Pioneer Daniel Boone was an American frontiersman and explorer who played a major role in the settlement of Kentucky. He was born in 1734 in Pennsylvania and died in 1820 in Missouri. He is best known for his exploration and settlement of what is now Kentucky, which was then part of Virginia but on the other side of the Appalachian Mountains from the settled areas. Boone blazed the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky in 1775, and founded Boonesborough, Kentucky, one of the first American settlements west of the Appalachians.