Their itinerary may be traced from the names given to natural objects in honor of members of the party--Walden's Mountain and Walden's Creek, Scaggs' Ridge and Newman's Ridge.

Following the peace of 1763, which made travel in this region moderately safe once more, the English proceeded to occupy the territory which they had won.

In 1765 George Croghan with a small party, on the way to prepare the inhabitants of the Illinois country for transfer to English sovereignty, visited the Great Bone Licks of Kentucky (May 30th, 31st); and a year later Captain Harry Gordon, chief engineer in the Western Department in North America, visited and minutely described the same licks and the falls.

But these, and numerous other water-journeys and expeditions of which no records were kept, though interesting enough in themselves, had little bearing upon the larger phases of westward expansion and colonization.
The decade opening with the year 1765 is the epoch of bold and ever bolder exploration--the more adventurous frontiersmen of the border pushing deep into the wilderness in search of game, lured on by the excitements of the chase and the profit to be derived from the sale of peltries.

In midsummer, 1766, Captain James Smith, Joshua Horton, Uriah Stone, William Baker, and a young mulatto slave passed through Cumberland Gap, hunted through the country south of the Cherokee and along the Cumberland and Tennessee rivers, and as Smith reports "found no vestige of any white man." During the same year a party of five hunters from South Carolina, led by Isaac Lindsey, penetrated the Kentucky wilderness to the tributary of the Cumberland, named Stone's River by the former party, for one of their number.