“You are to note all the Bodies of good Land as you go along, tho there is not a sufficient Quantity for the Company’s Grant, but You need not be so particular in the Mensuration of that, as in the larger Bodies of Land.
“You are to draw as good a plan as you can of the Country You pass thro: You are to take an exact and particular Journal of all Your Proceedings, and make a true Report thereof to the Ohio Company.”
Gist was the man for the business in hand. He came from an enterprising family and was well educated. His father was one of the Commissioners for laying off the city of Baltimore. “Little is known of his early life, but the evidences he has left in his journals, his maps, plats of surveys, and correspondence indicate that he enjoyed the advantages of an education superior to that of many of his calling in those early days. His signature and manuscript are characterized by the neatness and uniformity of a copy plate, while his plats and surveys are models in their mathematical exactness and precision of drawing. To this evidence of scholarly order and professional skill he added the hardy qualities of the pioneer and backwoodsman, capable of enduring the exposure of long journeys in the most rigorous weather. In him were combined the varied talents which made him at once an accomplished surveyor, an energetic farmer who felled the forest and tilled the soil, a skilful diplomat who understood the Indian character and was influential in making treaties, a brave soldier, an upright man, trusted by the highest civil and military authorities with implicit faith.”[3]
The earlier portion of Gist’s journey, which he began in October, 1750, is not of importance in the present monograph. He reached the Ohio River by way of the Juniata and Kiskiminitas Rivers. Crossing the Ohio he worked his way westward on the Great Trail to the “Crossing Place of the Muskingum” (Bolivar, Ohio), and from thence he traversed the Indian trail to the country of the Shawanese and Miamis.
It was not until Tuesday, the twelfth of March, that Gist again crossed the Ohio, and entered what is now the state of Kentucky. His first day’s experience was typical—in a land so well known for great things and strong; for on the day after crossing at the Shawanese Shannoah Town, he found two men who had “Two of the Teeth of a large Beast.... The Rib Bones of the largest of these Beasts were eleven Feet long, and the Skull Bone six Feet wide, across the Forehead, & the other Bones in Proportion; and that there were several Teeth there, some of which he called Horns, and said they were upwards of five Feet long, and as much as a Man could well carry.”
Gist was now in Kentucky—the land of which thousands were waiting to hear, the home of the race that was to come and conquer and settle and hold the West. Of it Gist came to know only a little, but this little was the beginning of a revelation.
After crossing the Ohio, Gist journeyed over a hundred miles down the southern bank of the river, and on March eighteenth crossed “the lower Salt Lick Creek,” the Licking River. Reports of Indians at the “Falls” and “the footsteps of some Indians plain on the Ground” made him desist from visiting that spot, but he took down descriptions of it. On the nineteenth he turned southward into the interior. On the twentieth he ascended Pilot Knob, near Clay City, Powell County, and writes of the view from that height from which he saw, as John Finley wrote later, “with pleasure the beautiful level of Kentucky.”
With but a glimpse of the good lands of Kentucky, Gist, like Walker before him, journeyed into the mountainous country to the southeast. For a month he floundered around in the desolate laurel ridges where Walker had spent so many distressing days the year before. On Red River Gist crossed Walker’s route and came on homeward between Walker’s outward and homeward courses. From Red River he went through Pound Gap and eastward, down what is known as Gist’s or Guesse’s Fork of the Clinch in Wise County, Virginia, and then upon Bluestone, a tributary of New River. On the thirteenth of May he crossed Walker’s route again at Inglis Ferry, near Draper’s Meadows. On the seventeenth he passed into North Carolina through Flower or Wood’s Gap toward his home on the Yadkin. He reached home on the eighteenth and found that his family had removed to Roanoke, thirty-five miles eastward, because of depredations of the Indians during the winter.
Gist’s journey was far more successful than Walker’s. He found the fine fertile valleys of the Muskingum, Scioto, and Miami Rivers north of the Ohio, and he caught a glimpse of the beautiful meadows of Kentucky. He singularly made a complete circle about the land between the Monongahela and Kanawha Rivers, where the Ohio Company’s grant of land was made. As he did not approach it on any side it is probable that he knew that only rough land lay there. Had it not been for the sudden breaking out of the old French War, the Ohio Company would undoubtedly have settled on lands in the Ohio Valley according to Gist’s advice. Hostilities on the frontier soon drove back the farther settlements, and rendered activities in the land Gist had discovered out of the question, either on the part of land companies or private individuals.