166 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 



could be avoided, he found himself at twenty-one literally 

 dragged forward into the position of a leader. 



The frontier of North Carolina was at that time a good 

 deal harrassed by Indians, but principally by white ruffians 

 and marauders who assumed the guise of Indians to perpetrate 

 their most infamous outrages. From his knowledge of wood- 

 craft he was soon enabled to put a stop to this trick, and 

 break down this dangerous combination. This gained him, in 

 a still greater degree, the admiration of the borderers, and he 

 was now regarded as a person of importance, and great con- 

 fidence reposed in him, though so young a man. 



Little was known, at this time, of the vast country beyond 

 the Alleghanies to the West, but most especially of the wild 

 and remote land of Kan-tuck-Kee, as it was termed from its 

 principal river by the Indians. 



It is true, that so early as 1543, the Spaniards who pene- 

 trated the northern country under the chivalrous and unfor- 

 funate De Soto, discovered Kentucky while descending the 

 Mississippi ; that on the Ohio and Mississippi sides it had 

 frequently been merely touched by the French Canadians, 

 and by Jesuit missionaries, but it seems that a Colonel Wood 

 in 1654, was the first American who penetrated it so far 

 as the Mississippi, through the interior. 



In 1670, Captain Bolt, visited it from Virginia, then the 

 famous Jesuit, Father Hennepin, visited it in 1680. lie is 

 followed by Captain Tonti, three years afterwards, who de- 

 scended the Mississippi for the first time to its mouth, along 

 with the famous Laselle. By the year 1739, the French 

 Canadian traders had a regular trail through Kentucky by 

 the Big Bone Lick. In 1750, Dr. Thomas Walker crossed 

 the Alleghanies and explored to the Cumberland and Kentucky 

 rivers ; then James McBride, in 1754, descended to the mouth 

 of the Kentucky river and left his name there carved upon a 

 Leech tree. But it was not until 1767 that the country could 

 be said to have been really explored. 



