In the early part of the eighteenth century an English governor of the colony of Virginia, Alexander Spotswood, had led a band of horsemen known afterward as his "Knights of the Golden Horseshoe," with great hilarity, "stimulated by abundance of wine, champagne, rum," and other liquors, over the Blue Ridge Mountains, a part of the Alleghany Range, to the Shenandoah. He had talked menacingly of the French who held the valley beyond, had encouraged the extension of English settlements to break the line of French possessions, and had formed a short-lived Virginia-Indian company to protect the frontier against French and Indian incursions. This expedition was a visible challenge. With his merry company he buried a record of his "farthest west" journey in one of the bottles emptied en route and then went back to tidewater. That was the end of his adventure; little or nothing came of his "flourish" except the extension of the Virginia frontier to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Only traders and trappers ventured farther or even so far during the next three or four decades, and they were a "set of abandoned wretches," or so a later governor characterized them, though Parkman mentions some exceptions, and I wish to believe there were more, since one of them, I find, carried my own name far into that country on his trading and hunting expeditions among and with the Indians. Searching, a few years ago, the files of a paper published early in the nineteenth century on the edge of this wilderness, which was already calling itself the _Western World_--a paper, one of the first of the myriad white leaves into which the falling forests have been converted and scattered thick enough to cover every square foot of the valley--I happened upon this record, surprised as if a bit of the transmontane sea spray had touched my own face on the Mississippi: "That delightful country" (Kentucky), it ran, "from time immemorial had been the resort of wild beasts and of men only less savage, when in the year 1767 it was visited by John Finley and a few wandering white men from the British colony of North Carolina, allured by the love of hunting and the desire of barter with the Indians. The distance of this country from populous parts of the colonies, almost continuous wars, and the claims of the French had prevented all attempts at exploration." I seize upon this partly because, having succeeded to the name of this hunter and trader, who entered the valley just as St. Ange was yielding Fort Chartres to the English and crossing the Mississippi, I am able to show that my own ancestral sympathies while dwelling on the frontiers were not with the French. But I quote it chiefly because he was a typical forerunner, a first frontiersman.