| dbo:abstract
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- A longhunter (or long hunter) was an 18th-century explorer and hunter who made expeditions into the American frontier for as much as six months at a time. Historian Emory Hamilton says that "The Long Hunter was peculiar to Southwest Virginia only, and nowhere else on any frontier did such hunts ever originate." The term, however, has been used loosely to describe any unofficial European-American explorer of the period. Most long hunts started in the Holston River Valley near Chilhowie, Virginia. The hunters came from there and the adjacent valley of the Clinch River, where they were land owners or residents. The parties of two or three men (and rarely more) usually started their hunts in October and ended toward the end of March or early in April, going west into the territory of present-day Kentucky and Tennessee. This was part of the homeland of the Cherokee people. The longhunters gathered information about the lands in the 1760s and 1770s that would prove critical to early European-American settlement in Tennessee and Kentucky. Many longhunters were employed by land surveyors seeking to claim new lands ceded to the British by the French in the Ohio Valley following the latter's defeat in the Seven Years' War. Some later helped guide settlers to what became Middle Tennessee and southeastern Kentucky. (en)
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| dbp:competencies
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- Trapping, hunting, fishing, skinning, marksmanship, self-defense, trading, canoeing, horsemanship, tracking, exploring, mental and physical toughness, wilderness survival skills, folk medicine, frontier doctoring, diplomacy, English, French, Spanish, and Native American languages (en)
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