the McAfee party, five in number, from Botetourt County,
Virginia, who between May l0th and September 1, 1773, safely
accomplished a journey through Kentucky and carefully marked
well-chosen sites for future location." An ominous incident of
the time was the veiled warning which Cornstalk, the great
Shawanoe chieftain, gave to Captain Thomas Bullitt, head of a
party of royal surveyors, sent out by Lord Dunmore, Governor of
Virginia. Cornstalk at Chillicothe, June 7, 1773, warned Bullitt
concerning the encroachments of the whites, "designed to deprive
us," he said, "of the hunting of the country, as usual . . . the
hunting we stand in need of to buy our clothing." During the
preceding summer, George Rogers Clark, an aggressive young
Virginian, with a small party, had descended the Ohio as low as
Fish Creek, where he built a cabin; and in this region for many
months various parties of surveyors were busily engaged in
locating and surveying lands covered by military grants. Most
significant of the ruthless determination of the pioneers to
occupy by force the Kentucky area was the action of the large
party from Monongahela, some forty in number, led by Captain
James Harrod, who penetrated to the present Miller County, where
in June, 1774, they made improvements and actually laid out a
town.

A significant, secretly conducted movement, of which historians
have taken but little account, was now in progress under the
manipulation of Virginia's royal governor. As early as 1770 Dr.
John Connolly proposed the establishment of an extensive colony
south of the Ohio; and the design of securing such territory from
the Indians found lodgment in the mind of Lord Dunmore. But this
design was for the moment thwarted when on October 28, 1773, an