Blue Ridge Country. Jean Pichon Thomas
and Kentucky Rivers. He crossed the Big Sandy—the Indians called it Chatterawha and Totteroy. He got out of their canoe at a point where the Totteroy flows into the Ohio and stood on the bank and looked about at the far-off hills. So it was young Gabriel Arthur who was the first white man to set foot in Kentucky, and that at the mouth of the Big Sandy.
Young Gabriel’s tales traveled far. Soon others, fired with the spirit of adventure, were turning to the wilderness. Nor was adventure the only spur. Investors as well as hunters and trappers saw promise of profits in Far Appalachia. Cartographers were put to work. A glimpse at their drawings shows interesting and similar observations.
In 1697 Louis Hennepin’s map indicated the territory south of the Great Lakes, including the southern Appalachians and extending as far west as the Mississippi River and a route which passed through a “gap across the Appalachians to the Atlantic seaboard.” Later the map of a Frenchman named Delisle labeled the great continental path leading to the Carolinas “Route que les François.” Successive maps all showed the passing over the Cumberland Mountain at the great wind gap, indicating portages and villages of the Chaouanona (Shawnees) in the river valleys. Lewis Evans’ map in 1755 of “The Middle British Colonies in America” shows the courses of the Totteroy (Big Sandy River) and of the Kentucky River. Thomas Hutchins in 1788, who became a Captain in the 60th Royal American Regiment of Foot, was appointed Geographer General under General Nathanael Greene and had unusual opportunity to observe geographically the vast wilderness beyond the Alleghenies. On his map the Kentucky River (where Boone was to establish a fort) was called the Cuttawa, the Green River was the Buffalo, the Cumberland was indicated as Shawanoe, and the Tennessee was the Cherokee. Though there were numerous trails in the Cumberland plateau, the Geographer General indicated only one, the Warrior’s Path which he called the “Path to the Cuttawa Country.” He too showed the Gap in the “Ouasioto” Mountains leading to the Cuttawa Country.
With the increase of map-making, more projects were launched. There were large colonizing schemes to induce settlement along the frontier, but colonizing was not the only idea in the heads of the wealthy Virginia investors. They were not unmindful of the riches in furs to be garnered in the Blue Ridge. In this connection Dr. Thomas Walker’s expedition for the Loyal Land Company in 1750 was important. Dr. Walker, an Englishman, was sent into what is now Kentucky where the company had a grant of “eight hundred thousand acres.” A man could buy fifty acres for five shillings sterling, the doctor explained. He was not only a physician but a surveyor as well, and primarily the purpose of these early expeditions was surveying—to lay out the boundaries of the land to be sold to incoming settlers. Such an expedition was composed usually of some six or eight men each equipped with horse, dog, and gun. Fortunately the doctor-surveyor was not illiterate like young Gabriel Arthur. Walker set down an interesting account of the expedition which was especially glowing from the trader’s point of view. In their four months in the wilderness the Walker expedition killed, aside from buffalo, wild geese, and turkeys, fifty-three bears and twenty deer. And the doctor added that they could have trebled the number. Walker followed the Warrior’s Path as young Gabriel Arthur had more than seventy years before. The rivers they crossed, as well as the places on the way which were sometimes no more than salt licks, bore Indian names. But when Dr. Walker reached the great barrier between Kentucky and Virginia he was so deeply moved by the vastness and grandeur of the mountains that he called his companions about him. “It is worthy of a noble name,” said Dr. Walker. “Let us call it Cumberland for our Duke in far-off England.” When the expedition reached the gap that permitted them to pass through into the Cuttawa country he cried exultantly, “This too shall be named for our Duke.” So Cumberland Gap it became and the mountain known to pioneers as Laurel Mountain became instead Cumberland Mountain.
The doctor-surveyor could not know that one day he would be hailed as “the first white man in Cumberland Gap” by those sturdy settlers who were to follow his course. When Dr. Walker reached the Indians’ Totteroy River, or rather the two forks that combine to make it, he called the stream to the right, which touched West Virginia soil, Louisa or Levisa for the wife of the Duke of Cumberland.
This leader of the expedition of the Loyal Land Company jotted down much that he saw. There was the amazing “burning spring” that shot up right out of the earth, its flame so brilliant the doctor could read his map by the glow at a distance of several miles. Apparently he was not concerned with the cause but rather with the effect of the burning spring. He saw the painted picture language of the Indians on mountain side and tree trunk.
Dr. Walker returned on a second expedition in 1758, but he gained only partial knowledge of the wilderness land. However, the mountain he named determined the course of the trail which was to be laid out by Daniel Boone, and the gap through which he passed became the gateway for thousands of horizon-seekers.
Their coming was not without hazard.
The southern Indians resented the invasion of their hunting ground by the English. The French-Indians incited by the French settlers in the Mississippi Valley who wanted the wealth of fur-bearing animals for themselves, began to swoop down on the settlements of the English-speaking people along the frontier, massacring them by the hundreds.
The Assembly in Philadelphia turned a deaf ear to the frontiersmen’s plea for help, so the Scotch-Irish, accustomed to fighting for their rights, organized companies of Rangers to defend themselves against the attacks of the Indians. With continued massacre of their people their desperation grew. If they could have no voice in governmental matters in Pennsylvania and could expect no protection from that source against the warring Indians, they could move on. They did. On down the Valley of Virginia they came into Carolina. They built their little cabins, planted crops, and by 1764 had laid out two townships, one of which, Mecklenburg, figured in an important way in America’s independence.
As each settlement became more thickly settled the more venturesome spirits pressed on into the mountains. And as they moved forward, clearing forests and planting ground for their bread, they dislodged hunters and trappers who had preceded them. For all of them there was always the troublesome Indian to be reckoned with. A cunning warrior, he pounced upon the newcomer at most unexpected times. To maintain a measure of safety the pioneer began to build block houses and forts along the watercourses traveled by the Indians. Fur-trading posts were set up by the Crown but even when the Indian seemed satisfied with the exchange he might take prisoner a trader or explorer and subject him to torture, or even put him to death. The homes of settlers were objects of constant attack. It would take white men of more cunning than the Indian to deal with him: fearless and daring fighters.
About the time Dr. Walker had started on his expedition in 1755, a family living in Pennsylvania packed up their belongings and moved down into the Valley of Virginia. There were the father, his sons, and his brothers. They hadn’t stayed long in Rockingham County, barely long enough to raise a crop, when they moved again. This time they journeyed on down to the valley of the Yadkin River in North Carolina and there they stayed. All but one son—Daniel Boone, a lad of eighteen. Even as a boy he had roamed the woods alone, and once was lost for days. When his father and friends found him, guided by a stream of smoke rising in the distance, Daniel wasn’t in tears. Instead, seated on the pelt of a wild animal he had killed and roasting a piece of its meat at the fire, he was whistling gaily. He had made for himself a crude shelter of branches and pelts. It was useless to chide his son, the older Boone found out. So he saved his breath and let Daniel roam at his will. Soon the boy was exploring and hunting farther and farther into the mountains.
On one such venture the young hunter alone “cilled a bar” and left the record of his feat carved with his hunting knife upon a tree. His imagination was fired with the tales of warfare about him, of the courage and independence of the men who dwelt far up in the mountains. He knew of the heroism of George Washington who, four years after the Boones left Pennsylvania, had led a company of mountain men against the French. He had heard the stories of how Washington had been driven back with his mountain men at Great Meadows. Boone longed to be in the thick of the fray. So in 1755, when General Braddock came to “punish the French for their insolence” and Washington accompanied him with one hundred mountain men from North Carolina, Daniel Boone, for all his youth, was among them—as brave a fighter and as skilled a shot as the best.