together made their way to the important Cumberland River, a tributary of the Ohio, where they found traveling difficult on account of the number of so-called sink-holes, the depressions resulting from the sinking of the earth after heavy rains in a limestone country.
In March, 1771, we find the energetic explorers again on the Kentucky River, where they resolved to form a settlement, and whence they started in the ensuing month for the Yadkin of North Carolina to bring out their families. Two years elapsed before the necessary arrangements could be made, and meanwhile rumors reached the Eastern States of explorations made by other parties, who, without any preconcerted plans, were simultaneously wandering about on the banks of the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers. In June, 1769, but one month after the first entry into Kentucky of Boone, some twenty men, from North Carolina and West Virginia, made their way over the Alleghanies, and through the Cumberland mountain pass to the river of the same name, into the south-west of Kentucky, the whole of which they thoroughly scoured, returning home in April, 1770, laden with the results of their hunting excursions.
In the same year, 1769, a second company of hunters built a boat and two trapping canoes, and in them paddled down the Cumberland River to the Ohio, and again down the Ohio to the Mississippi, embarking on which they made their way to Natchez, where they sold their furs to great advantage. This was of more importance to them than the fact that this trip of theirs connected the work of the English from the East with that of the French from the South, which alone entitles them to a place in our narrative.
In 1771, the Cumberland was again navigated, this time from the north, by Casper Mansso and some half a dozen companions, who penetrated into the so-called barrens of the south of Kentucky, where they met other hunters from the East. Thus, by the time of Boone's return in 1773, Kentucky, though still unsettled by any white man, was no longer the unknown district it had been on his first visit, and he appeared to have many rivals in the field.
The little caravan of settlers, which included Boone's own family and that of five others, started on its arduous journey across the Alleghanies in September, 1773, and in the now well-known Powell's Valley its numbers were augmented by forty well-armed men, who had determined to throw in their lot with the emigrants. The transit of Powell's Gap or Pass was succeeded by that of Wallen's Ridge, and the augmented party were enter-
