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 axe-bearing settler was about to begin.

1.  This is true as a whole; but along the Mississippi, in the extreme west of the present Kentucky and Tennessee, the Chickasaws held possession.  There was a Shawnee town south of the Ohio, and Cherokee villages in southeastern Tennessee.

2.  The backwoodsmen generally used “trace,” where western frontiersmen would now say “trail.”