Tidewater officials held solemn powwows with the chiefs, gave wampum strings, and forthwith incorporated.

* Chiefs blessed their white brothers who had "forever brightened the chain of friendship," departed home, and proceeded to brighten the blades of their tomahawks and to await, not long, the opportunity to use them on casual hunters who carried in their kits the compass, the "land-stealer." Usually the surveying hunter was a borderer; and on him the tomahawk descended with an accelerated gusto.
Private citizens also formed land companies and sent out surveyors, regardless of treaties.

Bold frontiersmen went into No Man's Land and staked out their claims.

In the very year when disaster turned the Boone party back, James Harrod had entered Kentucky from Pennsylvania and had marked the site of a settlement.
* The activities of the great land companies are described in Alvord's exhaustive work, "The Mississippi Valley in British Politics." Ten years earlier (1763), the King had issued the famous and much misunderstood Proclamation restricting his "loving subjects" from the lands west of the mountains.

The colonists interpreted this document as a tyrannous curtailment of their liberties for the benefit of the fur trade.