th the beauty of the country.[47] They then went to the
cabin, several days before the appointed time; but to their surprise
found every thing scattered over the ground, and two fires burning,
while on a tree near the landing was written, "Alarmed by finding some
people killed and we are gone down." This left the four adventurers in a
bad plight, as they had but fifteen rounds of powder left, and none of
them knew the way home. However there was no help for it, and they
started off.[48] When they came to the mountains they found it such hard
going that they were obliged to throw away their blankets and every
thing else except their rifles, hunting-shirts, leggings, and moccasins.
Like the other parties of returning explorers, they found this portion
of their journey extremely distressing; and they suffered much from sore
feet, and also from want of food, until they came on a gang of
buffaloes, and killed two. At last they struck Cumberland Gap, followed
a blazed trail across it to Powell's Valley, and on August 9th came to
the outlying settlements on Clinch River, where they found the settlers
all in their wooden forts, because of the war with the Shawnees.[49]

In this same year many different bodies of hunters and surveyors came
into the country, drifting down the Ohio in pirogues. Some forty men led
by Harrod and Sowdowsky[50] founded Harrodsburg, where they built cabins
and sowed corn; but the Indians killed one of their number, and the rest
dispersed. Some returned across the mountains; but Sowdowsky and another
went through the woods to the Cumberland River, where they built a
canoe, paddled down the muddy Mississippi between unending reaches of
lonely marsh and forest, and from New Orleans took ship to Virginia.

At that time, among other parties of surveyors there was one which had
been sent by Lord Dunmore to the Falls of the Ohio. When the war broke
out between the Shawnees and the Virginians, Lord Dunmore, being very
anxious for the fate of these surveyors, sent Boon and Stoner to pilot
them in; which the two bush veterans accordingly did, making the round
trip of 800 miles in 64 days. The outbreak of the Indian war caused all
the hunters and surveyors to leave Kentucky; and at the end of 1774
there were no whites left, either there or in what is now middle
Tennessee. But on the frontier all men's eyes were turned towards these
new and fertile regions. The pioneer work of the hunter was over, and
that of the