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.