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.
It is eminently significant of the spirit of the age, which was inaugurating an era of land hunger unparalleled in American history, that the first authentic records of the trans-Alleghany were made by surveyors who visited the country as the agents of great land companies.

The outbreak of the French and Indian War so soon afterward delayed for a decade and more any important colonization of the West.

Indeed, the explorations and findings of Walker and Gist were almost unknown, even to the companies they represented.

But the conclusion of peace in 1763, which gave all the region between the mountains and the Mississippi to the British, heralded the true beginning of the westward expansionist movement in the Old Southwest, and inaugurated the constructive leadership of North Carolina in f he occupation and colonization of the imperial domain of Kentucky and the Ohio Valley.
In the middle years of the century many families of Virginia gentry removed to the back country of North Carolina in the fertile region ranging from Williamsborough on the east to Hillsborough on the west.

There soon arose in this section of the colony a society marked by intellectual distinction, social graces, and the leisured dignity of the landlord and the large planter.