CHAPTER VII.

¹The activities of the great land companies are described in Alvord's exhaustive work,The Mississippi Valley in British Politics.

Ten years earlier (1763), the King had issued the famous and much misunderstood Proclamation restricting his “loving subjects” from the lands west of the mountains. The colonists interpreted this document as a tyrannous curtailment of their liberties for the benefit of the fur trade. We know now that the portion of this Proclamation relating to western settlement was a wise provisiondesigned to protect the settlers on the frontier by allaying the suspicions of the Indians, who viewed with apprehension the triumphal occupation of that vast territory from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico by the colonizing English. By seeking to compel all land purchase to be made through the Crown, it was designed likewise to protect the Indians from “whisky purchase,” and to make impossible the transfer of their lands except with consent of the Indian Council, or full quota of headmen, whose joint action alone conveyed what the tribes considered to be legal title. Sales made according to this form, Sir William Johnson declared to the Lords of Trade, he had never known to be repudiated by the Indians. This paragraph of the Proclamation was in substance an embodiment of Johnson's suggestions to the Lords of Trade. Its purpose was square dealing and pacification; and shrewd men such as Washington recognized that it was not intended as a final check to expansion. “A temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians,” Washington called it, and then himself went out along the Great Kanawha and into Kentucky, surveying land.

It will be asked what had become of the Ohio Company of Virginia and that fort at the Forks ofthe Ohio, once a bone of contention between France and England. Fort Pitt, as it was now called, had fallen foul of another dispute, this time between Virginia and Pennsylvania. Virginia claimed that the far western corner of her boundary ascended just far enough north to take in Fort Pitt. Pennsylvania asserted that it did nothing of the sort. The Ohio Company had meanwhile been merged into the Walpole Company. George Croghan, at Fort Pitt, was the Company's agent and as such was accused by Pennsylvania of favoring from ulterior motives the claims of Virginia. Hotheads in both colonies asseverated that the Indians were secretly being stirred up in connection with the boundary disputes. If it does not very clearly appear how an Indian rising would have settled the ownership of Fort Pitt, it is evident enough where the interests of Virginia and Pennsylvania clashed. Virginia wanted land for settlement and speculation; Pennsylvania wanted the Indians left in possession for the benefit of the fur trade. So far from stirring up the Indians, as his enemies declared, Croghan was as usual giving away all his substance to keep them quiet. ¹ Indeed,during this summer of 1774, eleven hundred Indians were encamped about Fort Pitt visiting him.

¹The suspicion that Croghan and Lord Dunmore, the Governor of Virginia, were instigating the war appears to have arisen out of the conduct of Dr. John Connolly, Dunmore's agent and Croghan's nephew. Croghan had induced the Shawanoes to bring under escort to Fort Pitt certain English traders resident in the Indian towns. The escort was fired on by militiamen under command of Connolly, who also issued a proclamation declaring a state of war to exist. Connolly, however, probably acted on his own initiative. He was interested in land on his own behalf and was by no means the only man at that time who was ready to commit outrages on Indians in order to obtain it. As Croghan lamented, there was “too great a spirit in the frontier people for killing Indians.”

Two hundred thousand acres in the West—Kentucky and West Virginia—had been promised to the colonial officers and soldiers who fought in the Seven Years' War. But after making the Proclamation the British Government had delayed issuing the patents. Washington interested himself in trying to secure them; and Lord Dunmore, who also had caught the “land-fever,” ² prodded the British authorities but won only rebuke for his inconvenient activities. Insistent, however, Dunmore sent out parties of surveyors to fix the bounds of the soldiers' claims. James Harrod, Captain Thomas Bullitt, Hancock Taylor, and three McAfee brothers entered Kentucky, by the Ohio, under Dunmore's orders. John Floyd went in bythe Kanawha as Washington's agent. A bird's-eye view of that period would disclose to us very few indeed of His Majesty's loving subjects who were paying any attention to his proclamation. Early in 1774, Harrod began the building of cabins and a fort, and planted corn on the site of Harrodsburg. Thus to him and not to Boone fell the honor of founding the first permanent white settlement in Kentucky.

²See Alvord,The Mississippi Valley in British Politics,vol. II, pp. 191-94.

When summer came, its thick verdure proffering ambuscade, the air hung tense along the border. Traders had sent in word that Shawanoes, Delawares, Mingos, Wyandots, and Cherokees were refusing all other exchange than rifles, ammunition, knives, and hatchets. White men were shot down in their fields from ambush. Dead Indians lay among their own young corn, their scalp locks taken. There were men of both races who wanted war and meant to have it—and with it the land.

Lord Dunmore, the Governor, resolved that, if war were inevitable, it should be fought out in the Indian country. With this intent, he wrote to Colonel Andrew Lewis of Botetourt County, Commander of the Southwest Militia, instructing himto raise a respectable body of troops and “join me either at the mouth of the Great Kanawha or Wheeling, or such other part of the Ohio as may be most convenient for you to meet me.” The Governor himself with a force of twelve hundred proceeded to Fort Pitt, where Croghan, as we have seen, was extending his hospitality to eleven hundred warriors from the disaffected tribes.

On receipt of the Governor's letter, Andrew Lewis sent out expresses to his brother Colonel Charles Lewis, County Lieutenant of Augusta, and to Colonel William Preston, County Lieutenant of Fincastle, to raise men and bring them with all speed to the rendezvous at Camp Union (Lewisburg) on the Big Levels of the Greenbrier (West Virginia). Andrew Lewis summoned these officers to an expedition for “reducing our inveterate enemies to reason.” Preston called for volunteers to take advantage of “the opportunity we have so long wished for… this useless People may now at last be Oblidged to abandon their country.” These men were among not only the bravest but the best of their time; but this was their view of the Indian and his alleged rights. To eliminate this “useless people,” inveterate enemies of the white race, was, as they saw it, a political necessityand a religious duty. And we today who profit by their deeds dare not condemn them.

Fervor less solemn was aroused in other quarters by Dunmore's call to arms. At Wheeling, some eighty or ninety young adventurers, in charge of Captain Michael Cresap of Maryland, were waiting for the freshets to sweep them down the Ohio into Kentucky. When the news reached them, they greeted it with the wild monotone chant and the ceremonies preliminary to Indian warfare. They planted the war pole, stripped and painted themselves, and starting the war dance called on Cresap to be their “white leader.” The captain, however, declined; but in that wild circling line was one who was a white leader indeed. He was a sandy-haired boy of twenty—one of the bold race of English Virginians, rugged and of fiery countenance, with blue eyes intense of glance and deep set under a high brow that, while modeled for power, seemed threatened in its promise by the too sensitive chiseling of his lips. With every nerve straining for the fray, with thudding of feet and crooning of the blood song, he wheeled with those other mad spirits round the war pole till the set of sun closed the rites. “That evening two scalps were brought into camp,” so a letter of his reads.Does the bold savage color of this picture affright us? Would we veil it? Then we should lose something of the true lineaments of George Rogers Clark, who, within four short years, was to lead a tiny army of tattered and starving backwoodsmen, ashamed to quail where he never flinched, through barrens and icy floods to the conquest of Illinois for the United States.

Though Cresap had rejected the rôle of “white leader,” he did not escape the touch of infamy. “Cresap's War” was the name the Indians gave to the bloody encounters between small parties of whites and Indians, which followed on that war dance and scalping, during the summer months. One of these encounters must be detailed here because history has assigned it as the immediate cause of Dunmore's War.

Greathouse, Sapperton, and King, three traders who had a post on Yellow Creek, a tributary of the Ohio fifty miles below Pittsburgh, invited several Indians from across the stream to come and drink with them and their friends. Among the Indians were two or three men of importance in the Mingo tribe. There were also some women, one of whom was the Indian wife of Colonel John Gibson, an educated man who had distinguished himself asa soldier with Forbes in 1758. That the Indians came in amity and apprehended no treachery was proved by the presence of the women. Gibson's wife carried her half-caste baby in her shawl. The disreputable traders plied their guests with drink to the point of intoxication and then murdered them. King shot the first man and, when he fell, cut his throat, saying that he had served many a deer in that fashion. Gibson's Indian wife fled and was shot down in the clearing. A man followed to dispatch her and her baby. She held the child up to him pleading, with her last breath, that he would spare it because it was not Indian but “one of yours.” The mother dead, the child was later sent to Gibson. Twelve Indians in all were killed.

Meanwhile Croghan had persuaded the Iroquois to peace. With the help of David Zeisberger, the Moravian missionary, and White Eyes, a Delaware chief, he and Dunmore had won over the Delaware warriors. In the Cherokee councils, Oconostota demanded that the treaty of peace signed in 1761 be kept. The Shawanoes, however, led by Cornstalk, were implacable; and they had as allies the Ottawas and Mingos, who had entered the council with them.

A famous chief of the day and one of great influence over the Indians, and also among the white officials who dealt with Indian affairs, was Tach-nech-dor-us, or Branching Oak of the Forest, a Mingo who had taken the name of Logan out of compliment to James Logan of Pennsylvania. Chief Logan had recently met with so much reproach from his red brothers for his loyalty to the whites that he had departed from the Mingo town at Yellow Creek. But, learning that his tribe had determined to assist the Shawanoes and had already taken some white scalps, he repaired to the place where the Mingos were holding their war council to exert his powers for peace. There, in presence of the warriors, after swaying them from their purpose by those oratorical gifts which gave him his influence and his renown, he took the war hatchet that had already killed, and buried it in proof that vengeance was appeased. Upon this scene there entered a Mingo from Yellow Creek with the news of the murders committed there by the three traders. The Indian whose throat had been slit as King had served deer was Logan's brother. Another man slain was his kinsman. The woman with the baby was his sister. Logan tore up from the earth the bloody tomahawk and,raising it above his head, swore that he would not rest till he had taken ten white lives to pay for each one of his kin. Again the Mingo warriors declared for war and this time were not dissuaded. But Logan did not join this red army. He went out alone to wreak his vengeance, slaying and scalping.

Meanwhile Dunmore prepared to push the war with the utmost vigor. His first concern was to recall the surveying parties from Kentucky, and for so hazardous an errand he needed the services of a man whose endurance, speed, and woodcraft were equal to those of any Indian scout afoot. Through Colonel Preston, his orders were conveyed to Daniel Boone, for Boone's fame had now spread from the border to the tidewater regions. It was stated that “Boone would lose no time,” and “if they are alive, it is indisputable but Boone must find them.”

So Boone set out in company with Michael Stoner, another expert woodsman. His general instructions were to go down the Kentucky River to Preston's Salt Lick and across country to the Falls of the Ohio, and thence home by Gaspar's Lick on the Cumberland River. Indian war parties were moving under cover across “the Darkand Bloody Ground” to surround the various groups of surveyors still at large and to exterminate them. Boone made his journey successfully. He found John Floyd, who was surveying for Washington; he sped up to where Harrod and his band were building cabins and sent them out, just in time as it happened; he reached all the outposts of Thomas Bullitt's party, only one of whom fell a victim to the foe; ¹ and, undetected by the Indians, he brought himself and Stoner home in safety, after covering eight hundred miles in sixty-one days.

¹Hancock Taylor, who delayed in getting out of the country and was cut off.

Harrod and his homesteaders immediately enlisted in the army. How eager Boone was to go with the forces under Lewis is seen in the official correspondence relative to Dunmore's War. Floyd wanted Boone's help in raising a company: “Captain Bledsoe says that Boone has more [influence] than any man now disengaged; and you know what Boone has done for me… for which reason I love the man.” Even the border, it would seem, had its species of pacifists who were willing to let others take risks for them, for men hung back from recruiting, and desertions were the order of the day. Major Arthur Campbell hit upon a solutionof the difficulties in West Fincastle. He was convinced that Boone could raise a company and hold the men loyal. And Boone did.

For some reason, however, Daniel's desire to march with the army was denied. Perhaps it was because just such a man as he—and, indeed, there was no other—was needed to guard the settlement. Presently he was put in command of Moore's Fort in Clinch Valley, and his “diligence” received official approbation. A little later the inhabitants of the valley sent out a petition to have Boone made a “captain” and given supreme command of the lower forts. The settlers demanded Boone's promotion for their own security.

The land it is good, it is just to our mind,Each will have his part if his Lordship be kind,The Ohio once ours, we'll live at our ease,With a bottle and glass to drink when we please.

The land it is good, it is just to our mind,

Each will have his part if his Lordship be kind,

The Ohio once ours, we'll live at our ease,

With a bottle and glass to drink when we please.

So sang the army poet, thus giving voice, as bards should ever do, to the theme nearest the hearts of his hearers—in this case, Land! Presumably his ditty was composed on the eve of the march from Lewisburg, for it is found in a soldier's diary.

On the evening of October 9, 1774, Andrew Lewis with his force of eleven hundred frontiersmenwas encamped on Point Pleasant at the junction of the Great Kanawha with the Ohio. Dunmore in the meantime had led his forces into Ohio and had erected Fort Gower at the mouth of the Hockhocking River, where he waited for word from Andrew Lewis. ¹

¹It has been customary to ascribe to Lord Dunmore motives of treachery in failing to make connections with Lewis; but no real evidence has been advanced to support any of the charges made against him by local historians. The charges were, as Theodore Roosevelt says, “an afterthought.” Dunmore was a King's man in the Revolution; and yet in March, 1775, the Convention of the Colony of Virginia, assembled in opposition to the royal party, resolved: “The most cordial thanks of the people of this colony are a tribute justly due to our worthy Governor, Lord Dunmore, for his truly noble, wise, and spirited conduct which at once evinces his Excellency's attention to the true interests of this colony, and a zeal in the executive department which no dangers can divert, or difficulties hinder, from achieving the most important services to the people who have the happiness to live under his administration.” (SeeAmerican Archives,Fourth Series, vol. II, p. 170.) Similar resolutions were passed by his officers on the march home from Ohio; at the same time, the officers passed resolutions in sympathy with the American cause. Yet it was Andrew Lewis who later drove Dunmore from Virginia. Well might Dunmore exclaim, “That it should ever come to this!”

The movements of the two armies were being observed by scouts from the force of red warriors gathered in Ohio under the great leader of the Shawanoes. Cornstalk purposed to isolate the two armies of his enemy and to crush them in turn before they could come together. His first move was to launch an attack on Lewis at PointPleasant. In the dark of night, Cornstalk's Indians crossed the Ohio on rafts, intending to surprise the white man's camp at dawn. They would have succeeded but for the chance that three or four of the frontiersmen, who had risen before daybreak to hunt, came upon the Indians creeping towards the camp. Shots were exchanged. An Indian and a white man dropped. The firing roused the camp. Three hundred men in two lines under Charles Lewis and William Fleming sallied forth expecting to engage the vanguard of the enemy but encountered almost the whole force of from eight hundred to a thousand Indians before the rest of the army could come into action. Both officers were wounded, Charles Lewis fatally. The battle, which continued from dawn until an hour before sunset, was the bloodiest in Virginia's long series of Indian wars. The frontiersmen fought as such men ever fought—with the daring, bravery, swiftness of attack, and skill in taking cover which were the tactics of their day, even as at a later time many of these same men fought at King's Mountain and in Illinois the battles that did so much to turn the tide in the Revolution. ²

²With Andrew Lewis on this day were Isaac Shelby and William Campbell, the victorious leaders at King's Mountain, James Robertson, the “father of Tennessee,” Valentine Sevier, Daniel Morgan, hero of the Cowpens, Major Arthur Campbell, Benjamin Logan, Anthony Bledsoe, and Simon Kenton. With Dunmore's force were Adam Stephen, who distinguished himself at the Brandywine, George Rogers Clark, John Stuart, already noted through the Cherokee wars, and John Montgomery, later one of Clark's four captains in Illinois. The two last mentioned were Highlanders. Clark's Illinois force was largely recruited from the troops who fought at Point Pleasant.

Colonel Preston wrote to Patrick Henry that the enemy behaved with “inconceivable bravery,” the head men walking about in the time of action exhorting their men to “lie close, shoot well, be strong, and fight.” The Shawanoes ran up to the muzzles of the English guns, disputing every foot of ground. Both sides knew well what they were fighting for—the rich land held in a semicircle by the Beautiful River.

Shortly before sundown the Indians, mistaking a flank movement by Shelby's contingent for the arrival of reinforcements, retreated across the Ohio. Many of their most noted warriors had fallen and among them the Shawano chief, Puck-e-shin-wa, father of a famous son, Tecumseh. ¹ Yet they were unwilling to accept defeat. When they heard that Dunmore was now marching overland to cut them off from their towns, their fury blazed anew. “Shall we first kill all our women and children and thenfight till we ourselves are slain?” Cornstalk, in irony, demanded of them; “No? Then I will go and make peace.”

¹Thwaites,Documentary History of Dunmore's War.

By the treaty compacted between the chiefs and Lord Dunmore, the Indians gave up all claim to the lands south of the Ohio, even for hunting, and agreed to allow boats to pass unmolested. In this treaty the Mingos refused to join, and a detachment of Dunmore's troops made a punitive expedition to their towns. Some discord arose between Dunmore and Lewis's frontier forces because, since the Shawanoes had made peace, the Governor would not allow the frontiersmen to destroy the Shawano towns.

Of all the chiefs, Logan alone still held aloof. Major Gibson undertook to fetch him, but Logan refused to come to the treaty grounds. He sent by Gibson the short speech which has lived as an example of the best Indian oratory:

I appeal to any white man to say if ever he entered Logan's cabin hungry and he gave him not meat: if ever he came cold and naked and he clothed him not. During the course of the last long and bloody war, Logan remained idle in his cabin, an advocate for peace. Such was my love for the whites that my countrymen pointed as they passed and said, “Logan is the friend of the white men.” I had even thought to have livedwith you but for the injuries of one man. Colonel Cresap, the last spring, in cold blood and unprovoked, murdered all the relations of Logan, not even sparing my women and children. There remains not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living creature. This called on me for revenge. I have sought it; I have killed many; I have fully glutted my vengeance: for my country I rejoice at the beams of peace. But do not harbor a thought that mine is the joy of fear. Logan never felt fear. He will not turn on his heel to save his life. Who is there to mourn for Logan? Not one. ¹

¹Some writers have questioned the authenticity of Logan's speech, inclining to think that Gibson himself composed it, partly because of the biblical suggestion in the first few lines. That Gibson gave biblical phraseology to these lines is apparent, though, as Adair points out there are many examples of similitude in Indian and biblical expression. But the thought is Indian and relates to the first article of the Indian's creed, namely, to share his food with the needy. “There remains not a drop of my blood in the veins of any living creature” is a truly Indian lament. Evidently the final four lines of the speech are the most literally translated, for they have the form and the primitive rhythmic beat which a student of Indian poetry quickly recognizes. The authenticity of the speech, as well as the innocence of Cresap, whom Logan mistakenly accused, was vouched for by George Rogers Clark in a letter to Dr. Samuel Brown dated June 17, 1798. See Jefferson papers, Series 5, quoted by English,Conquest of the Country Northwest of the River Ohio,vol. II. p. 1029.

By rivers and trails, in large and small companies, started home the army that had won the land. The West Fincastle troops, from the lower settlements of the Clinch and Holston valleys, were to return by the Kentucky River, while those fromthe upper valley would take the shorter way up Sandy Creek. To keep them in provisions during the journey it was ordered that hunters be sent out along these routes to kill and barbecue meat and place it on scaffolds at appropriate spots.

The way home by the Kentucky was a long road for weary and wounded men with hunger gnawing under their belts. We know who swung out along the trail to provide for that little band, “dressed in deerskins colored black, and his hair plaited and bobbed up.” It was Daniel Boone—now, by popular demand, Captain Boone—just “discharged from Service,” since the valley forts needed him no longer. Once more only a hunter, he went his way over Walden Mountain—past his son's grave marking the place wherehehad been turned back—to serve the men who had opened the gates.

The Dark And Bloody Ground

Withthe coming of spring Daniel Boone's desire, so long cherished and deferred, to make a way for his neighbors through the wilderness was to be fulfilled at last. But ere his ax could slash the thickets from the homeseekers' path, more than two hundred settlers had entered Kentucky by the northern waterways. Eighty or more of these settled at Harrodsburg, where Harrod was laying out his town on a generous plan, with “in-lots” of half an acre and “out-lots” of larger size. Among those associated with Harrod was George Rogers Clark, who had surveyed claims for himself during the year before the war.

While over two hundred colonists were picking out home sites wherever their pleasure or prudence dictated, a gigantic land promotion scheme—involving the very tracts where they were sowing their first corn—was being set afoot in NorthCarolina by a body of men who figure in the early history of Kentucky as the Transylvania Company. The leader of this organization was Judge Richard Henderson. ¹ Judge Henderson dreamed a big dream. His castle in the air had imperial proportions. He resolved, in short, to purchase from the Cherokee Indians the larger part of Kentucky and to establish there a colony after the manner and the economic form of the English Lords Proprietors, whose day in America was so nearly done. Though in the light of history the plan loses none of its dramatic features, it shows the practical defects that must surely have prevented its realization. Like many another Cæsar hungering for empire and staking all to win it, the prospective lord of Kentucky, as we shall see, had left the human equation out of his calculations.

¹Richard Henderson (1734-1785) was the son of the High Sheriff of Granville County. At first an assistant to his father, he studied law and soon achieved a reputation by the brilliance of his mind and the magnetism of his personality. As presiding Judge at Hillsborough he had come into conflict with the violent element among the Regulators, who had driven him from the court and burned his house and barns. For some time prior to his elevation to the bench, he had been engaged in land speculations. One of Boone's biographers suggests that Boone may have been secretly acting as Henderson's agent during his first lonely explorations of Kentucky. However this may be, it does not appear that Boone and his Yadkin neighbors were acting with Henderson when in September, 1773, they made their first attempt to enter Kentucky as settlers.

Richard Henderson had known Daniel Boone on the Yadkin; and it was Boone's detailed reports of the marvelous richness and beauty of Kentucky which had inspired him to formulate his gigantic scheme and had enabled him also to win to his support several men of prominence in the Back Country. To sound the Cherokees regarding the purchase and to arrange, if possible, for a conference, Henderson dispatched Boone to the Indian towns in the early days of 1775.

Since we have just learned that Dunmore's War compelled the Shawanoes and their allies to relinquish their right to Kentucky, that, both before and after that event, government surveyors were in the territory surveying for the soldiers' claims, and that private individuals had already laid out town sites and staked holdings, it may be asked what right of ownership the Cherokees possessed in Kentucky, that Henderson desired to purchase it of them. The Indian title to Kentucky seems to have been hardly less vague to the red men than it was to the whites. Several of the nations had laid claim to the territory. As late as 1753, it will be remembered, the Shawanoes had occupied a town at Blue Licks, for John Findlay had been taken there by some of them. But, before Findlayguided Boone through the Gap in 1769, the Shawanoes had been driven out by the Iroquois, who claimed suzerainty over them as well as over the Cherokees. In 1768, the Iroquois had ceded Kentucky to the British Crown by the treaty of Fort Stanwix; whereupon the Cherokees had protested so vociferously that the Crown's Indian agent, to quiet them, had signed a collateral agreement with them. Though claimed by many, Kentucky was by common consent not inhabited by any of the tribes. It was the great Middle Ground where the Indians hunted. It was the Warriors' Path over which they rode from north and south to slaughter and where many of their fiercest encounters took place. However shadowy the title which Henderson purposed to buy, there was one all-sufficing reason why he must come to terms with the Cherokees: their northernmost towns in Tennessee lay only fifty or sixty miles below Cumberland Gap and hence commanded the route over which he must lead colonists into his empire beyond the hills.

The conference took place early in March, 1775, at the Sycamore Shoals of the Watauga River. Twelve hundred Indians, led by their “town chiefs”—among whom were the old warrior and the old statesman of their nation, Oconostota andAttakullakulla—came to the treaty grounds and were received by Henderson and his associates and several hundred white men who were eager for a chance to settle on new lands. Though Boone was now on his way into Kentucky for the Transylvania Company, other border leaders of renown or with their fame still to win were present, and among them James Robertson, of serious mien, and that blond gay knight in buckskin, John Sevier.

It is a dramatic picture we evolve for ourselves from the meager narratives of this event—a mass of painted Indians moving through the sycamores by the bright water, to come presently into a tense, immobile semicircle before the large group of armed frontiersmen seated or standing about Richard Henderson, the man with the imperial dream, the ready speaker whose flashing eyes and glowing oratory won the hearts of all who came under their sway. What though the Cherokee title be a flimsy one at best and the price offered for it a bagatelle! The spirit of Forward March! is there in that great canvas framed by forest and sky. The somber note that tones its lustrous color, as by a sweep of the brush, is the figure of the Chickamaugan chief, Dragging Canoe, warrior and seer and hater of white men, who urges his tribesmen against the sale and,when they will not hearken, springs from their midst into the clear space before Henderson and his band of pioneers and, pointing with uplifted arm, warns them that a dark cloud hangs over the land the white man covets which to the red man has long been a bloody ground. ¹

¹This utterance of Dragging Canoe's is generally supposed to be the origin of the descriptive phrase applied to Kentucky—“the Dark and Bloody Ground.” See Roosevelt,The Winning of the West,vol. I, p.229.

The purchase, finally consummated, included the country lying between the Kentucky and Cumberland Rivers—almost all the present State of Kentucky, with the adjacent land watered by the Cumberland River and its tributaries, except certain lands previously leased by the Indians to the Watauga Colony. The tract comprised about twenty million acres and extended into Tennessee.

Daniel Boone's work was to cut out a road for the wagons of the Transylvania Company's colonists to pass over. This was to be done by slashing away the briers and underbrush hedging the narrow Warriors' Path that made a direct northward line from Cumberland Gap to the Ohio bank, opposite the mouth of the Scioto River. Just prior to the conference Boone and “thirty guns” had set forth from the Holston to prepare the road and to build a fort on whatever site he should select.

By April, Henderson and his first group of tenants were on the trail. In Powell's Valley they came up with a party of Virginians Kentucky bound, led by Benjamin Logan; and the two bands joined together for the march. They had not gone far when they heard disquieting news. After leaving Martin's Station, at the gates of his new domain, Henderson received a letter from Boone telling of an attack by Indians, in which two of his men had been killed, but “we stood on the ground and guarded our baggage till the day and lost nothing.” ¹ These tidings, indicating that despite treaties and sales, the savages were again on the warpath, might well alarm Henderson's colonists. While they halted, some indecisive, others frankly for retreat, there appeared a company of men making all haste out of Kentucky because of Indian unrest. Six of these Henderson persuaded to turn again and go in with him; but this addition hardly offset the loss of those members of his party who thought it too perilous to proceed. Henderson's own courage did not falter. He had staked his all on this stupendous venture and for him it was forward to wealth and glory or retreat into poverty and eclipse. Boone, in the heart of the danger,was making the same stand. “If we give way to them [the Indians] now,” he wrote, “it will ever be the case.”

¹Bogart,Daniel Boone and the Hunters of Kentucky, p. 121.

Signs of discord other than Indian opposition met Henderson as he resolutely pushed on. His conversations with some of the fugitives from Kentucky disclosed the first indications of the storm that was to blow away the empire he was going in to found. He told them that the claims they had staked in Kentucky would not hold good with the Transylvania Company. Whereupon James McAfee, who was leading a group of returning men, stated his opinion that the Transylvania Company's claim would not hold good with Virginia. After the parley, three of McAfee's brothers turned back and went with Henderson's party, but whether with intent to join his colony or to make good their own claims is not apparent. Benjamin Logan continued amicably with Henderson on the march but did not recognize him as Lord Proprietor of Kentucky. He left the Transylvania caravan shortly after entering the territory, branched off in the direction of Harrodsburg, and founded St. Asaph's Station, in the present Lincoln County, independently of Henderson though the site lay within Henderson's purchase.

Notwithstanding delays and apprehensions, Henderson and his colonists finally reached Boone's Fort, which Daniel and his “thirty guns”—lacking two since the Indian encounter—had erected at the mouth of Otter Creek.

An attractive buoyancy of temperament is revealed in Henderson's description in his journal of a giant elm with tall straight trunk and even foliage that shaded a space of one hundred feet. Instantly he chose this "divine elm" as the council chamber of Transylvania. Under its leafage he read the constitution of the new colony. It would be too great a stretch of fancy to call it a democratic document, for it was not that, except in deft phrases. Power was certainly declared to be vested in the people; but the substance of power remained in the hands of the Proprietors.

Terms for land grants were generous enough in the beginning, although Henderson made the fatal mistake of demanding quitrents—one of the causes of dissatisfaction which had led to the Regulators' rising in North Carolina. In September he augmented this error by more than doubling the price of land, adding a fee of eight shillings for surveying, and reserving to the Proprietors one-half of all gold, silver, lead, and sulphur found onthe land. No land near sulphur springs or showing evidences of metals was to be granted to settlers. Moreover, at the Company's store the prices charged for lead were said to be too high—lead being necessary for hunting, and hunting being the only means of procuring food—while the wages of labor, as fixed by the Company, were too low. These terms bore too heavily on poor men who were risking their lives in the colony.

Hence newcomers passed by Boonesborough, as the Transylvania settlement was presently called, and went elsewhere. They settled on Henderson's land but refused his terms. They joined in their sympathies with James Harrod, who, having established Harrodsburg in the previous year at the invitation of Virginia, was not in the humor to acknowledge Henderson's claim or to pay him tribute. All were willing to combine with the Transylvania Company for defense, and to enforce law they would unite in bonds of brotherhood in Kentucky, even as they had been one with each other on the earlier frontier now left behind them. But they would call no man master; they had done with feudalism. That Henderson should not have foreseen this, especially after the upheaval in North Carolina, proves him, in spite of all his brilliantgifts, to have been a man out of touch with the spirit of the time.

The war of the Revolution broke forth and the Indians descended upon the Kentucky stations. Defense was the one problem in all minds, and defense required powder and lead in plenty. The Transylvania Company was not able to provide the means of defense against the hordes of savages whom Henry Hamilton, the British Governor at Detroit, was sending to make war on the frontiers. Practical men like Harrod and George Rogers Clark—who, if not a practical man in his own interests, was a most practical soldier—saw that unification of interests within the territory with the backing of either Virginia or Congress was necessary. Clark personally would have preferred to see the settlers combine as a freemen's state. It was plain that they would not combine and stake their lives as a unit to hold Kentucky for the benefit of the Transylvania Company, whose authority some of the most prominent men in the territory had refused to recognize. The Proprietary of Transylvania could continue to exist only to the danger of every life in Kentucky.

While the Proprietors sent a delegate to the Continental Congress to win official recognition forTransylvania, eighty-four men at Harrodsburg drew up a petition addressed to Virginia stating their doubts of the legality of Henderson's title and requesting Virginia to assert her authority according to the stipulations of her charter. That defense was the primary and essential motive of the Harrodsburg Remonstrance seems plain, for when George Rogers Clark set off on foot with one companion to lay the document before the Virginian authorities, he also went to plead for a load of powder. In his account of that hazardous journey, as a matter of fact, he makes scant reference to Transylvania, except to say that the greed of the Proprietors would soon bring the colony to its end, but shows that his mind was seldom off the powder. It is a detail of history that the Continental Congress refused to seat the delegate from Transylvania. Henderson himself went to Virginia to make the fight for his land before the Assembly. ¹

¹In 1778 Virginia disallowed Henderson's title but granted him two hundred thousand acres between the Green and Kentucky rivers for his trouble and expense in opening up the country.

The magnetic center of Boonesborough's life was the lovable and unassuming Daniel Boone. Soon after the building of the fort Daniel had brought in his wife and family. He used often tostate with a mild pride that his wife and daughters were the first white women to stand on the banks of the Kentucky River. That pride had not been unmixed with anxiety; his daughter Jemima and two daughters of his friend, Richard Galloway, while boating on the river had been captured by Shawanoes and carried off. Boone, accompanied by the girls' lovers and by John Floyd (eager to repay his debt of life-saving to Boone) had pursued them, tracing the way the captors had taken by broken twigs and scraps of dress goods which one of the girls had contrived to leave in their path, had come on the Indians unawares, killed them, and recovered the three girls unhurt.

In the summer of 1776, Virginia took official note of “Captain Boone of Boonesborough,” for she sent him a small supply of powder. The men of the little colony, which had begun so pretentiously with its constitution and assembly, were now obliged to put all other plans aside and to concentrate on the question of food and defense. There was a dangerous scarcity of powder and lead. The nearest points at which these necessaries could be procured were the Watauga and Holston River settlements, which were themselves none too well stocked. Harrod and Logan, some time in 1777,reached the Watauga fort with three or four pack-horses and filled their packs from Sevier's store; but, as they neared home, they were detected by red scouts and Logan was badly wounded before he and Harrod were able to drive their precious load safely through the gates at Harrodsburg. In the autumn of 1777, Clark, with a boatload of ammunition, reached Maysville on the Ohio, having successfully run the gauntlet between banks in possession of the foe. He had wrested the powder and lead from the Virginia Council by threats to the effect that if Virginia was so willing to lose Kentucky—for of course “a country not worth defending is not worth claiming”—he and his fellows were quite ready to take Kentucky for themselves and to hold it with their swords against all comers, Virginia included. By even such cogent reasoning had he convinced the Council—which had tried to hedge by expressing doubts that Virginia would receive the Kentucky settlers as “citizens of the State”—that it would be cheaper to give him the powder.

Because so many settlers had fled and the others had come closer together for their common good, Harrodsburg and Boonesborough were now the only occupied posts in Kentucky. Other settlements,once thriving, were abandoned; and, under the terror, the Wild reclaimed them. In April, 1777, Boonesborough underwent its first siege. Boone, leading a sortie, was shot and he fell with a shattered ankle. An Indian rushed upon him and was swinging the tomahawk over him when Simon Kenton, giant frontiersman and hero of many daring deeds, rushed forward, shot the Indian, threw Boone across his back, and fought his way desperately to safety. It was some months ere Boone was his nimble self again. But though he could not “stand up to the guns,” he directed all operations from his cabin.

The next year Boone was ready for new ventures growing from the settlers' needs. Salt was necessary to preserve meat through the summer. Accordingly Boone and twenty-seven men went up to the Blue Licks in February, 1778, to replenish their supply by the simple process of boiling the salt water of the Licks till the saline particles adhered to the kettles. Boone was returning alone, with a pack-horse load of salt and game, when a blinding snowstorm overtook him and hid from view four stealthy Shawanoes on his trail. He was seized and carried to a camp of 120 warriors led by the French Canadian, Dequindre, and James and George Girty, two white renegades. Among theIndians were some of those who had captured him on his first exploring trip through Kentucky and whom he had twice given the slip. Their hilarity was unbounded. Boone quickly learned that this band was on its way to surprise Boonesborough. It was a season when Indian attacks were not expected; nearly threescore of the men were at the salt spring and, to make matters worse, the walls of the new fort where the settlers and their families had gathered were as yet completed on only three sides. Boonesborough was, in short, well-nigh defenseless. To turn the Indians from their purpose, Boone conceived the desperate scheme of offering to lead them to the salt makers' camp with the assurance that he and his companions were willing to join the tribe. He understood Indians well enough to feel sure that once possessed of nearly thirty prisoners, the Shawanoes would not trouble further about Boonesborough but would hasten to make a triumphal entry into their own towns. That some, perhaps all, of the white men would assuredly die, he knew well; but it was the only way to save the women and children in Boonesborough. In spite of Dequindre and the Girtys, who were leading a military expedition for the reduction of a fort, the Shawanoes fell in with the suggestion. When theyhad taken their prisoners, the more bloodthirsty warriors in the band wanted to tomahawk them all on the spot. By his diplomatic discourse, however, Boone dissuaded them, for the time being at least, and the whole company set off for the towns on the Little Miami.

The weather became severe, very little game crossed their route, and for days they subsisted on slippery elm bark. The lovers of blood did not hold back their scalping knives and several of the prisoners perished; but Black Fish, the chief then of most power in Shawanoe councils, adopted Boone as his son, and gave him the name of Sheltowee, or Big Turtle. Though watched zealously to prevent escape, Big Turtle was treated with every consideration and honor; and, as we would say today, he played the game. He entered into the Indian life with apparent zest, took part in hunts and sports and the races and shooting matches in which the Indians delighted, but he was always careful not to outrun or outshoot his opponents. Black Fish took him to Detroit when some of the tribe escorted the remainder of the prisoners to the British post. There he met Governor Hamilton and, in the hope of obtaining his liberty, he led that dignitary to believe that heand the other people of Boonesborough were eager to move to Detroit and take refuge under the British flag. ¹ It is said that Boone always carried in a wallet round his neck the King's commission given him in Dunmore's War; and that he exhibited it to Hamilton to bear out his story. Hamilton sought to ransom him from the Indians, but Black Fish would not surrender his new son. The Governor gave Boone a pony, with saddle and trappings, and other presents, including trinkets to be used in procuring his needs and possibly his liberty from the Shawanoes.

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