Near the front in this race for the rich meadows between the Ohio and Tennessee were bounty-land claimants. One of Virginia's most effective pleas for the great territory which had come into her possession was that she might reward her soldiers of the French and Indian wars. While as a people she had known less of Indian warfare than some of the colonies, Virginia had been liberal in sending troops northward to defend the frontier. And these Virginians had made a name for themselves at Braddock's defeat and elsewhere. Washington was always insistent that the claims of these old veterans of the bloody border war be redeemed in good lands, and it must be remembered ever with pride that as late as 1770, only six years before he became commander-in-chief of the armies of the United States at Cambridge, and but two years after the signing of the Stanwix treaty, he made the difficult journey to the Ohio River and down that river in a canoe to Virginia's new empire on the Great Kanawha, where surveys of bounty lands for his heroes of Fort Necessity were first made. Additional surveys were soon made along the Ohio and Licking Rivers. Explorers, hunters, squatters, speculators, and bounty-land claimants--this was the heterogeneous population that was surging westward to the land of which Boone wrote. But not all came down the old thoroughfare between the Allegheny and Blue Ridge Mountains and through Cumberland Gap. Many followed northward the rough trails which descended the New and Monongahela Rivers, while many went northwesterly over Braddock's overgrown twelve-foot road or along the winding narrow track of Forbes's Road through the Pennsylvania Glades to the little frontier fortress, Fort Pitt. From the time Bouquet relieved this beleaguered garrison until the Stanwix treaty, Pittsburg, as the town was now known, had been growing. One year after that treaty (1769) the manor of Pittsburg was surveyed, the survey embracing five thousand seven hundred and sixty-six acres. Upon the signing of the Stanwix treaty, Pittsburg became an important point and was claimed by both Pennsylvania and Virginia. About it sprang up villages and from it down the Ohio and up the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers settlements spread. What was loosely known as the "Monongahela Country"--the territory between the Monongahela and Ohio Rivers--became quite populous.