He was imprisoned by the French in New Orleans on charges of spying and escaped together with another prisoner, taking eight months to finally reach his home in Virginia.

Salling was born in the Palatinate region of the Holy Roman Empire to Niclaus Sallin and Salome Johanna, Huguenots from Kaiserslautern, Germany.

He later wrote in his journal: "In the year 1740, I came from Pennsylvania to the part of Orange County now called Augusta; and settled in a fork of James River close under the Blue Ridge Mountains of the West Side, where I now live.

[7] In December of that year, the militia engaged in combat with an Iroquois war party at the Battle of Galudoghson, not far from Salling's homestead.

[10] The group left Salling's home on 16 March 1742 and, after visiting the Natural Bridge, traveled over 250 miles down the New River in a boat they manufactured using buffalo hide, until it became too dangerous to navigate.

He obtained a file from a guard and used it to cut his chains and those of another prisoner (a French Creole named Baudran, as referenced in Vaudreuil's letter of 1744).

After traveling 60 miles across Lake Pontchartrain and up the Pearl River, they reached the land of an unnamed Native American tribe (probably Choctaws) where they stayed with Baudran's father for two months and ten days, during which the French conducted an intensive manhunt.

Salling, Baudran and another Frenchman traveled by boat along the coast to Choctawhatchee Bay, then went overland to Augusta in the Province of Georgia, arriving in March 1745.

The French set Salling and eleven other men adrift in a small boat, in which they were able to return to Charles Town on 15 April 1745.

[18] In November 1753, Salling and his son George were part of a work crew constructing a connecting road near his home, under the supervision of John Mathews.

Fry sent his transcribed copy to Governor Lewis Burwell in 1751, and used the journal and information he obtained verbally from Salling to create a 1752 map of Virginia.

[24] Geographer John Mitchell used information from Salling's journal to complete his 1755 "Map of the British and French dominions in North America".

He claims in his letter that the original purpose of his trip to the Mississippi was to broker a peace treaty between the Colony of Virginia and the Indian tribes.

Draper reports that Salling and his family moved to Williamsburg after 1735, where he was employed as a weaver, and that he met Thomas Marlin or Morlin, a trader who had recently visited western Virginia.

[27]: 535–36 Withers states that, while traveling with Marlin, Salling was captured by Native Americans and spent several years as a captive of either Choctaw or Cherokee Indians in Tennessee.

He eventually made his way to Fort Frontenac in Canada, where he was freed and sent to New York, after which he returned to Virginia, arriving just as his wife was preparing to marry another man.