Some forty men led by Harrod and Sowdowsky[50] founded Harrodsburg, where they built cabins and sowed corn; but the Indians killed one of their number, and the rest dispersed.

Some returned across the mountains; but Sowdowsky and another went through the woods to the Cumberland River, where they built a canoe, paddled down the muddy Mississippi between unending reaches of lonely marsh and forest, and from New Orleans took ship to Virginia.
At that time, among other parties of surveyors there was one which had been sent by Lord Dunmore to the Falls of the Ohio.

When the war broke out between the Shawnees and the Virginians, Lord Dunmore, being very anxious for the fate of these surveyors, sent Boon and Stoner to pilot them in; which the two bush veterans accordingly did, making the round trip of 800 miles in 64 days.

The outbreak of the Indian war caused all the hunters and surveyors to leave Kentucky; and at the end of 1774 there were no whites left, either there or in what is now middle Tennessee.

But on the frontier all men's eyes were turned towards these new and fertile regions.