Page:Historic highways of America (Volume 6).djvu/76

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
76
BOONE'S WILDERNESS ROAD

Pound Gap and eastward, down what is known as Gist's or Guesse's Fork of the Clinch in Wise County, Virginia, and then upon Bluestone, a tributary of New River. On the thirteenth of May he crossed Walker's route again at Inglis Ferry, near Draper's Meadows. On the seventeenth he passed into North Carolina through Flower or Wood's Gap toward his home on the Yadkin. He reached home on the eighteenth and found that his family had removed to Roanoke, thirty-five miles eastward, because of depredations of the Indians during the winter.

Gist's journey was far more successful than Walker's. He found the fine fertile valleys of the Muskingum, Scioto, and Miami Rivers north of the Ohio, and he caught a glimpse of the beautiful meadows of Kentucky. He singularly made a complete circle about the land between the Monongahela and Kanawha Rivers, where the Ohio Company's grant of land was made. As he did not approach it on any side it is probable that he knew that only rough land lay there. Had it not been for the sudden breaking out of the old French