In 1748 the Ohio Company was organized by Colonel Thomas Lee, president of the Virginia council, and twelve other gentlemen, of Virginia and Maryland. In their petition for five hundred thousand acres, one of the declared objects of the company was "to anticipate the French by taking possession of that country southward of the Lakes to which the French had no right...." By the royal order of May 19, 1749, the company was awarded two hundred thousand acres, free of quit-rent for ten years; and the promise was made of an additional award of the remainder petitioned for, on condition of seating a hundred families upon the original grant and the building and maintaining of a fort. Christopher Gist, summoned from his remote home on the Yadkin in North Carolina, was instructed "to search out and discover the Lands upon the river Ohio & other adjoining branches of the Mississippi down as low as the great Falls thereof." In this journey, which began at Colonel Thomas Cresap's, in Maryland, in October, 1750, and ended at Gist's home on May 18, 1751, Gist visited the Lower Shawnee Town and the Lower Blue Licks, ascended Pilot Knob almost two decades before Findlay and Boone, from the same eminence, "saw with pleasure the beautiful level of Kentucky," intersected Walker's route at two points, and crossed Cumberland Mountain at Pound Gap on the return journey. This was a far more extended journey than Walker's, enabling Gist to explore the fertile valleys of the Muskingum, Scioto, and Miami rivers and to gain a view of the beautiful meadows of Kentucky. [72] It is eminently significant of the spirit of the age, which was inaugurating an era of land-hunger unparalleled in American history, that the first authentic records of the trans-Alleghany were made by surveyors who visited the country as the agents of great land companies. The outbreak of the French and Indian War so soon afterward delayed for a decade and more any important colonization of the West. Indeed, the explorations and findings of Walker and Gist were almost unknown, even to the companies they represented. But the conclusion of peace in 1763, which gave all the region between the mountains and the Mississippi to the British, heralded the true beginning of the westward expansionist movement in the Old Southwest, and inaugurated the constructive leadership of North Carolina in the occupation and colonization of the imperial domain of Kentucky and the Ohio Valley.