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| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 101.3 | The History Cooperative
101.3  
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September, 2005
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Reviews

Running Mad for Kentucky
Frontier Travel Accounts

Edited by Ellen Eslinger
(Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004. Pp. xiii, 288. Map, illustrations, notes, sources, index. $35.00.)

By mid-eighteenth century, private hunters and traders were tentatively probing the Kentucky country, and speculative land companies were seeking royal charters for acreage to induce settlement. In 1750, Virginian Thomas Walker's scouting expedition found a long-used wild animal and Indian trail, a natural V-shaped passage through the Cumberland Mountains near the juncture of Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee. The Wilderness Road, blazed by Daniel Boone through this Cumberland Gap, and the Ohio River became the principal trans-Appalachian gateways to the conquest and settlement of Kentucky. Together they provided the setting for one of the great migratory epics in the annals of frontier American history that opened up successive Wests across the continent. 1
      Incorporating "Mad" into the title for this volume is perhaps metaphorically overdrawn. To be sure, the movement was at times frenzied, even irrational, motivated by the need and desire of hundreds of families seeking to establish themselves on farms in this new West. This possibility became even more desirable as news trickled back east about the rich soil of Kentucky's bluegrass region. . . .
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