SPOTTSWOOD'S EXPEDITION OF 1716 
2riS 
the Shenandoah, writes Fontaine, “ I got some grasshoppers and 
fished, another and 1, and we catched a dish of fish, some perch 
and a kind of fish the}' called chuh. The others went a-hunt- 
ing and killed deer and turkeys.” There were rattlesnakes, too, 
to be killed and hornets to be fought, and at least once the bear 
objected to the sacrificial rite, attacking the man who rode after 
him and narrowly missing him ; “ he tore the things that he had 
behind him from the horse and would have destroyed him had 
he not had immediate help from the other men and our dogs.” 
So their expedition did not lack the spice of peril to season its 
hilarity. Two men fell sick with measles also and had to be 
left in camp with guards and taken up again on the homeward 
march, but all in the end went well, and after a ride of nine days 
out and four days back the gallant party reached Germanna 
once more. 
The question has sometimes been raised whether Spottswood’s 
was the first company to attempt the crossing of the Blue Ridge 
and the exploration of the regions beyond. .John P. Hale, for 
exami)le, in bis “ Transallegheny Pioneers,” states that Colonel 
Aljraham Wood, under a concession from the colonial governor 
(Richard Rennet) “ to ex{)lore the country and open up trade 
with the Indians to the west,” crossed the mountains in 1654, 
})robably at Wood’s gap — far to the south of Spottswood’s line 
of march — and again that Governor Berkeley, in 1666, dispatched 
an ex})loring party under Captain Henry Batte, who followed 
the same route as Wood. Hale offers no documentary evidence 
to support these claims and the writer has been able to discover 
none. Until thus authenticated they must rest in the limbo of 
unverified traditions, and Spottswood must wear his rightful 
laurels as the first white man who with serious purpose led a 
company across this boundary of our colonial civilization, and 
set the example so promptly followed by the hardy pioneers, 
who faced the perils of the wilderness and built their homes in 
the fair valley of Virginia. 
What, then, were the serious purposes of this earliest recon- 
naissance of the Blue Ridge? for, of course, the grave and sa- 
gacious Spottswood was not the man to prosecute such a journey 
merely that he might say at the end “ we were very merry and 
diverted ourselves with our adventures.” “ The chief aim of my 
expedition,” he writes in 1718 to the Board of Trade, ‘'was to 
satisfy myself whether it was practicable to come at the lakes.” 
What he did was to trace the Rappahannock to its source, to 
