The Conquest of the Old Southwest Part 5

CHAPTER XIII. Opening the Gateway--Dunmore's War

Virginia, we conceive, can claim this Country [Kentucky] with the greatest justice and propriety, its within the Limits of their Charter. They Fought and bled for it. And had it not been for the memorable Battle, at the Great Kanaway those vast regions had yet continued inaccessable.--The Harrodsburg Pet.i.tion. June 7-15, 1776.

It was fortunate for the Watauga settlers that the Indians and the whites were on the most peaceful terms with each other at the time the Watauga Valley was shown, by the running of the boundary line, to lie within the Indian reservation. With true American self reliance, the settlers met together for deliberation and counsel, and deputed James Robertson and John Been, as stated by Tennessee's first historian, "to treat with their landlords, and agree upon articles of accommodation and friends.h.i.+p. The attempt succeeded. For though the Indians refused to give up the land gratuitously, they consented, for a stipulated amount of merchandise, muskets, and other articles of convenience, to lease all the country on the waters of the Watauga." In addition to the land thus leased for ten years, several other tracts were purchased from the Indians by Jacob Brown, who reoccupied his former location on the Nolichucky.

In taking this daring step, the Watauga settlers moved into the spotlight of national history. For the inevitable consequence of leasing the territory was the organization of a form of government for the infant settlement. Through his familiarity with the North Carolina type of "a.s.sociation," in which the settlers had organized for the purpose of "regulating" abuses, and his acquaintance with the contents of the "Impartial Relation," in which Husband fully expounded the principles and practices of this a.s.sociation, Robertson was peculiarly fitted for leaders.h.i.+p in organizing this new government. The convention at which Articles of a.s.sociation, unfortunately lost, were drawn up, is noteworthy as the first governmental a.s.semblage of free-born American citizens ever held west of the Alleghanies.

The government then established was the first free and independent government, democratic in spirit, representative in form, ever organized upon the American continent. In describing this mimic republic, the royal Governor of Virginia says: "They appointed magistrates, and framed laws for their present occasion, and to all intents and purposes, erected themselves into, though an inconsiderable, yet a separate State." The most daring spirit in this little state was the young John Sevier, of French Huguenot family (originally spelled Xavier), born in Augusta County, Virginia, on September 23, 1745. It was from Millerstown in Shenandoah County where he was living the uneventful life of a small farmer, that he emigrated (December, 1773) to the Watauga region. With his arrival there begins one of the most fascinating and romantic careers recorded in the varied arid stirring annals of the Old Southwest. In this daring and impetuous young fellow, fair-haired, blue-eyed, magnetic, debonair--of powerful build, splendid proportions, and athletic skill--we hold the gallant exemplar of the truly heroic life of the border. The story of his life, thrilling in the extreme, is rich in all the multi-colored elements which impart romance to the arduous struggle of American civilization in the opening years of the republic.

The creative impulses in the Watauga commonwealth are hinted at by Dunmore, who serves, in the letter above quoted, that Watauga "sets a dangerous example to the people America, of forming governments distinct from and independent of his Majesty's authority."

It is true that the experiment was somewhat limited. The organization of the Watauga a.s.sociation, which const.i.tuted a temporary expedient to meet a crisis in the affairs of a frontier community cut off by forest wilderness and mountain barriers from the reach of the arm of royal or provincial government, is not to be compared with the revolutionary a.s.semblage at Boonesborough, May 23, 1775, or with the extraordinary demands for inde pendence in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, during the same month.

Nevertheless the Watauga settlers defied both North Carolina and the Crown, by adopting the laws of Virginia and by ignoring Governor Josiah Martin's proclamation (March 26, 1774) "requiring the said settlers immediately to retire from the Indian Territories." Moreover, Watauga really was the parent of a series of mimic republics in the Old Southwest, gradually tending toward higher forms of organization, with a larger measure of individual liberty. Watauga, Transylvania, c.u.mberland, Franklin represent the evolving political genius of a free people under the creative leaders.h.i.+p of three constructive minds--James Robertson, John Sevier, and Richard Henderson. Indeed, Watauga furnished to Judge Henderson precisely the "dangerous example" of which Dunmore prophetically speaks.

Immediately upon his return in 1771 from the extended exploration of Kentucky, Daniel Boone as already noted was engaged as secret agent, to treat with the Cherokees for the lease or purchase of the trans-Alleghany region, on behalf of Judge Henderson and his a.s.sociates. Embroiled in the exciting issues of the Regulation and absorbed by his confining duties as colonial judge, Henderson was unable to put his bold design into execution until after the expiration of the court itself which ceased to exist in 1773.

Disregarding the royal proclamation of 1763 and Locke's Fundamental Const.i.tutions for the Carolinas, which forbade private parties to purchase lands from the Indians, Judge Henderson applied to the highest judicial authorities in England to know if there was any law in existence forbidding purchase of lands from the Indian tribes. Lord Mansfield gave Judge Henderson the "sanction of his great authority in favor of the purchase."

Lord Chancellor Camden and Mr. Yorke had officially advised the King in 1757, in regard to the pet.i.tion of the East Indian Company, "that in respect to such territories as have been, or shall be acquired by treaty or grant from the Great Mogul, or any of the Indian princes or governments, your Majesty's letters patent are NOT NECESSARY; the property of the soil vesting in the company by the Indian grant subject only to your Majesties right of sovereignty over the settlements, as English settlements, and over the inhabitants, as English subjects, who carry with them your Majesties laws wherever they form colonies, and receive your Majesties protection by virtue of your royal charters." This opinion, with virtually no change, was rendered in regard to the Indian tribes of North America by the same two authorities, certainly as early as 1769; and a true copy, made in London, April 1, 1772, was transmitted to Judge Henderson. Armed with the legal opinions received from England, Judge Henderson was fully persuaded that there was no legal bar whatsoever to his seeking to acquire by purchase from the Cherokees the vast domain of the trans-Alleghany. A golden dream of empire, with its promise of an independent republic in the form of a proprietary colony, casts him under the spell of its alluring glamour.

In the meantime, the restless Boone, impatient over the delay in the consummation of Judge Henderson's plans, resolved to establish himself in Kentucky upon his own responsibility.

Heedless of the question of t.i.tle and the certain hazards incident to invading the territory of hostile savages, Boone designated a rendezvous in Powell's Valley where he and his party of five families were to be met by a band under the leaders.h.i.+p of his connections, the Bryans, and another company led by Captain William Russell, a daring pioneer of the Clinch Valley. A small detachment of Boone's party was fiercely attacked by Shawanoes in Powell's Valley on October 10, 1773, and almost all were killed, including sons of Boone and Russell, and young John and Richard Mendenhall of Guilford County, North Carolina. As the result of this b.l.o.o.d.y repulse, Boone's attempt to settle in Kentucky at this time was definitely abandoned. His failure to effect a settlement in Kentucky was due to that characteristic disregard of the territorial rights of the Indians which was all too common among the borderers of that period.

This failure was portentous of the coming storm. The reign of the Long Hunters was over. Dawning upon the horizon was the day of stern adventurers, fixed in the desperate and lawless resolve to invade the trans-Alleghany country and to battle savagely with the red man for its possession. More successful than Boone was the McAfee party, five in number, from Botetourt County, Virginia, who between May 10th and September 1, 1773, safely accomplished a journey through Kentucky and carefully marked well-chosen sites for future location." An ominous incident of the time was the veiled warning which Cornstalk, the great Shawanoe chieftain, gave to Captain Thomas Bullitt, head of a party of royal surveyors, sent out by Lord Dunmore, Governor of Virginia. Cornstalk at Chillicothe, June 7, 1773, warned Bullitt concerning the encroachments of the whites, "designed to deprive us," he said, "of the hunting of the country, as usual ... the hunting we stand in need of to buy our clothing." During the preceding summer, George Rogers Clark, an aggressive young Virginian, with a small party, had descended the Ohio as low as Fish Creek, where he built a cabin; and in this region for many months various parties of surveyors were busily engaged in locating and surveying lands covered by military grants. Most significant of the ruthless determination of the pioneers to occupy by force the Kentucky area was the action of the large party from Monongahela, some forty in number, led by Captain James Harrod, who penetrated to the present Miller County, where in June, 1774, they made improvements and actually laid out a town.

A significant, secretly conducted movement, of which historians have taken but little account, was now in progress under the manipulation of Virginia's royal governor. As early as 1770 Dr.

John Connolly proposed the establishment of an extensive colony south of the Ohio; and the design of securing such territory from the Indians found lodgment in the mind of Lord Dunmore. But this design was for the moment thwarted when on October 28, 1773, an order was issued from the Privy Council chamber in Whitehall granting an immense territory, including all of the present West Virginia and the land alienated to Virginia by Donelson's agreement with the Cherokees (1772), to a company including Thomas Walpole, Samuel Wharton, Benjamin Franklin, and others.

This new colony, to be named "Vandalia," seemed a.s.sured. A clash between Dunmore and the royal authorities was imminent; for Virginia under her sea-to-sea charter claimed the vast middle region of the continent, extending without known limit to west and northwest. Moreover, Dunmore was interested in great land speculations on his own account; and while overtly vindicating Virginia's claim to the trans-Alleghany by despatching parties of surveyors to the western wilderness to locate and survey lands covered by military grants, he with the collusion of certain members of the "Honourable Board," his council, as charged by Was.h.i.+ngton, was more than "lukewarm," secretly restricting as rigorously as he dared the extent and number of the soldiers'

allotments. According to the famous Virginia Remonstrance, he was in league with "men of great influence in some of the neighboring states" to secure, under cover of purchases from the Indians, large tracts of country between the Ohio and the Mississippi." In shaping his plans Dunmore had the shrewd legal counsel of Patrick Henry, who was equally intent upon making for himself a private purchase from the Cherokees. It was Henry's legal opinion that the Indiana purchase from the Six Nations by the Pennsylvania traders at Fort Stanwix (November 5, 1768) was valid; and that purchase by private individuals from the Indians gave full and ample t.i.tle. In consequence of these facts, William Murray, in behalf of himself and his a.s.sociates of the Illinois Land Company, and on the strength of the Camden Yorke decision, purchased two large tracts, on the Illinois and Ohio respectively, from the Illinois Indians (July 5, 1773); and in order to win the support of Dunmore, who was ambitious to make a fortune in land speculation, organized a second company, the Wabash (Ouabache) Land Company, with the governor as the chief share-holder. In response to Murray's pet.i.tion on behalf of the Illinois Land Company, Dunmore (May, 1774) recommended it to Lord Dartmouth, Secretary of State for the Colonies, and urged that it be granted; and in a later letter he disingenuously disclaimed any personal interest in the Illinois speculation.

The party of surveyors sent out under the direction of Colonel William Preston, on the request of Was.h.i.+ngton and other leading eastern men, in 1774 located lands covered by military grants on the Ohio and in the Kentucky area for prominent Virginians, including Was.h.i.+ngton, Patrick Henry, William Byrd, William Preston, Arthur Campbell, William Fleming, and Andrew Lewis, among others, and also a large tract for Dr. Connolly. Certain of these grants fell within the Vandalia area; and in his reply (September 10, 1774) to Dunmore's letter, Lord Dartmouth sternly censured Dunmore for allowing these grants, and accused the white settlers of having brought on, by such unwarrantable aggressions, the war then raging with the Indians. This charge lay at the door of Dunmore himself; and there is strong evidence that Dunmore personally fomented the war, ostensibly in support of Virginia's charter rights, but actually in order to further his own speculative designs." Dunmore's agent, Dr. Connolly, heading a party posing as Virginia militia, fired without provocation upon a delegation of Shawanoe chiefs a.s.sembled at Fort Pitt (January, 1774). Taking advantage of the alarming situation created by the conflict of the claims of Virginia and Pennsylvania, Connolly, inspired by Dunmore without doubt, then issued an incendiary circular (April 21, 1774), declaring a state of war to exist.

Just two weeks before the Battle of the Great Kanawha, Patrick Henry categorically stated, in conversation with Thomas Wharton:

"that he was at Williamsburg with Ld. D. when Dr. Conolly first came there, that Conolly is a chatty, sensible man, and informed Ld. Dunmore of the extreme richness of the lands which lay on both sides of the Ohio; that the prohibitory orders which had been sent him relative to the land on the hither side (or Vandalia) had caused him to turn his thoughts to the opposite sh.o.r.e, and that as his Lords.h.i.+p was determined to settle his family in America he was really pursueing this war, in order to obtain by purchase or treaty from the natives a tract of territory on that side; he then told me that he was convinced from every authority that the law knew, that a purchase from the natives was as full and ample a t.i.tle as could be obtained, that they had Lord Camden and Mr. York's opinion on that head, which opinion with some others that Ld. Dunmore had consulted, and with the knowledge Conolly had given him of the quality of the country and his determined resolution to settle his family on this continent, were the real motives or springs of the present expedition."

At this very time, Patrick Henry, in conjunction with William Byrd 3d and others, was negotiating for a private purchase of lands from the Cherokees; and when Wharton, after answering Henry's inquiry as to where he might buy Indian goods, remarked: "It's not possible you mean to enter the Indian trade at this period," Henry laughingly replied: "The wish-world is my hobby horse." "From whence I conclude," adds Wharton, "he has some prospect of making a purchase of the natives, but where I know not."

The war, thus promulgated, we believe, at Dunmore's secret instigation and heralded by a series of ghastly atrocities, came on apace. After the inhuman murder of the family of Logan, the Indian chieftain, by one Greathouse and his drunken companions (April 30th), Logan, who contrary to romantic views was a blackhearted and vengeful savage, harried the Tennessee and Virginia borders, burning and slaughtering. Unable to arouse the Cherokees, owing to the opposition of Atta-kulla-kulla, Logan as late as July 21st said in a letter to the whites: "The Indians are not angry, only myself," and not until then did Dunmore begin to give full execution to his warlike plans. The best woodsmen of the border, Daniel Boone and the German scout Michael Stoner, having been despatched on July 27th by Colonel William Preston to warn the surveyors of the trans-Alleghany, made a remarkable journey on foot of eight hundred miles in sixty-one days.

Harrod's company at Harrodsburg, a company of surveyors at Fontainebleau, Floyd's party on the Kentucky, and the surveyors at Mann's Lick, this warned, hurried in to the settlements and were saved. Meanwhile, Dunmore, in command of the Virginia forces, invaded territory guaranteed to the Indians by the royal proclamation of 1763 and recently (1774) added to the province of Quebec, a fact of which he was not aware, conducted a vigorous campaign, and fortified Camp Charlotte, near Old Chillicothe.

Andrew Lewis, however, in charge of the other division of Dunmore's army, was the one destined to bear the real brunt and burden of the campaign. His division, recruited from the very flower of the pioneers of the Old Southwest, was the most representative body of borderers of this region that up to this time had a.s.sembled to measure strength with the red men. It was an army of the true stalwarts of the frontier, with fringed leggings and hunting-capes, rifles and powder-horns, hunting-knives and tomahawks.

The Battle of the Great Kanawha, at Point Pleasant, was fought on October 10, 1774, between Lewis's force, eleven hundred strong, and the Indians, under Cornstalk, somewhat inferior in numbers.

It was a desultory action, over a greatly extended front and in very brushy country between Crooked Creek and the Ohio.

Throughout the long day, the Indians fought with rare craft and stubborn bravery--loudly cursing the white men, cleverly picking off their leaders, and derisively inquiring, in regard to the absence of the fifes: "Where are your whistles now?" Slowly retreating, they sought to draw the whites into an ambuscade and at a favorable moment to "drive the Long Knives like bullocks into the river." No marked success was achieved on either side until near sunset, when a flank movement directed by young Isaac Shelby alarmed the Indians, who mistook this party for the expected reinforcement under Christian, and retired across the Ohio. In the morning the whites were amazed to discover that the Indians, who the preceding day so splendidly heeded the echoing call of Cornstalk, "Be strong! Be strong!", had quit the battlefield and left the victory with the whites.

The peace negotiated by Dunmore was durable. The governor had accomplished his purpose, defied the authority of the crown, and vindicated the claim of Virginia, to the enthusiastic satisfaction of the backwoodsmen. While tendering their thanks to him and avowing their allegiance to George III, at the close of the campaign, the borderers proclaimed their resolution to exert all their powers "for the defense of American liberty, and for the support of her just rights and privileges, not in any precipitous, riotous or tumultuous manner, but when regularly called forth by the unanimous voice of our countrymen." Dunmore's War is epochal, in that it procured for the nonce a state of peace with the Indians, which made possible the advance of Judge Henderson over the Transylvania Trail in 1775, and, through his establishment of the Transylvania Fort at Boonesborough, the ultimate acquisition by the American Confederation of the imperial domain of the trans-Alleghany.

CHAPTER XIV. Richard Henderson and the Transylvania Company

I happened to fall in company, and have a great deal of conversation with one of the most singular and extraordinary persons and excentric geniuses in America, and perhaps in the world. His name is Richard Henderson.--J. F. D. Smyth: A Tour in the United States of America.

Early in 1774, chastened by his own disastrous failure the preceding autumn, Boone advised Judge Henderson that the time was auspicious for opening negotiations with the Cherokees for purchasing the trans-Alleghany region." In organizing a company for this purpose, Henderson chose men of action and resource, leaders in the colony, ready for any hazard of life and fortune in this gigantic scheme of colonization and promotion. The new men included, in addition to the partners in the organization known as Richard Henderson and Company, were Colonel John Luttrell, destined to win laurels in the Revolution, and William Johnston, a native of Scotland, the leading merchant of Hillsborough.

Meeting in Hillsborough on August 27, 1774, these men organized the new company under the name of the Louisa Company. In the articles then drawn up they agreed to "rent or purchase" a tract of land from the Indian owners of the soil for the express purpose of "settling the country." Each partner obligated himself to "furnish his Quota of Expenses necessary towards procuring the grant." In full antic.i.p.ation of the grave dangers to be encountered, they solemnly bound themselves, as "equal sharers in the property," to "support each other with our lives and fortunes." Negotiations with the Indians were begun at once.

Accompanied by Colonel Nathaniel Hart and guided by the experienced Indian-trader, Thomas Price, Judge Henderson visited the Cherokee chieftains at the Otari towns. After elaborate consultations, the latter deputed the old chieftain, Atta-kulla-kulla, a young buck, and a squaw, "to attend the said Henderson and Hart to North Carolina, and there examine the Goods and Merchandize which had been by them offered as the Consideration of the purchase." The goods purchased at Cross Creek (now Fayetteville, North Carolina), in which the Louisa Company "had embarked a large amount," met the entire approval of the Indians--the squaw in particular shrewdly examining the goods in the interest of the women of the tribe.

On January 6, 1775, the company was again enlarged, and given the name of the Transylvania Company-the three new partners being David Hart, brother to Thomas and Nathaniel, Leonard Henley Bullock, a prominent citizen of Granville, and James Hogg, of Hillsborough, a native Scotchman and one of the most influential men in the colony. In the elaborate agreement drawn up reference is explicitly made to the contingency of "settling and voting as a proprietor and giving Rules and Regulations for the Inhabitants etc." Hillsborough was the actual starting-point for the westward movement, the first emigrants, traveling thence to the Sycamore Shoals of the Watauga. In speaking of the departure of the settlers, the first movement of extended and permanent westward migration, an eye-witness quaintly says: "At this place [Hillsborough] I saw the first party of emigrant families that moved to Kentucky under the auspices of Judge Henderson. They marched out of the town with considerable solemnity, and to many their destination seemed as remote as if it had been to the South Sea Islands." Meanwhile, the "Proposals for the encouragement of settling the lands etc.," issued on Christmas Day, 1774, were quickly spread broadcast through the colony and along the border." It was the greatest sensation North Carolina had known since Alamance; and Archibald Neilson, deputy-auditor and naval officer of the colony, inquired with quizzical anxiety: "Pray, is d.i.c.k Henderson out of his head?" The most liberal terms, proffered by one quite in possession of his head, were embodied in these proposals. Land at twenty s.h.i.+llings per hundred acres was offered to each emigrant settling within the territory and raising a crop of corn before September 1, 1775, the emigrant being permitted to take up as much as five hundred acres for him self and two hundred and fifty acres for each t.i.thable person under him. In these "Proposals" there was no indication that the low terms at which the lands were offered would be maintained after September 1, 1775. In a letter to Governor Dunmore (January, 1775), Colonel William Preston, county surveyor of Fincastle County, Virginia, says "The low price he [Henderson]

proposes to sell at, together with some further encouragement he offers, will I am apprehensive induce a great many families to remove from this County (Fincastle) & Carolina and settle there."

Joseph Martin, states his son, "was appointed entry-Taker and agent for the Powell Valley portion" of the Transylvania Purchase on January 20, 1775; and "he (Joseph Martin) and others went on in the early part of the year 1775 and made their stand at the very spot where he had made corn several years before. In speaking of the startling design, unmasked by Henderson, of establis.h.i.+ng an independent government, Colonel Preston writes to George Was.h.i.+ngton of the contemplated "large Purchase by one Col.

Henderson of North Carolina from the Cherokees.... I hear that Henderson talks with great Freedom & Indecency of the Governor of Virginia, sets the Government at Defiance & says if he once had five hundred good Fellows settled in that Country he would not Value Virginia."

Early in 1775 runners were sent off to the Cherokee towns to summon the Indians to the treaty ground at the Sycamore Shoals of the Watauga; and Boone, after his return from a hunt in Kentucky in January, was summoned by Judge Henderson to aid in the negotiations preliminary to the actual treaty. The dominating figure in the remarkable a.s.semblage at the treaty ground, consisting of twelve hundred Indians and several hundred whites, was Richard Henderson, "comely in person, of a benign and social disposition," with countenance betokening the man of strenuous action" n.o.ble forehead, prominent nose, projecting chin, firm-set jaw, with kindness and openness of expression." Gathered about him, picturesque in garb and striking in appearance, were many of the buckskin-clad leaders of the border--James Robertson, John Sevier, Isaac Shelby, William Bailey Smith, and their compeers--as well as his Carolina friends John Williams, Thomas and Nathaniel Hart, Nathaniel Henderson, Jesse Benton, and Valentine Searcy.

Little was accomplished on the first day of the treaty (March 14th); but on the next day, the Cherokees offered to sell the section bargained for by Donelson acting as agent for Virginia in 1771. Although the Indians pointed out that Virginia had never paid the promised compensation of five hundred pounds and had therefore forfeited her rights, Henderson flatly refused to entertain the idea of purchasing territory to which Virginia had the prior claim. Angered by Henderson's refusal, The Dragging Canoe, leaping into the circle of the seated savages, made an impa.s.sioned speech touched with the romantic imagination peculiar to the American Indian. With pathetic eloquence he dwelt upon the insatiable land-greed of the white men, and predicted the extinction of his race if they committed the insensate folly of selling their beloved hunting-grounds. Roused to a high pitch of oratorical fervor, the savage with uplifted arm fiercely exhorted his people to resist further encroachments at all hazards--and left the treaty ground. This incident brought the conference to a startling and abrupt conclusion. On the following day, however, the savages proved more tractable, agreeing to sell the land as far as the c.u.mberland River. In order to secure the additional territory watered by the tributaries of the c.u.mberland, Henderson agreed to pay an additional sum of two thousand pounds. Upon this day there originated the ominous phrase descriptive of Kentucky when The Dragging Canoe, dramatically pointing toward the west, declared that a DARK Cloud hung over that land, which was known as the b.l.o.o.d.y GROUND.

On the last day, March 17th, the negotiations were opened with the signing of the "Great Grant." The area purchased, some twenty millions of acres, included almost all the present state of Kentucky, and an immense tract in Tennessee, comprising all the territory watered by the c.u.mberland River and all its tributaries. For "two thousand weight of leather in goods"

Henderson purchased "the lands lying down Holston and between the Watauga lease, Colonel Donelson's line and Powell's Mountain" as a pathway to Kentucky--the deed for which was known as the "Path Deed." By special arrangement, Carter's Valley in this tract went to Carter and Lucas; two days later, for two thousand pounds, Charles Robertson on behalf of the Watauga a.s.sociation purchased a large tract in the valleys of the Holston, Watauga, and New Rivers; and eight days later Jacob Brown purchased two large areas, including the Nolichucky Valley. This historic treaty, which heralds the opening of the West, was conducted with absolute justice and fairness by Judge Henderson and his a.s.sociates. No liquor was permitted at the treaty ground; and Thomas Price, the ablest of the Cherokee traders, deposed that "he at that time understood the Cherokee language, so as to comprehend everything which was said and to know that what was observed on either side was fairly and truly translated; that the Cherokees perfectly understood, what Lands were the subject of the Treaty...." The amount paid by the Transylvania Company for the imperial domain was ten thousand pounds sterling, in money and in goods.

Although Daniel Boone doubtless a.s.sisted in the proceedings prior to the negotiation of the treaty, his name nowhere appears in the voluminous records of the conference. Indeed, he was not then present; for a fortnight before the conclusion of the treaty he was commissioned by Judge Henderson to form a party of competent woodmen to blaze a pa.s.sage through the wilderness. On March 10th this party of thirty ax-men, under the leaders.h.i.+p of Boone, started from the rendezvous, the Long Island of Holston, to engage in the arduous labor of cutting out the Transylvania Trail.

Henderson, the empire-builder, now faced with courage and resolution the hazardous task of occupying the purchased territory and establis.h.i.+ng an independent government. No mere financial promoter of a vast speculative enterprise, he was one of the heroic figures of the Old Southwest; and it was his dauntless courage, his unwavering resolve to go forward in the face of all dangers, which carried through the armed "trek" to a successful conclusion. At Martin's Station, where Henderson and his party tarried to build a house in which to store their wagons, as the road could be cleared no further, they were joined by another party, of five adventurers from Prince William County, Virginia." In Henderson's party were some forty men and boys, with forty packhorses and a small amount of powder, lead, salt, and garden-seeds. The warning freely given by Joseph Martin of the perils of the path was soon confirmed, as appears from the following entry in Henderson's diary:

"Friday the 7th. [April] About Brake of Day began to snow. About 11 O'Clock received a letter from Mr. Luttrells camp that were five persons killd on the road to the Cantuckie by Indians. Capt.

[Nathaniel] Hart, uppon the receipt of this News Retreated back with his Company, & determined to Settle in the Valley to make Corn for the Cantucky people. The same Day Received a Letter from Dan. Boone, that his Company was fired uppon by Indians, Kill'd Two of his men--tho he kept the ground & saved the Baggage &c."

The following historic letter, which reveals alike the dogged resolution of Boone and his reliance upon Henderson and his company in this black hour of disaster, addressed "Colonel Richard Henderson--these with care," is eloquent in its simplicity

"Dear Colonel: After my compliments to you, I shall acquaint you of our misfortunes. On March the 25 a party of Indians fired on my Company about half an hour before day, and killed Mr. Twitty and his negro, and wounded Mr. Walker very deeply, but I hope he will recover.

"On March the 28 as we were hunting for provisions, we found Samuel Tate's son, who gave us an account that the Indians fired on their camp on the 27th day. My brother and I went down and found two men killed and sculped, Thomas McDowell and Jeremiah McFeters. I have sent a man down to all the lower companies in order to gather them all at the mouth of Otter Creek.

"My advice to you, Sir, is to come or send as soon as possible.

Your company is desired greatly, for the people are very uneasy, but are willing to stay and venture their lives with you, and now is the time to fl.u.s.terate their [the Indians'] intentions, and keep the country, whilst we are in it. If we give way to them now, it will ever be the case. This day we start from the battle ground, for the mouth of Otter Creek, where we shall immediately erect a Fort, which will be done before you can come or send, then we can send ten men to meet you, if you send for them.

"I am, Sir, your most obedient Omble Sarvent Daniel Boone.

"N.B. We stood on the ground and guarded our baggage till day, and lost nothing. We have about fifteen miles to Cantuck [Kentucky River] at Otter Creek."

This dread intelligence caused the hearts of strong men to quail and induced some to turn back, but Henderson, the jurist-pioneer, was made of sterner stuff. At once (April 8th) he despatched an urgent letter in hot haste to the proprietors of Transylvania, enclosing Boone's letter, informing them of Boone's plight and urging them to send him immediately a large quant.i.ty of powder and lead, as he had been compelled to abandon his supply of saltpeter at Martin's Station. "We are all in high spirits," he a.s.sures the proprietors, "and on thorns to fly to Boone's a.s.sistance, and join him in defense of so fine and valuable a country."

Laconically eloquent is this simple entry in his diary: "Sat.u.r.day the 8th. Started abt. 10 oClock Crossed c.u.mberland Gap about 4 miles met about 40 persons Returning from the Cantucky, on Acct.

of the Late Murders by the Indians could prevail on one only to return. Memo Several Virginians who were with us return'd."

There is no more crucial moment in early Western history than this, in which we see the towering form of Henderson, clad in the picturesque garb of the pioneer, with outstretched arm resolutely pointing forward to the "dark and b.l.o.o.d.y ground," and in impa.s.sioned but futile eloquence pleading with the pale and panic-stricken fugitives to turn about, to join his company, and to face once more the mortal dangers of pioneer conquest.

Significant indeed are the lines: