The Story of Wise County (Virginia)

The first white man supposed to have crossed what is now Wise County and leave a written record was Captain Christopher Gist, woodland scout for George Washington.

At the time Captain Gist was commissioned to go on the long trip from Virginia down the Ohio River Valley and examine the lands, he was living on the Yadkin River in North Carolina. Prior to that time he had lived in the village of Baltimore, Maryland. He was a surveyor by profession but he liked better to live in the wilderness and trade with the Indians. He had the knack of making friends with savages and because of this trait; he was chosen to make the perilous journey for the Ohio Land Company of Virginia whose office was in Williamsburg.

Captain Gist had helped draw up treaties with the Six Nations long before Daniel Boone thought of dealing with the Cherokees of the South. It was he who served as scout for General Edward Braddock when he led his Redcoats to defeat in an attempt to rout the French and Indians from Fort Duquesne during the French and Indian War.

On October 31, 1750, Captain Gist and a Negro boy set out from Old Town on the upper Potomac River, to follow an old Indian trail across the Alleghenies. He had been told that both the French and the Indians would be his enemies and that he might have a detachment of soldiers to go with him. But he told the few members of the Ohio Land Company there at the company store in Old Town that the Indians would be suspicious of soldiers. Indians would receive him better, he said, if he took along only a Negro boy as helper.

On the way Captain Gist fell ill and friendly Indians sweated him before a roaring fire in what they called a sweathouse. He recovered and continued his journey. The Negro boy became weary with the bitter cold, the hard journey and the threat of Indians and wanted to turn back, but Captain Gist would not listen to him. He said they had a job to do and they would’ do it if possible.

After many long and trying days, Captain Gist and his companion ran into enemy Indians at the place now known as the falls above Louisville, Kentucky, and they turned eastward.

In the eastern mountains of Kentucky Captain Gist found "out-cropping" of coal. He put some of the lumps into his saddlebags and took them back to the land company in Williamsburg.

Some historians write that Thomas Jefferson was the first to make a record of the finding of coal in the mountains of Southwest Virginia-and the present State of Kentucky was then a county of Virginia. But the journal which Captain Gist kept day by day was sent to London and filed in the archives there and thus became lost to America until many years after his trip.

Early historians say that Capt. Christopher Gist crossed Pine Mountain by way of Pound Gap, camped near the present town of Pound and again on Indian Creek. On Indian Creek, he was supposed to have camped three days with Indians whose tribal name was Crane.

From Indian Creek he crossed to the headwaters of Guest River and again camped at Norton, so said Lewis P. Summers in his Annals of Southwest Virginia. Tradition has it that Guest River was named by him or for him and that Guest Station, now Coeburn, was likewise named for him...

And, being a surveyor, Gist kept a daily record of his direction of travel and the approximate distance traveled. The writer of this narrative together with Rufus M. Reed, a surveyor at Warfield, Kentucky, has thwarted Gist's course along the south side of the Ohio River and through Kentucky.

It is our finding that Gist, upon approaching the great, rugged spur in eastern Kentucky known as Pine Mountain, followed the valley alongside it to the Levisa and the Russell Forks of the Big Sandy River and thence traveled eastward through the present bounds of West Virginia to the Bluestone River and the great cliff from which, we know, he overlooked the New River.