This last argument had very much to do with the settlement of Kentucky. Salt and lead were essentials. Salt was very heavy. The transportation across these grim mountains was very difficult. If one could have salt in Kentucky, it would not be necessary for one to come back. To-day we can scarcely understand this reasoning, once so cogent.
To strengthen the grasp upon historical facts and dates it is sometimes well to begin at the time close at hand, and go backward. We may therefore make a reversed recapitulation of the explorations of Kentucky, this dark and bloody hunting and fighting ground of many tribes of strong-legged and peppery-headed savages.
In 1770 the "Long Hunters" of Joseph Drake and Henry Skaggs were in Kentucky--indeed, ran across Daniel Boone there; yet Kentucky was then an oldish land. In 1766 James Smith and five others explored much of west Tennessee, and worked north as far as Illinois. The Virginian, John McCullough, with one white companion, saw Kentucky in the summer of 1769, pushed on northward as far as the point where Terre Haute, Indiana, now stands, and later descended the Mississippi River to New Orleans. Uriah Stone took a party of twenty hunters over the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky in the month of June, 1769, one month later than Boone's journey thither; but Stone had been in Kentucky in 1766.
George Washington was on the Ohio River in 1770 and 1767; John Finley in 1752; Christopher Gist in 1750; Doctor Thomas Walker in 1748; John Peter Salling and John Howard, in 1742, we have noted. Before all these was the French expedition of 1735. Indeed, just one hundred years before Boone's journey into Kentucky, John Lederer, a Virginian, crossed the Alleghanies and fared westward for some distance; and ninety-nine years previous to Boone's first glimpse of the delectable land, Thomas Batts and party had "taken possession" of the headwaters of the Great Kanawha in the name of Charles II.
We therefore see, with what will be a certain surprise to the average reader of American history, that Kentucky and the trans-Appalachian land was not wholly unknown but indeed fairly well understood and accurately forecast in possibilities, more than a generation before Daniel Boone ever saw it. Where, then, is Boone's fame as an explorer? Upon what does his reputation as an adventurer rest? What claim had he to hold himself as an "instrument for the settlement of the wilderness"?