Whatever the truth may be in regard to other matters, Campbell's dates are entirely erroneous. He would seem to postpone the settlement of Lewis in the valley to the year 1744, although he immediately refers to him as residing here in 1736.
Foote, in his "Sketches of Virginia," is silent as to the date of the settlement. He mentions, upon the authority of the late Charles A. Stuart, of Greenbrier county, a descendant of John Lewis, that the latter first located on the left bank of Middle river, then called Carthrae's river, about three miles east of the macadamized turnpike. Thence he removed to Lewis' Creek, two miles east of Staunton, where he built a stone house, known as Fort Lewis, which is still standing. According to Foote, Mackey and Salling came with Lewis, or at the same time, Mackey making his residence at Buffalo Gap, and Salling his at the forks of James river, below the Natural Bridge.
We are satisfied that Mackey and Salling did explore the Valley, but that it was about the year 1726, before there was any settlement by white people west of the Blue Ridge. Withers, in his "Border Warfare," gives the following account of Salling's captivity:
Salling, he says, was taken, to the country now known as Tennessee, where he remained for some years. In company with a party of Cherokees he went on a hunting expedition to the salt licks of Kentucky, and was there captured by a band of Illinois Indians, with whom the Cherokees were at war. He was taken to Kaskaskia and adopted into the family of a squaw whose son had been killed. While with these Indians he several times accompanied them down the Mississippi river, below the mouth of the Arkansas, and once to the Gulf of Mexico, The Spaniards in Louisiana desiring an interpreter purchased him of his Indian mother, and some of them took him to Canada. He was there redeemed by the French governor of that province, who sent him to the Dutch settlement in New York, "whence he made his way home after an absence of six years."—[Border Warfare, page 42.] Peyton, in his "History of Augusta County," gives an account of the coming of Lewis to the Valley quite different from Campbell's version of the matter, and somewhat at variance with Foote' s narrative. He says Lewis "had been some time in America, when, in 1732, Joist Hite and a party of pioneers set out to settle upon a grant of 40,000 acres
