Do you ever feel, when reading of the deeds of the early European navigators, who braved the perils of the trackless deep only to find on this shore a tangled "forest primeval," that our own beloved Kentucky is in every way far removed historically from them?

Since it is so interesting and edifying to find ourselves related to some noted personage, let us see if we can connect the "Dark and Bloody Ground" with the discoveries that opened up a new world.

We must go back many, many years, yes, even to the Middle Ages, if we would see how and why we are at least a small link in the great chain of events that gradually gave to the western world one of its proudest commonwealths. Some one has said, "Westward the course of empire takes its way," but for centuries the people of Europe concerned themselves not with what lay to the west of them but with the people and problems of the East. This is easy to understand when we learn that the copper, lead, tin, and manufactures of Europe were carried by traders, partly by sea and partly by land, to Constantinople or to Egypt, where they were exchanged for the luxuries that Asia had sent by vessels or camels. India and the Spice Islands sent cloves, cinnamon, ginger, pepper, mace, nutmeg, camphor, musk, aloes, and sandalwood, also diamonds and pearls. Cathay (China) sent silks, while Cipango, the island of mystery, in the great ocean east of Cathay that no one had seen, was believed to be the richest of all.

In 1453, while this exchange was at its height, the Turks conquered Constantinople, seized the caravan routes, and ruined the trade. Gold and pearls, ivory and diamonds, spices and silks, could no longer be secured unless a waterway could be found to the East.

Prince Henry the Navigator, a Portuguese, though many of his captains thought that in the torrid zone the ocean was boiling and that flames filled the air, succeeded in reaching almost to the equator before his death in 1460. In 1487, Diaz continued the work to the Cape of Good Hope. Christopher Columbus, believing the earth a sphere, thought that by sailing due westward only two thousand five hundred miles he would reach China and India. So in August, 1492, after seeking aid in vain from Portugal, England, and his own country, he braved the "Sea of Darkness" in a Spanish ship. Though some Portuguese sailors had said, "You might as well expect to find land in the sky as in that waste of waters," in October of the same year he made the discovery that gave to the world a new continent.

Then the spirit of adventure and aggrandizement dominated the Spanish race. Ponce de LeÓn, Fernando Cortez, Pizarro, and Fernando de Soto continued the work until June, 1543. Luis de Moscoso, the successor of de Soto, with a remnant of his once proud force, now reduced to about three hundred men, in boats descended the Mississippi River to its mouth; from the boats they were the first white men to behold the land that is now Kentucky.

England, so far, had been very quiet and conservative about discovering, exploring, or settling. Finally, English fishermen came to Newfoundland. Sir John Hawkins traded negroes for hides and pearls, and Sir Francis Drake ravaged the Caribbean coast and in 1577-1580 sailed around the world. Soon Sir Humphrey Gilbert attempted colonization, which was taken up by his half brother, Sir Walter Raleigh, who sent two ships under Philip Amadas and Arthur Barlowe, who discovered the coast of North Carolina. Upon their return, Queen Elizabeth named it Virginia. Kentucky was included in the charter of this first colony, which was settled at Jamestown, 1607.

The first Englishman to view what is now Kentucky was Colonel Wood, who in 1654, for commerce and not conquest, explored the northern boundary of Kentucky as far as the Mississippi River, then called the Meschacebe. Captain Bolt (or Batt) of Virginia in 1670 came from that state into what is now Kentucky. In 1673 Jacques Marquette, a Jesuit missionary, in company with Luis Joliet and five other Frenchmen in two canoes passed down the Mississippi along the western border of Kentucky and spent several days at the mouth of the Ohio, where Cairo, then called Ouabouskigou, now stands. Again in February, 1682, Robert de la Salle and his lieutenant, Henri de Tonti, in company with several other Frenchmen, descended the Illinois River, and passed down the Mississippi, or Colbert, to its mouth, claiming the country on both sides for the French king, Louis the Great, in whose honor they called this vast tract Louisiana.

It was as a prisoner among the Indians in 1730 that the first white native American, John Sailing of Virginia, was taken to Kentucky. In 1750 a party of Virginians, among them Dr. Thomas Walker, came by way of Powell's Valley through a gap in Laurel Mountain, into central Kentucky. He named both the mountain and the river (formerly the Shawnee) for England's "Bloody Duke" of Cumberland who defeated the Scottish forces at Culloden. Some say that near where they entered what is now the state of Kentucky these men built a rude cabin.

But it was left for John Finley and party, 1767, to learn and love this wonderland of fertile soil, towering forests, luxuriant vegetation, and boundless supply of game. When he returned to North Carolina with such glowing accounts of this wilderness beyond the mountains, many were ready to leave the comforts of civilization for the dangers and privations of this land of promise.