With the close of Pontiac's Rebellion and the passing away of the war clouds which had hung so long over the West, ten thousand eyes turned longingly across the Alleghenies and Blue Ridge. War with all its horrors had yet brought something of good, for never before had the belief that a splendidly fertile empire lay to the westward taken such a hold upon the people of Virginia. Nothing more was needed but the positive assurance of large areas of good land, and a way to reach it. It was ten years after the close of Pontiac's war before both of these conditions were fulfilled. First came the definite assurance that the meadows of Kentucky were what Gist and others had reported them to be. The Proclamation of 1763, forbidding western settlement, did not forbid hunting in the West--and the great emigration which started as slow as a glacier was finally put into motion by the proof brought back to North Carolina and Virginia by the hunters (of whom mention has been made) who went over the mountains between 1763 and 1773. In 1766 Colonel James Smith, undaunted by his captivity among the Indians, hunted through the southern portion of Kentucky. In 1767 John Finley traded with the Indians in northern Kentucky, and James Harrod and Michael Stoner were in the southern portion of the country. Finally, in 1769 Daniel Boone came into the land "a second Adam in another Eden." Boone reached the edge of the beautiful Blue Grass Region and returned home in 1771 to tell of what he saw, and to bring his family "as soon as possible to live in Kentucky, which I esteemed a second paradise, at the risk of my life and fortune." In 1769 also, the party of stout hunters headed by Colonel James Knox reached Kentucky, and hunted on the Green and Lower Cumberland Rivers; they were so long absent from home that they were given the name of "The Long Hunters." These, too, brought glowing descriptions of the fine meadows of _Ken-ta-kee_. At once the forests were filled with cohorts of surveyors--the vanguard of the host under whose feet the continent was soon to tremble. These surveyors represented the various land companies and the bounty land seekers, who had a claim to the two hundred thousand acres promised the Virginian soldiers in the old French war. Scores of cabins were raised in 1774 at Harrodsburg, near Danville, on the east fork of Salt River, on Dick's River, and on Salt River. Their erection marks the beginning of the first settlement of the land one year previous to the breaking out of the war of the Revolution.