The Project Gutenberg eBook ofBoone's Wilderness RoadThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Boone's Wilderness RoadAuthor: Archer Butler HulbertRelease date: October 22, 2012 [eBook #41143]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Greg Bergquist and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file wasproduced from images generously made available by TheInternet Archive/Canadian Libraries)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BOONE'S WILDERNESS ROAD ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Boone's Wilderness RoadAuthor: Archer Butler HulbertRelease date: October 22, 2012 [eBook #41143]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Greg Bergquist and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file wasproduced from images generously made available by TheInternet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
Title: Boone's Wilderness Road
Author: Archer Butler Hulbert
Author: Archer Butler Hulbert
Release date: October 22, 2012 [eBook #41143]Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Greg Bergquist and the Online DistributedProofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file wasproduced from images generously made available by TheInternet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BOONE'S WILDERNESS ROAD ***
Transcriber’s Note:Obvious errors in spelling and punctuation have been corrected except for narratives and letters included in this text. Footnotes have been moved to the end of the text body. Also images have been moved from the middle of a paragraph to the closest paragraph break, causing missing page numbers for those image pages and blank pages in this ebook.
Transcriber’s Note:Obvious errors in spelling and punctuation have been corrected except for narratives and letters included in this text. Footnotes have been moved to the end of the text body. Also images have been moved from the middle of a paragraph to the closest paragraph break, causing missing page numbers for those image pages and blank pages in this ebook.
Cumberland Gap and Boone’s Wilderness RoadCumberland Gap and Boone’s Wilderness Road
THE ARTHUR H. CLARK COMPANYCLEVELAND, OHIO1903
COPYRIGHT, 1903BYThe Arthur H. Clark CompanyALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PAGEPreface11I.The Pilgrims of the West19II.The First Explorers48III.Annals of the Road78IV.Kentucky in the Revolution145V.At the End of Boone’s Road175
I.Cumberland Gap and Boone’s Wilderness RoadFrontispieceII.Plat of Boonesborough97III.Filson’s Map of Kentucky119
The naming of our highways is an interesting study. Like roads the world over they are usually known by two names—the destinations to which they lead. The famous highway through New York state is known as the Genesee Road in the eastern half of the state and as the Albany Road in the western portion. In a number of cities through which it passes—Utica, Syracuse, etc.—it is Genesee Street. This path in the olden time was the great road to the famed Genesee country. The old Forbes Road across Pennsylvania soon lost its earliest name; but it is preserved at its termination, for the Pittsburger of today goes to the Carnegie Library on the “Forbes Street” car line. The Maysville Pike—as unknown today as it was of national prominence three quarters of a century ago—leading across Ohio from Wheeling to Maysville (Limestone) and on to Lexington, is known in Kentucky as the Zanesville Pike; from that city in Ohio the road branched off from the old National Road. The “Glade Road” was the important branch of the Pennsylvania or Pittsburg Road which led through the Glades of the Alleghenies to the Youghiogheny. One of the most singular names for a road was that of the “Shun Pike” between Watertown and Erie, in northwestern Pennsylvania. The large traffic over the old “French Road”—Marin’s Portage Road—between these points on Lake Erie and French Creek necessitated, early in the nineteenth century, a good road-bed. Accordingly a road company took hold of the route and improved it—placing toll gates on it for recompensation. Those who refused to pay toll broke open a parallel route nearby, which was as free as it was rough. It became known as the “Shun” Pike because those who traversed it shunned the toll road.
Few roads named from their builders, such as Braddock, Forbes, Bouquet, Wayne, Ebenezer Zane, Marin, and Boone preserved the oldtime name. Indeed nearly all ourroads have lost the ancient name, a fact that should be sincerely mourned. The Black Swamp has been drained, therefore there can be now no “Black Swamp Road.” There are now no refugees and the “Refugees Road” is lost not only to sight but to the memory of most. Perhaps there is but one road in the central West which is commonly known and called by the old Indian name; this is the “Tuscarawas Path,” a modern highway in Eastern Ohio which was widened and made a white man’s road by the first white army that ever crossed the Ohio River into what is now the State of Ohio.
One roadway—the Wilderness Road to Kentucky from Virginia and Tennessee, the longest, blackest, hardest road of pioneer days in America—holds the oldtime name with undiminished loyalty and is true today to every gloomy description and vile epithet that was ever written or spoken of it. It was broken open for white man’s use by Daniel Boone from the Watauga settlement on the Holston River, Tennessee, to the mouth of Otter Creek on the Kentucky River in the month preceding the outbreakof open revolution at Lexington and Concord. It was known as “Boone’s Trail,” the “Kentucky Road,” the “road to Caintuck,” or the “Virginia Road,” but its common name was the “Wilderness Road.” A wilderness of laurel thickets lay between the Kentucky settlements and Cumberland Gap and was the most desolate country imaginable. The name was transferred to the road that passed through it. It seems right that the brave frontiersman who opened this route to white men should be remembered by this act; and for a title to this volume “Boone’s Wilderness Road” has been selected.
As in the case of other highways with which this series of monographs is dealing, so with Boone’s Wilderness Road: the road itself is of little consequence. The following pages treat of phases of the story of the West suggested by Boone’s Road—the first social movement into the lower Ohio Valley, Henderson’s Transylvania Company, the struggle of the Watauga settlement to prevent the southern Indians from cutting Kentucky off from the world, the struggle of the Kentucky settlementsagainst the British and their Indian allies, the burst of population over Boone’s Road into Kentucky, and what the early founding of that commonwealth meant to the East and to the West.
Boone and Harrod and their compatriots assured the world of the splendid lands of Kentucky; Richard Henderson and his associates of the Transylvania Company proved the questionable fact that a settlement there could be made and be maintained. Boone’s Road, opened for the Transylvania Company, made a way thither. The result was a marvelous westward movement that for timeliness, heroism and ultimate success is without a parallel in our annals. When the armies of the Revolutionary War are counted, that first army of twenty-five thousand men, women, and children which hurried over Boone’s little path, through dark Powell’s Valley, over the “high-swung gateway” of Cumberland Gap, and down through the laurel wildernesses to Crab Orchard, Danville, Lexington, and Louisville must not be forgotten. No army ever meant so much to the West; some did not mean more to the East.
The author is greatly indebted for facts and figures to Thomas Speed’s invaluable studyThe Wilderness Road, and to other Filson Club Publications, and for inspiration and suggestion to Mr. Allen’sThe Blue Grass Region of Kentucky.
A. B. H.
Marietta, Ohio, May 20, 1903.
It is impossible to come upon this road without pausing, or to write of it without a tribute.—James Lane Allen.
It is impossible to come upon this road without pausing, or to write of it without a tribute.
—James Lane Allen.
No English colony in America looked upon the central West with such jealous eye as Virginia. The beautiful valley of theOyo—the Indian exclamation for “Beautiful”—which ran southwesterly through the great forests of the continent’s interior was early claimed as the sole possession of the Virginians. The other colonies were hemmed in by prescribed boundary lines, definitely outlined in their royal charters. New York was bounded by Lake Erie and the Allegheny and thought little of the West. The Pennsylvanian colony was definitely bounded by the line which is the western boundary line of that commonwealth today. Carolina’s extremity stopped at thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes. Virginia’s western boundary was not defined; hence the West was hers.
England herself was not at all sure of the West until after the fall of Quebec; but the Treaty of Paris was soon signed and, so far as the French were concerned, the colonies extended to the Mississippi. Then Pontiac’s bloody war broke out and matters were at a standstill until Bouquet hewed his way into “the heart of the enemies’ country” and, on the Muskingum, brought Pontiac’s desperate allies, the Delawares and Shawanese, to terms.
But now, when the West was his, the king of England did a wondrous thing. He issued a proclamation in the year 1763 which forbade anyone securing “patents for any lands beyond the heads or sources of any of the rivers which fall into the Atlantic Ocean from the West or Northwest!” Thus Lord Hillsborough, British Secretary for the Colonies, thought to checkmate what he called the “roving disposition” of the colonists, particularly the Virginians. The other colonies were restrained by definite boundaries; Virginia, too, should be restrained.
Hillsborough might as well have adopted the plan of the ignoramus who, whenmethods for keeping the Indians from crossing the frontier were being discussed, suggested that a strip of land along the entire western frontier be cleared of trees and bushes, in the belief that the savages would not dare to cross the open! Yet the secretary’s agent set to work to mark out a western boundary line which should connect the western lines of Georgia and New York and so accomplish the limitation of Virginia.
But the Virginians also acted. They sent an agent of their own, Thomas Walker, to Fort Stanwix (Rome, New York) to treat with the Six Nations for some of this very western land that Hillsborough was contriving to keep them out of. For the king issued the proclamation in the interest of the western Indians (and the annuities he received when the fur trade was prosperous) who desired that the West should be preserved to them. But what could be said if Virginia purchased the Indian’s claim? Could a king’s proclamation keep the Virginians from a territory to which, for value received, the Indians had given a quit-claim deed?
This famous Treaty of Fort Stanwix was held in the fall of 1768. Three thousand Indians were present. Presents were lavished upon the chieftains. The western boundary line crossed from the west branch of the Susquehanna to Kittanning on the Allegheny River; it followed the Allegheny and Ohio Rivers southwest to the mouth of the Great Kanawha. Here it met Hillsborough’s line which came up from Florida and which made the Great Kanawha the western boundary of Virginia. Had the Fort Stanwix line stopped here the western boundary line of the colonies would have been as Lord Hillsborough desired. But Walker did not pause here. Sir William Johnson, British Indian Agent for the Northern District, who was “thoroughly versed in the methods of making profit by his office,” allowed Walker to extend the line so as to enclose Virginia’s prospective purchase; and the Tennessee River was made the western boundary instead of the Great Kanawha. Thus Johnson at once satisfied the claims of Virginia and the pride of the Six Nations, who were still anxious to prove their long-boasted possession overthe Cumberland region, as well as their sovereignty over the hated Cherokee, by thus formally disposing of the land. So everyone was satisfied—but Hillsborough. And yet the Crown was compelled, finally, to approve the Treaty of Fort Stanwix.
This treaty marks an epoch in the history of the central West, since, thereby, nearly half of it became a portion of one of the Thirteen Colonies. The other half, north of the Ohio River, remained in the possession of the Indians who inhabited it.
It is remarkable how little known that great territory was which now became a part of Virginia. This was largely because it was an uninhabited country. The territory north of the Ohio River was filled with Indian nations, some of whom had reigned there from times prehistoric. This was likewise true of the country south, where the great southern confederacies had held sway since white men came to this continent. But between these inhabited areas lay a pleasant land which any tribe would have gladly possessed had there not been so many rivals for it. Consequently it became a “dark and bloody” land wherea thousand unrecorded battles were fought by Indians from both North and South who had the temerity to come there to hunt, or by armies who were hurrying through it in search of their foes who lived beyond. No Bouquet had pierced through to the Cumberland to release prisoners who might bring back reports of the land. No missionaries had carried their “great and good” words to this battle ground of the Nations and returned with tidings of its splendid meadows and their fertility. One or two adventuresome explorers had looked there and brought back practically all that the world knew of it. But they had never visited the most pleasant portions and knew little, if anything, of its real value. And all the Indians seemed to know was that it was a bloody border-land where no tribe could hunt in peace; where every shadow contained a lurking foe; and where every inch of soil was drenched with blood.
Thus to an unknown and unoccupied border-land between the Indians of the North and those to the South, Virginia obtained, from one of its alleged possessors,a nominal hold. Could she maintain it? The world asked the question and awaited the answer, wonderingly.
The principal reason why Virginia was successful was because her inhabitants were an agricultural people like their ancestors before them in England. Being an agricultural people they had expanded further, geographically, than the inhabitants of any of the other colonies. As early as 1740, cabins were being built in Bedford County, Virginia, over one hundred and fifty miles from the seaboard. There were settlements on the New River, a branch of the Great Kanawha, before the French and Indian war. Fort Loudoun, over the border, was erected in 1756, and Forts Long Island and Chissel in 1758. The Wyoming massacre in New York State in the Revolutionary War occurred on what was then the frontier, though Wyoming was less than a hundred miles from New York City. And, fortunately, this agricultural people was located in the most favorable place along the Atlantic for expansion, for a reason already mentioned. Back of New York and Pennsylvania roamed theIroquois, Delawares, Shawanese, and other Indian nations. Back of Virginia, whose fine rivers rose in the mountains, lay a comparatively uninhabited country; for, the moment the Indians became allied with either of the encroaching European powers, they ceased contending together in the border-land behind Virginia. It was not until Virginians began to occupy it that it became anew a “dark and bloody ground.” Virginia knew less of Indian warfare than some of the neighboring colonies until the era of her expansion when her sturdy people began occupying the land obtained at the Treaty of Fort Stanwix.
The expansion of Virginia was greatly facilitated by the geographical position of the mountains along her western frontier. While the mountains of western New York and Pennsylvania obstructed expansion, in Virginia the mountain ranges facilitated it. Further north they trended directly north and south and even the rivers could find a passage-way only by following the most tortuous courses. True, the Hudson and Mohawk valleys offered a clear course tothe great highland across to the Niagara River, but it was not until very late in the eighteenth century that the path across this watershed was open to white men. The two routes through Pennsylvania crossed the mountains horizontally and almost feared to follow the waterways. Braddock’s Road crossed the waters of one stream three times at right angles in the space of eighty miles and did not follow it one hundred yards altogether. In Virginia the mountain ranges trend southwesterly, with the rivers between them, offering a practicable though roundabout route westward.
But there was another thing Virginia possessed in addition to an agricultural people—an uninhabited territory west of her and some plain courses into it. She had among her citizens some daring, far-sighted, energetic men who might easily be called the first promoters of America. They were moneyed men who sought honestly to make money; but they were also men of chivalry and intense patriotism—Virginians of Virginians. They thought of their pockets, but they alsothought of their colony and their king; the standing of the Old Dominion was very dear to them: its growth in commercial as well as geographical dimensions. They desired to be thought well of at home; they desired that Virginia should be thought the best of all America.
Of these men the Washingtons were the most prominent, and George Washington was a marvelously inspired leader. As early as 1749 Virginians secured a grant of land south of the Ohio and directly west of old Virginia. The enterprise amounted to nothing save by precipitating the contest between England and France for the West. The example of the younger Washington in fighting for the possession of the West, in encouraging the disheartened people of the frontier in the dark days of defeat, in aiding in the final victory, in investing heavily in western land (for he, it is said, died the richest man in America, and half his wealth lay west of the Alleghenies), in encouraging the building of the Potomac Canal, in impressing upon the people the commercial value of exploiting the entire West from Lake Huron to CumberlandGap, affords perhaps the most remarkable instance in our whole national history of one man inspiring a people to greater things. A place and a rough way thither was ready for expanding Virginia—and such sons as Washington gave the inspiration.
Through the great “trough” between the Allegheny and Blue Ridge ranges passes the pioneer route to which we of the central West owe as much as to any thoroughfare in America—that rough, long, roundabout road which, coming down from Lancaster and Yorktown, crossed the Potomac at Wadkin’s Ferry, and passed up the Shenandoah valley by Martinsburg, Winchester and Staunton; and on to the headwaters of the New River, where it was joined by the thoroughfare through central Virginia from Richmond. Here, near the meeting of these famous old-time Virginia thoroughfares, stood Fort Chissel, erected in 1758 and situated two hundred miles east of Cumberland Gap. Beyond Fort Chissel ran the Indian trail toward the Gap and, within fifty miles of the Gap, stood Fort Watauga on a branch of the Holston.This was the most westerly fort at the time of the Stanwix treaty, and about the rude fort was springing up the Watauga settlement. Other earlier settlements were made at Draper’s Meadows and at Inglis Ferry on New River by families bearing those names. For more than a century the population of Virginia and North Carolina had been slowly sifting up the river valleys toward the West and by the time the king’s proclamation was issued many cabins were already erected beyond the headwaters of streams which fell “into the Atlantic Ocean from the West or Northwest.” Even the faithful Hillsborough seems to have recognized this since his boundary line passed through Chiswell’s Mine on the Great Kanawha and the mouth of that river—much further west than a strict interpretation of the proclamation would allow.
This vanguard which was moving westward was led by explorers and hunters. Of two of the former, mention will be particularly made. The parties of hunters who now began to press beyond the furthest settlements, while they subsistedon game, were also real explorers of the West and helped to set in motion and give zest to the great immigration which followed the signing of the Stanwix treaty. It was only one year after the Stanwix treaty when Daniel Boone came up from his home on the Yadkin in North Carolina and led a company of men through the Gap into the land whose hero and idol he was ever to be. About the same time John Finley and party were trapping on the forbidden rivers, and Colonel James Knox and company of nine hunted on the New, Clinch, and Holston Rivers, and reaching even to the lower Cumberland in 1769-70. These parties of men found that a paradise for the husbandman was to be speedily revealed to the world at the foothills of the Cumberland and Pine mountains on the great plain falling away westward to the Mississippi. At first, only the most vague description of the rich meadows of the West reached the Virginian settlements, but, meager as they were, they started a tide of immigration quite unparalleled in American history. One of these descriptions is preserved for us in the autobiography of Daniel Boone, and, though couched in language with which he was probably less familiar than his amanuensis, still is not unlike the stories told in border cabins to eager listening frontiersmen who were soon on their rough way to this El Dorado beyond the horrid ranges of the Cumberlands:
“We found everywhere abundance of wild beasts of all sorts, through this vast forest. The buffalo were more frequent than I have seen cattle in the settlements, browsing on the leaves of the cane, or cropping the herbage on those extensive plains, fearless, because ignorant of the violence of man.... Nature was here a series of wonders and a fund of delight. Here she displayed her ingenuity and industry in a variety of flowers and fruits, beautifully colored, elegantly shaped and charmingly flavored; and we were diverted with innumerable animals presenting themselves perpetually to our view.... Just at the close of day the gentle gales retired and left the place to the disposal of a profound calm. Not a breeze shook the most tremulous leaf. I had gained the summitof a commanding ridge, and, looking around with astonishing delight, beheld the ample plains, the beauteous tracts below: On the other hand had I surveyed the famous Ohio river, that rolled in silent dignity, marking the western boundary of Kentucky with inconceivable grandeur. At a vast distance I beheld the mountains lift their venerable brows, and penetrate the clouds.”
Inspired by such descriptions as these, there came in the wake of the hunter-explorers crowds of immigrants. Very many came even bringing their families, for the novelty of the adventure and because there was nothing to keep them where they had had but a tomahawk claim on the border. There were thousands who entered the West and became valuable citizens (considering the work to be done) who would best be described as gypsies. For a larger part of the way across the continent this peculiar class of people moved westward between the advanced explorers and the swarm of genuine “settlers” whose feet, even at this time, were making the middle of our continent tremble. For instance, very many of the first settlers inthe territory near the Mississippi hailed from a portion of the land between their home there and the Allegheny mountains, just as many of the first settlers between the Ohio and Lake Erie hailed from Virginia’s land between the Ohio and Tennessee. The phrase “following the immigration” was a common one and covered this class of pioneers who moved away from a given district of land when it began to fill with settlers. There has appeared a disposition in some quarters to attempt to minimize the value of the hosts of so-called “squatters” and “tomahawk claimers” who first moved into the West. Our pioneer literature is full of discreditable allusions, made by the second tide of pioneers who came West, concerning the scattered ranks of first comers, their moral character, their ways of thought and living. The later blueblood stock had not a little to say concerning the pioneers of Western Virginia and Kentucky flavored with the same spice that Dickens employed when, a little later, he jotted down his “American Notes.” It seems as though it were reasonable toremember what these first comers did rather than the picture of what they were. But for them there could never have been a better West. Who composed the armies of McIntosh, Brodhead, Crawford, Harmar, St. Clair, and Wayne but these rough, wild-looking men who first entered the West? What is now western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Kentucky gave practically all the troops which conquered the land between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes. And all of them, save the few who could raise money to buy some of it, retired again to their slovenly “claims” south of the Ohio—and a flood-tide of newcomers came after them to bring a new era they could never have brought, and, incidentally, leave to posterity repulsive pictures of them. It hath been said: “Instead of the thorn shall come up the fir tree, and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree; and it shall be to the Lord for a name, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.” The West was a land of brier and thorn, and men as rough as briers and thorns were needed to strike the first swift hard blows. The squatter in theWest played an important part and should not be remembered solely by the pictures drawn of his filth, lawlessness, and laziness. The Cleaveland of 1798 was a paradise beside the Cleveland of 1810. Was it not Caleb Atwater who said that “not one young man, whose family was rich, and of very high standing in the Eastern States, has succeeded in Ohio?” A little later in this narrative we shall read of one “Abraham hanks” who went, an unknown pioneer, with Daniel Boone through Cumberland Gap at the very van of all the western immigration! Atwater was not referring to his grandson—the immortal son of Nancy Hanks. Theodore Roosevelt in the following words has emphasized the debt our country owes to this class of early citizens: “Nevertheless this very ferocity was not only inevitable, but it was in a certain sense proper; or at least, even if many of its manifestations were blamable, the spirit that lay behind them was right. The backwoodsmen were no sentimentalists; they were grim, hard, matter-of-fact men, engaged all their lives long in an unendingstruggle with hostile forces, both human and natural; men who in this struggle had acquired many unamiable qualities, but who had learned likewise to appreciate at their full value the inestimable virtues of courage and common-sense. The crisis [Revolution] demanded that they should be both strong and good; but, above all things, it demanded that they should be strong. Weakness would have ruined them. It was needful that justice should stand before mercy; and they could no longer have held their homes, had they not put down their foes, of every kind with an iron hand.”
With these uncouth border families moved another class of men known as land speculators. The schemes of these fortune hunters and of the many great companies of which they were the representatives would fill a moderate volume and can only be hinted at here. As we have noted, a company was organized very early to speculate in western lands, called the Ohio Company. It received from the king of England a grant of land between the Monongahela and Great Kanawha Rivers,but failed to fulfil the required conditions and the Charter reverted to the Crown. From that day to the breaking out of the Revolutionary War numerous land companies secured by one means or another a claim to certain lands and many sought such claims but never secured them. It will be necessary to refer to one of these companies later in the course of our narrative.
Near the front in this race for the rich meadows between the Ohio and Tennessee were bounty-land claimants. One of Virginia’s most effective pleas for the great territory which had come into her possession was that she might reward her soldiers of the French and Indian wars. While as a people she had known less of Indian warfare than some of the colonies, Virginia had been liberal in sending troops northward to defend the frontier. And these Virginians had made a name for themselves at Braddock’s defeat and elsewhere. Washington was always insistent that the claims of these old veterans of the bloody border war be redeemed in good lands, and it must be remembered ever with pride that as late as 1770, only six years beforehe became commander-in-chief of the armies of the United States at Cambridge, and but two years after the signing of the Stanwix treaty, he made the difficult journey to the Ohio River and down that river in a canoe to Virginia’s new empire on the Great Kanawha, where surveys of bounty lands for his heroes of Fort Necessity were first made. Additional surveys were soon made along the Ohio and Licking Rivers.
Explorers, hunters, squatters, speculators, and bounty-land claimants—this was the heterogeneous population that was surging westward to the land of which Boone wrote. But not all came down the old thoroughfare between the Allegheny and Blue Ridge Mountains and through Cumberland Gap. Many followed northward the rough trails which descended the New and Monongahela Rivers, while many went northwesterly over Braddock’s overgrown twelve-foot road or along the winding narrow track of Forbes’s Road through the Pennsylvania Glades to the little frontier fortress, Fort Pitt. From the time Bouquet relieved this beleaguered garrison until the Stanwix treaty, Pittsburg, as the town was nowknown, had been growing. One year after that treaty (1769) the manor of Pittsburg was surveyed, the survey embracing five thousand seven hundred and sixty-six acres. Upon the signing of the Stanwix treaty, Pittsburg became an important point and was claimed by both Pennsylvania and Virginia. About it sprang up villages and from it down the Ohio and up the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers settlements spread. What was loosely known as the “Monongahela Country”—the territory between the Monongahela and Ohio Rivers—became quite populous.
Here, high up along the Ohio River, the Virginians learned how to fight the red man, if they had never known before. The decade succeeding Pontiac’s war, though nominally a peaceful one, was, nevertheless, one long and bitter duel between the Indians north of the Ohio and the Virginians who were coming “in shoals” to its southern bank. It has been estimated that the total loss of life within that decade was as great as the total loss in the open war—Dunmore’s War—which soon broke out and which momentarilythreatened the extinction of Virginia’s great colonial movement into the southern half of this black forest of the West.
We have refrained from using the name Kentucky long enough, perhaps, to accomplish the purpose of impressing upon the reader’s mind the part Virginia and the Virginians played in the creation of the earliest settlement in the West, first known as the county, then the state, of Kentucky. As Professor Shaler has said: “She owes to Virginia the most of the people she received during the half century when her society was taking shape: her institutions, be they good or evil, her ideals of life, her place in the nation’s history, are all as immediately derived from her great Mother Virginia as are an individual man’s from the mother who bore him.”
The name Kentucky, Kentuckgin, Kantucky, Kentucke, Caintuck, as it was variously spelled, may have been derived from an Iroquois wordKen-ta-kee, which means “among the meadows.” When, in the olden days, only the long, painted canoes of the Iroquois could be moored in safetyin the shades of the woodland meadows south of the Oyo, the name Ken-ta-kee was first heard—a name which has come down to us so pregnant with pride and power. The Catawba River, which gained its name, perhaps, from the famous war-path which followed it toward the land of the Catawbas in the south, was first known as the Louisa River (named by Walker in honor of the wife of the “Bloody Duke” of Cumberland), and afterwards as the Kentucky River.
After the treaty at the close of Dunmore’s War, Virginia had two quit-claim deeds to her western empire: one from the Iroquois, who boasted their possession of it, and one from the Shawanese, who had disputed the settlement. There was yet another claimant to deal with, the Cherokees of the South. In the year following the battle of Point Pleasant (1774) a land company headed by Colonel Richard Henderson purchased from the Cherokees the land between the Ohio, Kentucky, and Cumberland Rivers. This purchase was achieved at Fort Watauga through the agency of Daniel Boone. This privatepurchase from the Indians was afterward annulled by both Virginia and North Carolina, but so far as the Indian claims to Kentucky were concerned it had passed into the possession of the white man. Every inch of soil had been fairly obtained from each and every claimant who had made it a “dark and bloody ground” through their battles for it, since the earliest period of recorded history. But at the time of the Cherokee purchase, an old Indian chief said to Boone: “Brother, we have given you a fine land, but I believe you will have much trouble in settling it.” Perhaps the Cherokees knew what Shawanese quit-claim deeds were worth!
After making this purchase for Colonel Henderson, Boone engaged to mark out a road through Cumberland Gap to the center of the newly acquired territory. Following the old trail through the Gap, Boone’s Road ended at a new settlement at the mouth of Otter Creek on the Kentucky River named Boonesborough, in his honor. Fort Boonesborough was completed July 14, 1775. Colonel Logan and party came westward through the Gap at the sametime but diverged from Boone’s Road on Rockcastle Creek, and opened the more important branch of the road toward Louisville by way of Crab Orchard and Danville, and erected Fort Logan one mile west of Standford, in what is now Lincoln County, Kentucky. Harrod’s, Logan’s, and Boone’s forts were the important early “stations” in the West. To them the thousands wended their tedious way over the “Wilderness Road,” as both branches (Logan’s and Boone’s) were fitly called, or down the Ohio from Pittsburg. And along these lines of western movement cabins and clearings made their rapid appearance despite the era of bloodshed which began almost simultaneously with the opening of the Revolutionary War in the East.
Such were the pilgrims of the West. It is interesting to note that these leaders of civilization in the West were true Americans—American born and American bred. It is remarkable that the discoverers of the American central West were either French or American. For the work of exploring thishinterland, England scarcely furnished aman; she can write no names opposite those of Brulé, Cartier, Champlain, Du Lhuth, Hennepin, Joliet, Marquette, and La Salle. Nearly all that England knew of the interior she learned from the French. Her great explorers were maritime explorers and her conquest of New France was effected by water. But while the West could not have for its first colonists the counterpart of the hardy, irresistible race who first came to the Atlantic seaboard, it did have the next best thing—the direct descendants of them. It was a race of Americanized Britons who pressed from Virginia into the West. Hardly a name among them but was pure Norman or Saxon. Of the twenty-five members of the Political Club at Danville, Kentucky, which discussed with ability the Federal Constitution, all but two were descendants of colonists from Great Britain and Ireland. Of forty-five members of the convention which framed Kentucky’s first constitution, only three could claim European ancestry. Of the seven hundred members of the Filson Club, the representative historical society of Kentucky today, there are notmore than twenty who are not either English, Scotch, Welsh, or Irish. The blood of the mother country flowed in purer strain in no portion of the continent at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War than in the Virginian settlement of Kentucky. That the blood was true to its fighting traditions is proved by the Revolutionary pension rolls. In 1840 there were nine hundred Revolutionary soldiers receiving pensions in Kentucky. This race gave to the West its real heroes—the Gists, Walkers, Boones, Clarks, Todds, Shelbys, Kentons, Logans, Lewises, Crawfords, Gibsons, and St. Clairs. In frontier cabins they were bred to a free life in a free land—worthy successors to Washington and his school, worthy men to subdue and rule the empire of which they began the conquest before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War. In the form of these sturdy colonizers the American republic stretched its arm across the Appalachian mountain system and took in its grasp the richest river valley in the world at the end of Boone’s Wilderness Road. That arm was never withdrawn, that grasp neverrelinquished. The leaven of old Virginia leavened the whole lump.
Thus may be outlined briefly the era of expansion in which Boone’s Road played an all-important part. In the succeeding chapters the phases of this historic movement are reviewed as the meager data now obtainable can permit.
The first real explorations of the great territory secured by Virginia at the Treaty of Fort Stanwix were made by Dr. Thomas Walker, who later so skilfully managed Virginia’s part of that treaty, and Christopher Gist, in the early years of the second half of the eighteenth century, 1750 and 1751.
The brief journals[1]written by these men are the sources of our first information concerning the vast territory west of the Appalachian mountain system—the eastern half of the Mississippi basin south of the Ohio River. They are meager records of hard day’s pilgrimages, an outline of the routes pursued, and a description of the lands which were traversed. Both wereexplorers for two newly-formed land companies. Walker represented the Loyal Land Company of London, and Gist was the representative of the Ohio Company. The company for which Walker acted had secured a grant of eight hundred thousand acres in the territory now embraced in Kentucky north of 36° 30´. The Ohio Company had a grant of five hundred thousand acres between the Kanawha and Monongahela Rivers. These men were sent to search out favorable lands and report on the giants and grapes. They found both.
Little suggestion of the romance and daring of these historic journeys can be found in either of the journals of them; they make slight books. But volumes can be written on what can be read by the most careless reader between their few lines. The long climbing over the almost pathless mountains, the nights spent in discomfort, the countless trials, fears, dangers of which they knew so much and told so little—all this should make a story if it never has, that could not by any means find an uninterested reader. No youth’s history is ofmoment until we know the man and know that he is a man among men. Our nation is still a boy. Only with the passing of the years will its boyhood be studied and known as it should be known; when that time comes, the brief stories of such men as Walker and Gist will appear of priceless value.
“Having, on the 12th of December last, been employed for a certain consideration to go to the Westward in order to discover a proper Place for a Settlement, I left my house on the Sixth day of March, at 10 o’clock, 1749-50, in Company with Ambrose Powell, William Tomlinson, Colby Chew, Henry Lawless & John Hughs. Each man had a Horse and we had two to carry the Baggage. I lodged this night at Col. Joshua Fry’s, in Albemarle, which County includes the Chief of the head Branches of James River on the East side of the Blue Ridge.” Thus begins Dr. Walker’s journal. At this time England and her colonies were dating by the old calendar, each new year beginning on the twenty-fifth of March. Accordingly they started nineteen days before the beginning of the year 1750.
It was a brave little company of adventurous men. Walker had attended William and Mary College, and then had joined the ranks of that distinguished army of representative Virginians who, with saddle-bags and surveying instruments, proved to be the vanguard of the army which was to achieve the real conquest of the West. His home was Castle Hill, near Charlottesville, Albemarle County, Virginia, where his companions had rendezvoused for the present expedition and from which point they began their historic journey. Powell was of the best Virginian stock, and has left his name to one of the great valleys through which the highway to the West ran. His son became a Revolutionary officer and his great-grandson was General A. P. Hill, the famous Confederate leader. Chew was from Orange County, Virginia, and belonged to the Maryland branch of the Chew family. Two Presidents of the United States, Madison and Taylor, could claim him as a relative. Seven years later he served in Washington’s regiment in Forbes’s expedition against Fort Duquesne, and was killed in Grant’s wild attack onthat fort. As the journal states, this company spent the first night out with Colonel Joshua Fry. Fry too was one of them in spirit, though he did not accompany them westward. He was a graduate of Oxford University, joint author with Jefferson of Fry and Jefferson’s celebrated Map of Virginia, and a commissioner for the crown in establishing the boundary line between North Carolina and Virginia. He was killed by being thrown from his horse while taking command of Washington’s expedition against Fort Duquesne, four years later. These statistics show plainly that the best brain and blood of Virginia was foremost in attempting to realize Virginia’s dream of conquest and expansion.
But it was a time for brave men to show themselves. Ambitious Virginia had been slow to claim the West, where even at this early date Frenchmen had gone so far into the wilderness. Céloron, bold emissary of the humpbacked Canadian Governor Gallissonière, was now burying leaden plates at the mouths of the rivers which emptied into the Ohio, as a sign of French possession of the West. One of these was placedat the mouth of the Great Kanawha “at the mouth of the river Chinodahihetha, this 18th day of August,” claiming for the Bourbon crown the entire territory in which the grant of land to the Ohio Company was located. There was not a moment to lose if the West was to be saved to England. A settlement must be made quickly, and Walker and his band pushed on immediately to find a “proper Place for a Settlement.”
But all this, seemingly, is neither here nor there—so far as Walker’s Journal is concerned. There is not one mention of the political crisis then at hand; instead of French claims, Walker deals with tired horses or broken-legged dogs, and where one might suppose he would mention national boundary lines he tells only of cutting names on trees. And at the end, where the reader might look for a summary statement of the results of his tour he finds this: “I got home about noon. We killed in the Journey 13 Buffaloes, 8 Elks, 53 Bears, 20 Deer, 4 Wild Geese, about 150 Turkeys, besides small game. We might have killed three times as much meat, if wehad wanted it.” Yet, so far as human interest is concerned, the record is exceptionally entertaining, and to a student of the great thoroughfare from Virginia to Kentucky it is full of meaning; because of its many references to the difficulties of traveling at that early date, and to the varied experiences of explorers on the earliest thoroughfares westward. It is this story of experience in traveling west in 1750 that makes Walker’s Journal of interest in the present study.
On the day after the party left Colonel Fry’s, “We set off about 8,” writes Dr. Walker, “but the day proving wet, we only went to Thomas Joplin’s on Rockfish. This is a pretty River, which might at a small expense be made fit for transporting Tobacco; but it has lately been stopped by a Mill Dam near the Mouth to the prejudice of the upper inhabitants who would at their own expense clear and make it navigable, were they permitted.” Virginia’s great industry evidently flourished this far from tidewater even at this early date, though handicapped by these dams which were erected by the “Averice of Millers,” onwhich Dr. Walker comments again in his next day’s record. The record for Sunday, the eleventh, is appropriately brief: “11th. The Sabbath.” In only one or two instances did the party travel on Sunday, and then the journey was occasioned by necessity. On the twelfth the party crossed the Upper James River above the mouth of the Rivanna, and lodged with one Thomas Hunt.
“13th. We went early to William Calloway’s and supplied ourselves with Rum, Thread, and other necessaries & from thence took the main Waggon Road leading to Wood’s or the New River. It is not well clear’d or beaten yet, but will be a very good one with proper management.” Wood’s River—or New River, as we know it today—was discovered in 1671 by Colonel Abraham Wood, who explored along the line which later became the boundary line between North Carolina and Virginia. He crossed the Alleghenies through “Wood’s Gap” (now Flower Gap) and, going down Little River, found New River not far from Inglis Ferry, where Walker’s party crossed three days later. This mention of the roadWalker traversed is his first reference to the great road westward toward Cumberland Gap; he remarks its roughness, but before he returned to Virginia he learned new lessons on rough roads. “This night we lodged in Adam Beards low grounds. Beard is an ignorant, impudent, brutish fellow, and would have taken us up, had it not been for a reason, easily suggested.” When thus brought in contrast with the hospitality usually tendered Walker’s party, the deportment of this churlish mountaineer is conspicuous. Travelers on these first highways were ever in need—if for nothing more than a camping-place. The people who settled beside the frontier roads were trained by bitter experience to a generous hospitality. This hospitality was particularly marked, throughout the colonies, among those who could afford it, especially on the frontiers; and here it was often bestowed upon travelers when it could be ill-afforded. The modern hotel has in a large measure relieved the general public from the burden of continual and promiscuous hospitality, and it has been found that where hotels are least knownthis prime requisite of an expanding civilization may still be found. On the frontier, men were dependent on those who lived beside the road, not only in time of accident and sickness, but at all times—for little food and forage could be carried. At times travelers nearly perished when once beyond the frontier line. Walker’s party, though they killed the large amount of game mentioned, were once compelled to kill and eat one of their dogs. Captain Estill, who lost his life in Kentucky in the engagement which bears his name, is said to have done a great service for emigrants from Virginia by killing game and leaving the meat beside the road, in order to “pass on and notify incoming trains where they might find a supply of meat.”
Instances of vile treatment of travelers are not often cited, but the few that exist are the exceptions that prove the rule of generosity which was common to the time.
Leaving Beard’s, Walker and his men went, on the fourteenth, to Nicholas Welch’s, “where,” the Doctor writes, “we bought corn for our horses, and had some Victuals dress’d for Breakfast.” From here theyclimbed the Blue Ridge through Buford’s Gap, in Bedford County, through which the Norfolk and Western Railroad now passes. “The Ascent and Descent is so easie,” writes Walker, “that a Stranger would not know when he crossed the Ridge.” On the day after, they reached “the great Lick” near the present city of Roanoke, and continued up the trail on the following day to near the historic Inglis Ferry, not far from the present village of Blacksburg, Montgomery County, Virginia.
From this on, Walker’s route is not of importance to our study, as he missed the great trail which would have taken him to the pleasant meadows of Kentucky—though he struck it again at Cumberland Gap but did not follow it—and wandered over a circuitous route thus outlined by Daniel Bryan: “They started from low down in Virginia, traveled westwardly across Alleghany Mountains to Chissel’s Lead Mine, on New River; thence into the Holston Valley, thence over Walden’s Ridge and Powell’s Mountain into Powell’s Valley.... They then continued down the valley, leaving Cumberland Mountaina small distance on their right hand, until they came to Cumberland Gap.... At the foot of this mountain they fell into an Indian path leading from the Cherokee towns on Tennessee River to the Shawnee Indian towns on the Ohio, which path they followed down Yellow Creek to the old ford of Cumberland River.... Thence they went on the path down the river to the Flat Lick, eight miles; here they left the river, continued on the path, turning more north, crossing some of the head branches of the Kentucky River over a poor and hilly country, until they concluded there was no good country in the West. They then took an easterly course over the worst mountains and laurel thickets in the world.... They crossed the Laurel or Cumberland Mountain and fell into the Green brier country, almost starved to death ... and reached home with life only to pay for all their trouble and suffering.”
Regretting that this opinion of the final value of Walker’s journey cannot be gainsaid, it is yet of interest to follow his footsteps and learn what were some of theexperiences of such early explorers as these.
On the twenty-sixth they “left the Inhabitans,” as Dr. Walker called the line of civilization, and were at last within the wild land where no settlers had yet come. On the night of the twenty-ninth the “Dogs were very uneasie,” and the next day, on Reedy Creek, a branch of the South Fork of the Holston, the tracks of a party of Indians were discovered, which explained the restlessness of the dogs. It is probably little realized in this day how valuable dogs were to explorers and immigrants. They were not only of service in giving warning of the approach of strangers, but were well-nigh indispensable in securing game and in searching for lost horses. Dr. Walker’s love for dogs is a tradition in the family, and his care of them on this journey is typical of the gentleman and the wise frontiersman. At the junction of Reedy Creek and the Holston—an historic spot in Tennessee—Walker found a gigantic elm tree, which measured twenty-five feet in circumference at a distance of three feet from the ground. Pioneersand explorers considered the study of trees a fine art. By this means they always judged the quality of the soil, and knew at a glance by the growth that stood on it the character of any piece of land. The diaries of all that old school of western adventurers contain frequent mention of trees which were an almost infallible criterion of the soil beneath. Washington had keen eyes for trees—as for everything else—as illustrated in the journal of his trip down the Ohio River in 1770. On the fourth of November he found a sycamore on the Great Kanawha, in comparison with which this first elm of Walker’s was insignificant. It measured, three feet from the ground, forty-five feet in circumference, and near by stood another measuring thirty-one feet around. Upon hearing about this larger tree, some one remarked that Washington might have told the truth about the cherry tree but he told a “whopper” about the sycamore. But it was not guess-work, for the record states clearly that the girth of the larger tree lacked two inches of being the complete forty-five feet. Trees along the Ohio grew to an immense size; an oldOhio River pilot affirms that in his boyhood a burned trunk of a sycamore stood on his father’s farm on the Little Muskingum, into which he has frequently driven a horse, turned it about, and come out again. General Harmar found on the Ohio a button-wood tree forty-two feet in circumference, which held forty men within its trunk.
On the seventh of April Dr. Walker writes: “It snowed most of the day. In the Evening our dogs caught a large He Bear, which before we could come up to shoot him had wounded a dog of mine, so that he could not Travel, and we carried him on Horseback, till he recovered.” On the thirteenth the party reached “Cave Gap,” which Walker named Cumberland Gap in honor of the “bloody Duke,” the hero of Culloden. “Just at the foot of the Hill is a Laurel Thicket.... On the South side is a plain Indian Road. On the top of the Ridge are Laurel Trees marked with crosses, others Blazed and several Figures on them.... This Gap may be seen at a considerable distance, and there is no other, that I know of, except one about two miles to the North of it, whichdoes not appear to be so low as the other. The Mountain on the North Side of the Gap is very Steep and Rocky, but on the South side it is not So. We called it Steep Ridge.”
The party crossed the Cumberland River about four miles below the present village of Barbourville, Knox County, Kentucky, on the twenty-third of April. The river was named by Walker at this time. From this spot Walker, with two companions chosen by lot—Powell and Chew—went on a tour of exploration alone, leaving the others “to provide and salt some Bear, build an house, and plant some Peach Stones and Corn.”
Walker and his two companions floundered about the neighboring region for five days, not getting out of the mountainous country and not finding any good land. They crossed the Cumberland again, on the third day out, about twenty miles below the first crossing-place, and then returned up the river to the main party and found that the work he had ordered to be done was completed. “The People I had left had built an House 12 by 8, clear’d andbroke up some ground, & planted Corn, and Peach Stones.”
Thus was raised, beside the tumbling Cumberland, on the farm now owned by George M. Faulkner four miles below Barbourville, Kentucky, the first house now recorded as built by white men in the fine territory between the Cumberland Mountains and the Ohio River, now the state of Kentucky. It was not an “improver’s cabin”—a log pen without roof—but a roofed house, and instituted what the English Loyal Land Company could claim to be a “settlement” in the territory which they had been granted. This was completed by the planting of corn and peach trees. The formality of this “settlement” is evinced by the fact that, two days later, the entire party moved on for further exploration, never again to return to their house or to reap their crops. It was twenty years before a house was erected in Kentucky for the permanent dwelling.
From this on, Dr. Walker’s journal is a long story of accidents and disappointments. One horse became lame, and “another had been bit in the Nose by a Snake.” “I rub’d the wounds with Bear’s oil, and gave him a drench of the same and another of the decoction of Rattle Snake root some time after.” On the same day “Colby Chew and his Horse fell down the Bank. I Bled and gave him Volatile drops, & he soon recovered.” On the first of May they reached Powell’s River. This was named from Ambrose Powell. During the journey Dr. Walker gave the name of each of his companions to rivers he discovered; none were given his name, though a mountain range to the north of Fort Chiswell still bears the name of Walker’s Mountain. On Powell’s River the party this day again struck the Indian path which later became the great highway to Kentucky. Again he was on the route that would have taken him to the famous meadows below the foothills of the mountains, and again he left it as he did when he chose to explore on the south side of Cumberland Mountain, instead of crossing at Pineville and following the trail northward. He did not cross Rockcastle River. J. Stoddard Johnson says: “This was the farthest western point reached by Doctor Walker. He did notcross the main Rockcastle River, and, therefore, was never on the waters of Salt or Green rivers, as claimed by some. A day or two’s travel to the west or northwest would have brought him to the fertile lands of Lincoln or Madison County, his description of which would have left no doubt of his having passed the watershed between the Rockcastle, the Salt, and the rivers to the westward.”[2]
Shoes formed an important item in the catalogue of necessaries for the early traveler’s outfit on the first traveled ways in America. Already Walker’s party, though they traveled largely by horse, had worn out the shoes with which they started, and on the eleventh of May under one of the great cliffs near Rockcastle River they set to work to make themselves new shoes out of elkskin. “When our Elk’s Skin was prepared,” writes Dr. Walker on the fourteenth, “we had lost every Awl that we brought out, and I made one with the Shank of an old Fishing hook, the other People made two of Horse Shoe Nails, and withthese we made our Shoes and Moccosons.”
On the twenty-third the party was on the Kentucky River, where Walker found a sycamore which measured forty feet in circumference—almost, it will be seen, the size of the tree Washington found on the Great Kanawha—upon which he marked his initials, “T. W.” On the day after, he found another sycamore thirty feet in circumference. These trees, it would naturally be inferred, marked the location of fertile soil. On the twenty-sixth the “Dogs roused a large Buck Elk, which we followed down to a Creek. He killed Ambrose Powell’s Dog in the Chase, and we named the Run Tumbler’s Creek, the Dog being of that Name.”
“31st. We crossed 2 Mountains and camped just by a Wolf’s Den. They were very impudent and after they had twice been shot at, they kept howling about the Camp. It rained till Noon this day.”
“June ye 1st. We found the Wolf’s Den and caught 4 of the young ones.” It was very common for frontiersmen to invade the dens of wolves without any opposition on the part of the old wolves.Wolf cubs have often been pulled away from their mothers, who would only snarl and show their teeth. Bears, on the other hand, would fight to the death any invader of their dens. Notions which commonly prevail today, about the dangers in the primeval forests of America from wild animals, undergo a great change after a careful reading of pioneer literature.
On the fourth of June “a very black Cloud appearing, we turn’d out our Horses, got tent Poles up, and were just stretching a Tent, when it began to rain and hail, and was succeeded by a violent Wind which Blew down our Tent & a great many Trees about it, several large ones within 30 yds. of the Tent. We all left the place in confusion and ran different ways for shelter. After the Storm was over, we met at the Tent, and found all safe.”
On the fourteenth the party had gone east as far as the dividing ridge between the two forks of the Big Sandy; but within a few days the horses were spent, and the whole party floundered onward afoot. On the twentieth they reached Flat-top Mountain, Raleigh County, West Virginia. Thisday Dr. Walker’s horse was bitten by a snake; “... having no Bear’s Oil,” he wrote, “I rub’d the place with a piece of fat meat, which had the desired effect.”
Passing the present site of Hinton, West Virginia, the party followed about the present line of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway. They crossed the Allegheny divide July 8, and Hot Springs the ninth. They found “Six Invalides there. The Spring Water is very Clear & warmer than new Milk, and there is a spring of cold Water within 20 feet of the Warm one. I left one of my Company this day.” They reached Augusta Court House (Staunton, Virginia) on the eleventh, and Castle Hill on the sixteenth, having been four months and seven days on the journey.
Walker’s hard tour amounted to very little for the plain reason that he never got west of the mountains. He found no good land and his report was depressing.
It remained for another brave frontiersman to go further and bring back the welcome news of large areas of splendid land in the Ohio Valley. In 1748 JohnHanbury, London merchant; Thomas Lee, President of the Council of Virginia; and a number of prominent Virginians formed the Ohio Company, elsewhere mentioned, and received a large grant of land in the West. The grant was made March 18, 1749: two hundred thousand acres between the Monongahela and Great Kanawha Rivers, and later three hundred thousand acres, to be located on the waters of the lower Ohio. In 1750 this company employed Christopher Gist, a hardy, well-trained frontiersman who lived on the Yadkin in North Carolina, to explore the Ohio Valley and make a report upon the land there found. For his arduous service he was to receive one hundred and fifty pounds sterling “and such further handsome allowance as his service should deserve.” His instructions read as follows:
“You are to go out as soon as possible to the Westward of the great Mountains, and carry with you such a Number of Men as You think necessary, in Order to Search out and discover the Lands upon the river Ohio & other adjoining Branches of the Mississippi down as low as the great Fallsthereof: You are particularly to observe the Ways & Passes thro all the Mountains you cross, & take an exact Account of the Soil, Quality & Product of the Land, and the Wideness and Deepness of the Rivers, & the several Falls belonging to them, together with the Courses & Bearings of the Rivers & Mountains as near as you conveniently can: You are also to observe what Nations of Indians inhabit there, their Strength and Numbers, who they trade with, & in what Comodities they deal.
“When you find a large quantity of good, level Land, such as you think will suit the Company, You are to measure the Breadth of it, in three or four different Places, & take the Courses of the River & Mountains on which it binds in Order to judge the Quantity: You are to fix the Beginning & Bounds in such a Manner that they may be easily found again by your Description; the nearer in the Land lies the better, provided it be good & level, but we had rather go quite down the Mississippi than take mean broken Land. After finding a large Body of good level Land, you are not to stop but proceedfurther, as low as the Falls of the Ohio, that we may be informed of that Navigation; And You are to take an exact Account of all the large Bodies of good level Land, in the same Manner as above directed that the Company may the better judge when it will be most convenient for them to take their Land.
“You are to note all the Bodies of good Land as you go along, tho there is not a sufficient Quantity for the Company’s Grant, but You need not be so particular in the Mensuration of that, as in the larger Bodies of Land.
“You are to draw as good a plan as you can of the Country You pass thro: You are to take an exact and particular Journal of all Your Proceedings, and make a true Report thereof to the Ohio Company.”
Gist was the man for the business in hand. He came from an enterprising family and was well educated. His father was one of the Commissioners for laying off the city of Baltimore. “Little is known of his early life, but the evidences he has left in his journals, his maps, plats of surveys, and correspondence indicate that heenjoyed the advantages of an education superior to that of many of his calling in those early days. His signature and manuscript are characterized by the neatness and uniformity of a copy plate, while his plats and surveys are models in their mathematical exactness and precision of drawing. To this evidence of scholarly order and professional skill he added the hardy qualities of the pioneer and backwoodsman, capable of enduring the exposure of long journeys in the most rigorous weather. In him were combined the varied talents which made him at once an accomplished surveyor, an energetic farmer who felled the forest and tilled the soil, a skilful diplomat who understood the Indian character and was influential in making treaties, a brave soldier, an upright man, trusted by the highest civil and military authorities with implicit faith.”[3]