In 1748 and 1750, Thomas Walker crossed the mountains and explored the Holston River valley, recording and widely publicizing the location of Cumberland Gap—a pass near the modern border of Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

[2] In 1761, Elisha Wallen (spelled variously "Walden", "Wallin", and "Walling") led the first major recorded long hunt into what is now Tennessee.

That same year, Colonel Adam Stephen led regiments of Virginia and North Carolina soldiers to Long Island of the Holston, in what is now Sullivan County, Tennessee.

The expedition was to act in conjunction with a combined British and South Carolina force commanded by Lieutenant Colonel James Grant.

After the Anglo-Cherokee War, longhunters (some of whom may have been veterans of Stephen's expedition) began crossing the Appalachians into Tennessee and Kentucky in greater numbers.

[10] Stone returned to the Cumberland valley in 1769, along with fellow hunters Kasper Mansker, Isaac and Abraham Bledsoe, Joseph Drake, and Robert Crockett.

The French wanted the region to connect their holdings in Canada with Illinois Country and New Orleans, and the British sought to establish a foothold in the Ohio Valley.

French commander Pierre-Joseph Celoron de Blainville conducted maneuvers in 1749 that discouraged British trade west of the Appalachians, although American colonial land speculators remained interested in the region.

The French departure and a relative state of peace with the Cherokee during the same period opened up the region to explorers and hunters from the Thirteen Colonies.

[16] John and Samuel Pringle, two deserters from Fort Pitt, spent much of the early 1760s hunting in the Tygart Valley and likely ranged into what is now Kentucky.

Around the same time, an expedition led by Benjamin Cutbirth crossed Cumberland Gap and pushed all the way to the Mississippi River, where they shipped the pelts they had collected down to New Orleans.

Finley told Boone of the natural splendor of Kentucky's Bluegrass region, which he had visited as a merchant before the French and Indian War.

The following year, the two led an expedition into Kentucky, traveling up the Rockcastle River and establishing a station camp at Red Lick Fork.