Henceforward, border chronicles abound with reports of the adventures of English fur-traders, hunters, and land-viewers, all along the Ohio River and tributary waters above Louisville. Among these early adventurers was our friend Finley, whose experiences in Kentucky dated from 1752, and who piloted Boone to the promised land through the gateway of Cumberland Gap. The subsequent Indian wars, with the expeditions into the upper Ohio Valley by Generals Braddock, Forbes, and Bouquet, made the country still better known; and settlers were soon rushing in by scores, although as yet none of them appear to have made clearings within Kentucky itself. Officers and soldiers who had served in the French and Indian War were given liberal grants of land in the West. Washington had not only his own grant, as the principal officer upon the southwest frontier, but was agent for a number of fellow-soldiers, and in 1767 went to the Ohio River to select and survey claims. At the very time when Boone was engaged upon his fruitless expedition down the Big Sandy, Washington was making the first surveys in Kentucky on both the Little and Big Sandy. Again, in 1770, when Boone was exploring the Kentucky wilderness, Washington was surveying extensive tracts along the Ohio and the Great Kanawha, and planning for a large colony upon his own lands. The outbreak of the Revolution caused the great man to turn his attention from the over-mountain region to the defense of his country. Had he been left to carry out his plans, he would doubtless have won fame as the most energetic of Western pioneers. It will be remembered that when Boone and his companions passed through Cumberland Gap in the early summer of 1769, they found the well-worn trail of other hunters who had preceded them from the settlements. The men of the Yadkin Valley were not the only persons seeking game in Kentucky that year. At about the time when Boone was bidding farewell to his family, Hancock and Richard Taylor, Abraham Hempinstall, and one Barbour, frontiersmen of the same type, started from their homes in Orange County, Va., to explore the valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi. They descended from Pittsburg in a boat, explored Kentucky, and proceeded into Arkansas, where they camped and hunted during the following winter. The next year two of them traveled eastward to Florida, and thence northwardly to their homes; the others stayed in Arkansas for another year, and returned by sea from New Orleans to New York.