7. The Land Companies

It was thought good policy to settle those lands as fast as possible, and that the granting them to men of the first consequence who were likeliest and best able to procure large bodies of people to settle on them was the most probable means of effecting the end proposed.--Acting-Governor Nelson of Virginia to the Earl of Hillsborough: 1770.

Although for several decades the Virginia traders had been passing over the Great Trading Path to the towns of the Cherokees and the Catawbas, it was not until the early years of the eighteenth century that Virginians of imaginative vision directed their eyes to the westward, intent upon crossing the mountains and locating settlements as a firm barrier against the imperialistic designs of France. Acting upon his oft-expressed conviction that once the English settlers had established themselves at the source of the James River "it would not be in the power of the French to dislodge them," Governor Alexander Spotswood in 1716, animated with the spirit of the pioneer, led an expedition of fifty men and a train of pack-horses to the mountains, arduously ascended to the summit of the Blue Ridge, and claimed the country by right of discovery in behalf of his sovereign. In the journal of John Fontaine this vivacious account is given of the historic episode: "I graved my name on a tree by the river side; and the Governor buried a bottle with a paper enclosed on which he writ that he took possession of this place in the name and for King George the First of England. We had a good dinner, and after it we got the men together and loaded all their arms and we drank the King's health in Burgundy and fired a volley, and all the rest of the Royal Family in claret and a volley. We drank the Governor's health and fired another volley."

By this jovial picnic, which the governor afterward commemorated by presenting to each of the gentlemen who accompanied him a golden horseshoe, inscribed with the legend, Sic juvat transcendere montes, Alexander Spotswood anticipated by a third of a century the more ambitious expedition on behalf of France by Celoron de Bienville (see Chapter III), and gave a memorable object-lesson in the true spirit of westward expansion. During the ensuing years it began to dawn upon the minds of men of the stamp of William Byrd and Joshua Gee that there was imperative need for the establishment of a chain of settlements in the trans-Alleghany, a great human wall to withstand the advancing wave of French influence and occupation. By the fifth decade of the century, as we have seen, the Virginia settlers, with their squatter's claims and tomahawk rights, had pushed on to the mountains; and great pressure was brought to bear upon the council to issue grants for vast tracts of land in the uncharted wilderness of the interior.

At this period the English ministry adopted the aggressive policy already mentioned in connection with the French and Indian war, indicative of a determination to contest with France the right to occupy the interior of the continent. This policy had been inaugurated by Virginia with the express purpose of stimulating the adoption of a similar policy by North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Two land companies, organized almost simultaneously, actively promoted the preliminaries necessary to settlement, despatching parties under expert leadership to discover the passes through the mountains and to locate the best land in the trans-Alleghany.

In June, 1749, a great corporation, the Loyal Land Company of Virginia, received a grant of eight hundred thousand acres above the North Carolina line and west of the mountains. Dr. Thomas Walker, an expert surveyor, who in company with several other gentlemen had made a tour of exploration through eastern Tennessee and the Holston region in 1748, was chosen as the agent of this company. Starting from his home in Albemarle County, Virginia, March 6, 1750, accompanied by five stalwart pioneers, Walker made a tour of exploration to the westward, being absent four months and one week. On this journey, which carried the party as far west as the Rockcastle River (May 11th) and as far north as the present Paintsville, Kentucky, they named many natural objects, such as mountains and rivers, after members of the party. Their two principal achievements were the erection of the first house built by white men between the Cumberland Mountains and the Ohio River a feat, however, which led to no important developments; and the discovery of the wonderful gap in the Alleghanies to which Walker gave the name Cumberland, in honor of the ruthless conqueror at Culloden, the "bloody duke."

In 1748 the Ohio Company was organized by Colonel Thomas Lee, president of the Virginia council, and twelve other gentlemen, of Virginia and Maryland. In their petition for five hundred thousand acres, one of the declared objects of the company was "to anticipate the French by taking possession of that country southward of the Lakes to which the French had no right . . . ." By the royal order of May 19, 1749, the company was awarded two hundred thousand acres, free of quit-rent for ten years; and the promise was made of an additional award of the remainder petitioned for, on condition of seating a hundred families upon the original grant and the building and maintaining of a fort. Christopher Gist, summoned from his remote home on the Yadkin in North Carolina, was instructed "to search out and discover the Lands upon the river Ohio & other adjoining branches of the Mississippi down as low as the great Falls thereof." In this journey, which began at Colonel Thomas Cresap's, in Maryland, in October, 1750, and ended at Gist's home on May 18, 1751, Gist visited the Lower Shawnee Town and the Lower Blue Licks, ascended Pilot Knob almost two decades before Find lay and Boone, from the same eminence, "saw with pleasure the beautiful level of Kentucky," intersected Walker's route at two points, and crossed Cumberland Mountain at Pound Gap on the return journey. This was a far more extended journey than Walker's, enabling Gist to explore the fertile valleys of the Muskingum, Scioto, and Miami rivers and to gain a view of the beautiful meadows of Kentucky.

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