throughout the Appalachians. He was probably the first European to visit modern West Virginia and cross the Cumberland Gap. In 1750, Dr. Thomas Walker, an investor in the Loyal Land Company, with five companions, made a famous exploration through the Cumberland Gap and into eastern Kentucky. The Loyal Land Company settled people in southwest Virginia, but not Kentucky. In 1769, Virginia longhunter and explorer Joseph Martin made the first of several forays into the region. Acting as an agent for Dr. Thomas Walker, to whom Martin was connected through family relationships, Martin began an expedition to Powell's Valley in early 1769 in return for a promised land grant from Walker and the Loyal Land Company. Martin and his men built the earliest westernmost frontier fort at present-day Rose Hill, Virginia, a fort dubbed Martin's Station. Later that year Indians chased off Martin and his men, who returned to Albemarle County. Martin returned six years later to rebuild the fort, and a few months later became an agent for Richard Henderson's Transylvania Company. In 1774, Richard Henderson, a judge from North Carolina, organized a land speculation company with a number of other prominent North Carolinians called the Transylvania Company. The men hoped to purchase land from the Cherokees on the Kentucky side of the Appalachian Mountains and establish a British proprietary colony. Henderson hired Daniel Boone, an experienced hunter who had explored Kentucky, to blaze a trail through the Cumberland Gap into central Kentucky. Boone, the trailblazer The Appalachian Mountains form a natural barrier to east–west travel. From New York to Georgia there are only five ways to travel to the west, with only three natural interior breaks allowing animal powered travel without great engineering works. These were the Gaps of the Allegheny and the several ways such as the Kittanning Paths in Pennsylvania, the Cumberland Narrows in northwestern Maryland host to Nemacolin's Path, and the Cumberland Gap in the four-state region of North Carolina and Virginia on the east side and through the gap, Tennessee and Kentucky. While late 19th and 20th century technologies would later bridge the mountain chain in other places, these all required significant civil engineering works to make a road bed past the barrier range geologist classify as the ridge-and-valley Appalachians. Settlers from Pennsylvania tended to migrate south along the Great Wagon Road through the Great Appalachian Valley and Shenandoah Valley. Daniel Boone was from Pennsylvania