During the next eight years Findlay carried on his business of trading in the interior.

Upon the opening of the French and Indian War he was probably among "the young men about Paxtang who enlisted immediately," and served as a waggoner in Braddock's expedition.

Over the campfires, during the ensuing campaign in 1765, young Boone was an eager listener to Findlay's stirring narrative of his adventures in the Ohio Valley and on the wonderfully beautiful levels of Kentucky in 1752.

The fancies aroused in his brooding mind by Findlay's moving recital and his description of an ancient passage through the Ouasioto or Cumberland Gap and along the course of the Warrior's Path, inspired him with an irrepressible longing to reach that alluring promised land which was the perfect realization of the hunter's paradise.
Thirteen years later, while engaged in selling pins, needles, thread, and Irish linens in the Yadkin country, Findlay learned from the Pennsylvania settlers at Salisbury or at the Forks of the Yadkin of Boone's removal to the waters of the upper Yadkin.
At Boone's rustic home, in the winter of 1768-9, Findlay visited his old comrade-in-arms of Braddock's campaign.

On learning of Boone's failure during the preceding year to reach the Kentucky levels by way of the inhospitable Sandy region, Findlay again described to him the route through the Ouasioto Gap traversed sixteen years before by Pennsylvania traders in their traffic with the Catawbas.