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- 
eraft 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. He 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 
beech tree. But it was not until 1767 that the country could 
be said to have been really explored. 
