From a posting online From E. & P. Chapman to Charles Cummins on a chat board at http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/:
'John C. Cummins left NC about 1780 to settle briefly in Botetourt County, VA, where he met Capt. Charles Gatliff and James McGuire. The three men set out to investigate Kentucky. This visit must have been around the time when Indians attacked a large group of settlers in 1786. Those settlers, known as McKnitt's company, lost twenty-one people who were slaughtered in the area between the Big and Little Laurel Rivers. Capt Charles Gatliff first married James McGuire's daughter Christiana and later married John Cummins' eldest daughter Rachel.'