716, animated with the spirit of the pioneer, led
an expedition of fifty men and a train of pack-horses to the
mountains, arduously ascended to the summit of the Blue Ridge,
and claimed the country by right of discovery in behalf of his
sovereign. In the journal of John Fontaine this vivacious account
is given of the historic episode: "I graved my name on a tree by
the river side; and the Governor buried a bottle with a paper
enclosed on which he writ that he took possession of this place
in the name and for King George the First of England. We had a
good dinner, and after it we got the men together and loaded all
their arms and we drank the King's health in Burgundy and fired a
volley, and all the rest of the Royal Family in claret and a
volley. We drank the Governor's health and fired another volley."

By this jovial picnic, which the governor afterward commemorated
by presenting to each of the gentlemen who accompanied him a
golden horseshoe, inscribed with the legend, Sic juvat
transcendere montes, Alexander Spotswood anticipated by a third
of a century the more ambitious expedition on behalf of France by
Celoron de Bienville (see Chapter III), and gave a memorable
object-lesson in the true spirit of westward expansion. During
the ensuing years it began to dawn upon the minds of men of the
stamp of William Byrd and Joshua Gee that there was imperative
need for the establishment of a chain of settlements in the
trans-Alleghany, a great human wall to withstand the advancing
wave of French influence and occupation. By the fifth decade of
the century, as we have seen, the Virginia settlers, with their
squatter's claims and tomahawk rights, had pushed on to the
mountains; and great pressure was brought to bear upon the
council to issue grants for vast tracts of land in the uncharted
wilderness of the interior.

At this period the English ministry adopted the aggressive policy
already mentioned in connection with the French and Indian war,
indicative of a determination to contest with France the right to
occupy the interior of the continent. This policy had been
inaugurated by Virginia with the express purpose of stimulating
the adoption of a similar policy by North Carolina and
Pennsylvania. Two land companies, organized almost
simultaneously, actively promoted the preliminaries necessary to
settlement, despatching parties under expert leadership to
discover the passes through the mountains and to locate the best
la