[niteowl77]

My dad is supposedly a descendant of Col. Henry Bouquet; unfortunately, there is no record of Old Buckey ever marrying. Whatever the case, because of the purported family tie, I started reading up on the Seven Years War, which never interested me much as a kid.

The American frontier when it was still east of the Mississippi makes the cinematic "wild west" look positively tame.

[Inyo-Mono]

My ancestors lived on the Forks of the Yadkin River in North Carolina during the French and Indian War and were driven north to Virginia by the French and Cherokees in 1761.

The Forks of the Yadkin was also home to Daniel Boone and was the western most frontier with American settlers living there at that time. The stories I've read about the Indian attacks and hardships on the Forks of the Yadkin make the frontier of the 1870s look like a tea party.

[RightWhale]

Part of one of the states, North Carolina actually broke off from the main part of the state and made their own state, Franklin. That lasted 4 years. A lot of competing claims to unoccupied land west of the Thirteen Colonies, the Thirteen States, made for some tension between states.