The decade opening with the year 1765 is the epoch of bold and
ever bolder exploration--the more adventurous frontiersmen of the
border pushing deep into the wilderness in search of game, lured
on by the excitements of the chase and the profit to be derived
from the sale of peltries. In midsummer, 1766, Captain James
Smith, Joshua Horton, Uriah Stone, William Baker, and a young
mulatto slave passed through Cumberland Gap, hunted through the
country south of the Cherokee and along the Cumberland and
Tennessee rivers, and as Smith reports "found no vestige of any
white man." During the same year a party of five hunters from
South Carolina, led by Isaac Lindsey, penetrated the Kentucky
wilderness to the tributary of the Cumberland, named Stone's
River by the former party, for one of their number. Here they
encountered two men, who were among the greatest of the western
pioneers, and were destined to leave their names in historic
association with the early settlement of Kentucky, James Harrod
and Michael Stoner, a German, both of whom had descended the Ohio
from Fort Pitt. With the year 1769 began those longer and more
extended excursions into the interior which were to result in
conveying at last to the outside world graphic and detailed
information concerning "the wonderful new country of Cantucky."
In the late spring of this year Hancock and Richard Taylor (the
latter the father of President Zachary Taylor), Abraham
Hempinstall, and one Barbour, all true-blue frontiersmen, left
their homes in Orange County, Virginia, and hunted extensively in
Kentucky and Arkansas. Two of the party traveled through Georgia
and East and West Florida; while the other two hunted on the
Washita during the winter of 1770-1. Explorations of this type
became increasingly hazardous as the animosity of the Indians