But the brave Boone was as good as his word--and he did attempt to bring his family and five other families to Kentucky in the year 1773, over what was soon to be known as Boone's Road. This was the beginning of the great tide of immigration through Cumberland Gap, a social movement which for timeliness and ultimate success ranks as the most important in the history of the central West. This initial attempt was not a success, for the party was driven back by Indians, with loss, entirely discouraged. But from this time on, despite Dunmore's War which now broke out, the dream of western immigration could not be forgotten. But all the western movement was now put at hazard by the outbreak of this cruel, bloody war between the "Long Knives"--as the Virginians in the Monongahela country came to be called, from the sabres that hung at their loins--and the Shawanese north of the Ohio. As suggested, the preceding years had been marked by continual bloodshed. It is undoubtedly true that those Long Knives on the upper Ohio had been doing some dreadful slashing. Perhaps the provocations were as enormous as the crimes; surely the Indians to the north were the most bloodthirsty and cruel of any on the continent. At the same time it is safe to say that many of their white foes on the Ohio were inhuman marauders, whose principal occupation was that of shooting game for a living and Indians for sport. Even in the statement in Boone's autobiography there is a plain suggestion of a guilty conscience on the part of those of whom he wrote: "The settlers [in the Monongahela country], now aware that a general warfare would be commenced by the Indians, immediately sent an express to Williamsburg, the seat of government in Virginia, communicating their apprehensions and soliciting protection." How aware? Because some of the relatives of the Indian chieftain Logan had been basely murdered, while intoxicated, on Yellow Creek? The Virginian House of Burgesses was quick to answer this appeal of the western colonists, and Governor Dunmore's earnestness in arranging the campaign resulted in the short wars bearing his name. General Andrew Lewis, a hero of Braddock's defeat, was commissioned to raise an army of border settlers and march down the Great Kanawha; while Lord Dunmore went northward to Pittsburg, where, in the Monogahela country, he would recruit another army and descend the Ohio to the mouth of the Great Kanawha. Here the armies would unite to pierce the valley of the Scioto in which the hell-hound Shawanese dwelt.