agent Crawford,
insisting that the operation be carried on under the guise of
hunting game." The discreet Boone, taciturn and given to keeping
his own counsel, in one instance at least deemed it advantageous
to communicate the purpose of his mission to some hunters, well
known to him, in order to secure the results of their information
in regard to the best lands they had encountered in the course of
their hunting expedition. Boone came among the hunters, known as
the "Blevens connection," at one of their Tennessee station camps
on their return from a long hunt in Kentucky, in order, as
expressed in the quaint phraseology of the period, to be
"informed of the geography and locography of these woods, saying
that he was employed to explore them by Henderson & Company." The
acquaintance which Boone on this occasion formed with a member of
the party, Henry Scaggs, the skilled hunter and explorer, was
soon to bear fruit; for shortly afterward Scaggs was employed as
prospector by the same land company. In 1764 Scaggs had passed
through Cumberland Gap and hunted for the season on the
Cumberland; and accordingly the following year, as the agent of
Richard Henderson and Company, he was despatched on an extended
exploration to the lower Cumberland, fixing his station at the
salt lick afterward known as Mansker's Lick.

Richard Henderson thus, it appears, "enlisted the Harts and
others in an enterprise which his own genius planned," says Peck,
the personal acquaintance and biographer of Boone, "and then
encouraged several hunters to explore the country and learn where
the best lands lay." Just why Henderson and his associates did
not act sooner upon the reports brought back by the
hunters--Boone and Scaggs and Callaway, who accompanied Boone in
1764 in the interest of the land company "is not known; but in
all probability the fragmentary nature of these reports, however
glowing and enthusiastic, was sufficient cause for the delay of
five years before the land company, through the agency of Boone
and Findlay, succeeded in having a thorough exploration inside of
the Kentucky region. Delay was also caused by rival claims to the
territory. In the Virginia Gazette of December 1, 1768, Henderson
must have read with astonishment not unmixed with dismay that
"the Six Nations and all their tributaries have granted a vast
extent of country to his majesty, and the Proprietaries of
Pennsylvania, and settled an advantageous boundary line be