a tributary of the Red
River, and of the Pilot Knobwere sixteen years later to fire
Boone to his great tour of exploration in behalf of the
Transylvania Company.

During the next two decades, largely because of the hostility of
the savage tribes, only a few traders and hunters from the east
ranged through the trans-Alleghany. But in 1761, a party of
hunters led by a rough frontiersman, Elisha Walden, penetrated
into Powell's Valley, followed the Indian trail through
Cumberland Gap, explored the Cumberland River, and finally
reached the Laurel Mountain where, encountering a party of
Indians, they deemed it expedient to return. With Walden went
Henry Scaggs, afterward explorer for the Henderson Land Company,
William Elevens and Charles Cox, the famous Virginia hunters, one
Newman, and some fifteen other stout pioneers. Their itinerary
may be traced from the names given to natural objects in honor of
members of the party--Walden's Mountain and Walden's Creek,
Scaggs' Ridge and Newman's Ridge. Following the peace of 1763,
which made travel in this region moderately safe once more, the
English proceeded to occupy the territory which they had won. In
1765 George Croghan with a small party, on the way to prepare the
inhabitants of the Illinois country for transfer to English
sovereignty, visited the Great Bone Licks of Kentucky (May 30th,
31st); and a year later Captain Harry Gordon, chief engineer in
the Western Department in North America, visited and minutely
described the same licks and the falls. But these, and numerous
other water-journeys and expeditions of which no records were
kept, though interesting enough in themselves, had little bearing
upon the larger phases of westward expansion and colonization.

The decade opening with the year 1765 is the epoch of bold and
ever bolder exploration--the more adventurous frontiersmen of the
border pushing deep into the wilderness in search of game, lured
on by the excitements of the chase and the profit to be derived
from the sale of peltries. In midsummer, 1766, Captain James
Smith, Joshua Horton, Uriah Stone, William Baker, and a young
mulatto slave passed through Cumberland Gap, hunted through the
country south of the Cherokee and along the Cumberland and
Tennessee rivers, and as Smith reports "found no vestige of any
white man." During the same year a party of five hunters from
South Carolina, led by Isaac Lindsey, penetrated the Kentucky
wilderness to the tributary o