During the last four months of 1765 Boone and seven companions went on horseback to the new colony of Florida with a view to moving thither if they found it suited to their tastes. Wherever possible, they stopped overnight at borderers' cabins upon the frontiers of the Carolinas and Georgia. But such opportunities did not always occur; they often suffered from hunger, and once they might have died from starvation but for the timely succor of a roving band of Seminole Indians. They explored Florida all the way from St. Augustine to Pensacola, and appear to have had a rather wretched time of it. The trails were miry from frequent rains, the number and extent of the swamps appalled them, and there was not game enough to satisfy a man like Boone, who scorned alligators. Pensacola, however, so pleased him that he determined to settle there, and purchased a house and lot which he might in due time occupy. Upon their return Boone told his wife of his Pensacola venture, but this sturdy woman of the frontier spurned the idea of moving to a gameless land. So the town lot was left to take care of itself, and henceforth the dutiful husband looked only to the West as his model of a perfect country. At the close of the French and Indian War there arrived in the Boone settlement a Scotch-Irishman named Benjamin Cutbirth, aged about twenty-three years. He was a man of good character and a fine hunter. Marrying Elizabeth Wilcoxen, a niece of Daniel Boone, he and Boone went upon long hunts together, and attained that degree of comradeship which joint life in a wilderness camp is almost certain to produce. In 1766 several families from North Carolina went to Louisiana, apparently by sea to New Orleans, and founded an English settlement above Baton Rouge on the Mississippi River. The news of this event gave rise to a general desire for exploring the country between the mountains and the great river. The year following, Cutbirth, John Stuart, John Baker, and John Ward, all of them young married men on the Yadkin, and excellent hunters, resolved to perform this feat, and if possible to discover a region superior to their own valley. They crossed the mountain range and eventually saw the Mississippi, being, so far as we know from contemporary documents, the first party of white men to succeed in this overland enterprise. Possibly fur-traders may have done so before them, but they left no record to prove it.