These first comers found their way to Kentucky by two routes--the Warriors' Path through Cumberland Gap, and the Ohio River, which they reached either by the Kittanning Path up the Juniata or by Braddock's or Forbes's Roads. Each route was dangerous and difficult beyond description. It was a terrible road from Cumberland to Pittsburg, and the journey down the Ohio was not more inviting. When the river was high and afforded safe navigation it was as much a highway for red men as for white--and these were treacherous times. When the river was low, a thousand natural obstructions tended to daunt even the bravest boatmen--and the Virginian backwoodsmen were not educated to contend with such a dangerous stream as the Ohio, with its changing currents, treacherous eddies, and thousands of sunken trees. One frontiersman who made the river trip at an early date, cautioned those who essayed the trip against rowing their boats at night; lest the sound of the oars should prevent the watchman from hearing the "riffling" of the water about the rocks and sunken trees, on which many a boat had been wrecked with all its precious freight. The danger of river travel down such a stream appealed with tremendous force to the early pioneers, with the result that the majority chose the land route. But what an alternative! A narrow trail in the forests six hundred miles in length was the only path. It had been traversed by many even as early as 1775, but each traveler had made it worse, and the story of the hardships of the journey through "the Wilderness" would make even the bravest pause. It is a hard journey today, one which cannot be made without taxing even the strongest; what was it before the route was dotted with cities and hamlets, before the road had been widened and bridged, before the mountains had been graded and the swamps drained, before the fierce lurking enemies had been driven away? Neither Walker nor Gist traversed what became the famed Wilderness Road to Kentucky. When the Shawanese raided Draper's Meadows, near Inglis Ferry, in 1755, they took their prisoners away on the trail through Powell's Valley toward Cumberland Gap; and the rescuing party which followed them were perhaps the first white men who traveled what became the great pioneer thoroughfare to Kentucky. It was, undoubtedly, the route followed by the early hunters who passed through Cumberland Gap and found the fertile meadows of which Dr. Walker was ignorant, and of which Christopher Gist caught only a faint glimpse. Settlements sprang up slowly beyond Inglis Ferry, but by the time of Boone's return in 1771 a few families were on the upper waters of the Holston, and settlements had been made on the Watauga where Fort Watauga was soon to be built, and at Wolf Hills, now Abington. These settlements were all one hundred miles east of Cumberland Gap, and the little path thither was not yet marked for white man's use.