawnee regarded Kentucky as their hunting ground; they considered American hunters there to be poachers. Boone, undeterred, continued hunting and exploring in Kentucky. On one occasion, he shot a man to avoid capture, which historian John Mack Faragher says "was one of the few Indians