salt lick afterward known as Mansker's Lick.

Richard Henderson thus, it appears, "enlisted the Harts and
others in an enterprise which his own genius planned," says Peck,
the personal acquaintance and biographer of Boone, "and then
encouraged several hunters to explore the country and learn where
the best lands lay." Just why Henderson and his associates did
not act sooner upon the reports brought back by the
hunters--Boone and Scaggs and Callaway, who accompanied Boone in
1764 in the interest of the land company "is not known; but in
all probability the fragmentary nature of these reports, however
glowing and enthusiastic, was sufficient cause for the delay of
five years before the land company, through the agency of Boone
and Findlay, succeeded in having a thorough exploration inside of
the Kentucky region. Delay was also caused by rival claims to the
territory. In the Virginia Gazette of December 1, 1768, Henderson
must have read with astonishment not unmixed with dismay that
"the Six Nations and all their tributaries have granted a vast
extent of country to his majesty, and the Proprietaries of
Pennsylvania, and settled an advantageous boundary line between
their hunting country and this, and the other colonies to the
Southward as far as the Cherokee River, for which they received
the most valuable present in goods and dollars that was ever
given at any conference since the settlement of America." The
news was now bruited about through the colony of North Carolina,
that the Cherokees were hot in their resentment because the
Northern Indians, the inveterate foes of the Cherokees and the
perpetual disputants for the vast Middle Ground of Kentucky, had
received at the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, November 5, 1768, an
immense compensation from the crown for the territory which they,