It was in the year 1769, in the month of May, that Boone started out for his first determined exploration of “the far-famed but little-known land of Kentucky.” He had before this time been eager to cross the range and see for himself; indeed, he had made one short hunting trip into what is now the eastern edge of the state of Kentucky. Now, in the prime of life, at thirty-five years of age, he felt that the time had come for him to cross the range and make his abiding place in the West. We are accustomed to think that Boone was the first explorer of Kentucky, but such was by no means the case. Boone’s first trip across the mountains, to the headwaters of the Holston, was in 1761. John Peter Salling, a West Virginian, crossed Kentucky and Illinois as early as 1738. Doctor Thomas Walker and a party of Virginians had long before deliberately explored a part of Kentucky; and in 1751 Boone’s Yadkin neighbor, Christopher Gist,—the same Gist that accompanied Washington in his dangerous winter trip to the French forts on the Ohio,—made yet fuller explorations. Some of these early voyagings were not made of intent. Salling crossed Kentucky as a captive of the Indians, who took him as far west as Kaskaskia; and Mary Draper Ingles, “the first American bride west of the mountains,” whose father established the first actual settlement west of the Alleghanies, was in 1755 taken captive by the savages, and carried across Kentucky and parts of Ohio and Indiana, thus being an explorer quite against her will. Two hunters from Pittsburg, James Harrod and Michael Steiner or Stoner, after pushing out into the Illinois country, crossed the Ohio and traveled quite across Kentucky, as far south as the present city of Nashville, Tennessee. Steiner and Harrod were friends of Boone’s, and Harrod built his stockade of Harrodsburg a year before Boonesborough was begun, his journey with Steiner having been made two years before Boone made his pilgrimage across the Divide. Kasper Mansker or Mansco, later a famous scout and Indian fighter, went with the Virginian “Long Hunters” into Kentucky in 1769. John Finley or Finlay had traded with the Indians on the Red River of Kentucky in 1752, some years before Boone saw that region. Finley was an associate of Boone’s in the border wars before Boone was married, and it was Finley, in all likelihood, that first set Boone aflame with the desire to see and settle in Kentucky. Yet he might have had the counsel of James McBride, who in 1754 visited the mouth of the Kentucky River, and came back to say that he “had found the best tract of land in North America, and probably in the world.” Finley added to these stories, and clinched it all by saying that game of all kinds was abundant, that the mountains were beautiful beyond description, and that, moreover, salt could be manufactured on the spot.