Colonel Henderson plans a semi-independent republic—He employs Boone to spy out the land—Boone makes a hazardous journey into Kentucky alone—He locates the site of Boonesborough and after six weeks’ absence returns—Boone gathers the Indian chiefs at Sycamore Shoals—The Indians sell Kentucky to Henderson and his associates—Boone with a small band starts out to blaze the way into the interior—They are attacked by Indians and see buffalo for the first time—They commence the erection of a fort—Hundreds of speculators flock to the new territory.

The important part played by Daniel Boone in the settlement of Kentucky was due to the extraordinary combination of qualities possessed by this ideal backwoodsman, a combination which was not found in any other of the pioneers who were associated with him. George Rogers Clark was his superior in intellect, but Clark lacked Boone’s calm, even temper and infinite patience. Kenton was as fearless, but he had not Boone’s prudence and foresight. Harrod, Logan, Todd, and others were able captains, but each was wanting in some of the qualities that combined to fit Boone so perfectly for the rÔle he filled in frontier history.

The men of the border, with their independent dispositions, were extremely difficult to control. Even when imminent danger demanded concerted action, they were amenable only to the lightest discipline. If they followed a leader, it was not from any consideration of their obligations as militiamen, but because they had confidence in him and personal regard for him. These sentiments Boone excited in almost every one with whom he came in contact, and his influence over the rough, untrammelled backwoods fighters was probably greater than that exerted by any other leader. In the time of dire danger and stress that came upon the Kentucky settlers, when hundreds fled at the approach of the storm, had not Boone stood his ground, the new country must have been deserted.

The affection and respect which the settlers evinced for Boone were enhanced by the fact that he was in all respects one of themselves. Born on the border, of backwoods parentage, he was wedded to the hard life led by the frontier people, and like most of them he was poor and unlettered. There is much in his simple, honest character, with its homely common sense and cheery humor, to remind us of Abraham Lincoln, and it is not difficult to believe that Lincoln, under similar circumstances, would have been just such a backwoodsman as Boone.

The high qualities which made Daniel Boone a natural leader among his fellows were not lost upon men of superior station with whom he happened to have relations. Colonel Richard Henderson, of Granville County, North Carolina, had the highest opinion of the pioneer’s character and ability. Henderson was a judge whose circuit included the backwoods town of Hillsboro, and here he had frequently met Boone at the time that the latter lived upon the Yadkin. In fact, there is a tradition that Boone once saved Henderson from ill-treatment, if not death, at the hands of a band of Regulators.

Boone’s descriptions of Kentucky had keenly interested the Judge and ultimately awoke in his mind the idea of establishing in that wonderful region a semi-independent republic, to be called Transylvania. Of course, such a movement would meet with the disapprobation of the British authorities, but active opposition was hardly to be feared in such a remote part of the country. Three brothers named Hart who, like Colonel Henderson, were men of means, associated themselves with him in this romantic project. The defeat of the Indians in Dunmore’s War and the subsequent treaty of peace seemed to open a promising prospect of prosecuting the enterprise with success.

Towards the close of the year, Colonel Henderson put himself in communication with Boone, in whose judgment and discretion he had, as we have said, implicit confidence. The plan was outlined to the backwoodsman and his services as prospector were readily secured. Though Boone was not, perhaps, so sanguine as the promoters in the ultimate success of the undertaking, he fully appreciated its advantages as a preliminary step. He knew that in the past, the dwellers upon the frontier had been left to fight their own battles and manage their own affairs, with no considerable aid from the colonial authorities, and he did not believe that they would fare much better in the contemplated case with a corporation at their backs; but he realized that the efforts of Henderson and his associates might have a powerful effect in starting the settlement and he entered into the scheme with hearty good-will.

Leaving Hardy, who was duly proud of the responsibility, to look after the family on the Clinch, Boone started in January, 1775, upon a solitary expedition into Kentucky. His ostensible purpose was hunting, but in reality he was engaged in spying out the land for his employers. He struck the Kentucky River near the Virginia border and followed it to the site of Harrodsburg, which had been surveyed the year before. Thence he took a diagonal course across the great valley to the Cumberland Gap, and so home.

It was a hazardous journey, but just such an adventure as Boone delighted in. He found a genuine pleasure in the solitude of the wilderness, and felt safer when alone than with a companion whose imprudence might lead him into trouble. Kentucky was the common hunting-ground of several tribes and did not contain any permanent Indian villages. There were, therefore, few savages about in the winter. Perils of other kinds were, however, plentiful. Panthers, wolves, and bears sometimes attacked lone men. There was the possibility of becoming lost or, worse still, of suffering a crippling accident. Imagine the plight of a man with a broken leg, lying in the snowy wastes hundreds of miles from a human being. Such a fate befell more than one scout and pioneer, but Boone accomplished his task without mishap and returned after an absence of about six weeks to the cabin on the Clinch.

When Boone reported the result of his observations to Colonel Henderson and his associates, who now called themselves the Transylvania Company, it was determined to entrust him with a task calling for qualities of a different nature from those exercised in his exploration. It was proposed by the Company to purchase from the Cherokees the land which they decided on Boone’s recommendation to settle, and to him was entrusted the matter of opening negotiations.

It should be understood that the Cherokees had no better title to the territory in question than had the Choctaws, Shawnees, or Iroquois. In fact, the last named had some few years previous transferred to the British Crown all the lands lying between the Ohio and Tennessee Rivers. However, the Company felt that its position would be strengthened by securing some title, however shadowy, from an Indian tribe, and the Cherokees were selected because they commanded the path that would be followed by the settlers from the South in going to the new country.

As usual, Boone accomplished his errand and in March brought twelve hundred Cherokees to the Sycamore Shoals, on the Watauga River, where the promoters met them and after considerable bickering struck a bargain. It was agreed that in consideration of the payment of fifty thousand dollars, the tribe should cede to Henderson and his partners in the Transylvania Company all the land lying between the Kentucky and Cumberland Rivers, and should allow them a free road to the region through Powell’s Valley and the Cumberland Gap.

According to the general practice of the time, the purchase price was paid in merchandise, consisting of cloth, clothing, guns, ammunition, cooking utensils, hatchets, and ornaments. The goods filled a large cabin but when it came to distributing them, each warrior’s share proved to be small. One brave, to whom was allotted a deerskin hunting-shirt, expressed his disgust in no uncertain terms. What a fool he had been, he said, to sell for such an article his hunting-grounds, where in a single day he could kill deer enough to make half a dozen such garments.

Thus, at the outset, the arrangement met with the dissatisfaction of the Indians. Indeed, before the meeting broke up one of the chiefs warned Boone that he must not expect to effect the settlement of the region without trouble. He pointed out, truthfully enough, that the Indian chiefs could no more control their young men than the frontier leaders could the hot-heads among themselves. The Cherokees as a nation might, he said, be at peace with the Virginians—they called all frontiersmen “Virginians”—and a few individuals on either side wantonly commit some act that would bring on war. The chiefs could not, he declared, guarantee the safety of emigrants upon the promised path, much less of settlers in Kentucky itself.

This was not very promising, but it did not daunt the promoters, for they had expected nothing better. All they had looked for from the agreement was something that would give them a moral right to fight for the possession of the land and entitle them to the countenance of the Crown authorities. In this hope they were, however, immediately disappointed; for the Governors of North Carolina and Virginia denounced the transaction as soon as knowledge of it reached them.

By this time the colonists, and especially those on the borders, had begun to treat the representatives of King George with scant respect, and the Transylvania Company was in no measure deterred from the prosecution of its enterprise by the proclamations issued against it by Governors Martin and Dunmore. Boone counselled immediate action, reasoning that the Indians might be expected to observe the treaty for a few months and that by driving the entering wedge home before they should awake to active opposition, much would be gained. In this view the promoters concurred and again they relied upon their trusty agent to carry out their designs.

In his expedition of the preceding January, Boone had marked a spot for the first settlement of the Transylvania Company, and now it was arranged that he should go out at the head of a body of thirty picked backwoodsmen to mark a path through the wilderness to the place selected. The party started immediately after the conclusion of the meeting on the Watauga and arrived at their destination on the sixth day of April. They encountered many difficulties on the way and were more than once attacked by Indians, several of their number being killed and wounded.

The point at which it was decided to locate the capital town of Transylvania, as the colony was to be called, was Big Lick, just below Otter Creek on the Kentucky River. The site was a plain on the south side of the river, and as the pioneers approached it they were confronted with a sight which to most of them was entirely novel. Hundreds of buffalo occupied the destined ground, where they were engaged in licking the earth for the salt with which it was impregnated. As the men advanced, the huge beasts scattered in every direction, some running, some walking, others loping carelessly along with young calves skipping and bounding at their sides. Such a sight was common enough in Kentucky at that time, but soon after the advent of white men the great herds of bison moved westward.

The pioneers immediately commenced the erection of a fort and raised a few cabins along the river bank, but it was long before the stockade of Boonesborough, as the settlement was named, was completed. In the absence of women, it was hard to induce the backwoodsmen to devote themselves to measures of defence while such tempting opportunities for hunting presented themselves. They were a self-confident and somewhat reckless lot. Their first thought was to mark off a claim by a rude method of surveying which entailed endless after trouble. Their second, to pursue the game which abounded in a plenteousness far surpassing anything in their past experience.

Before the close of April, Colonel Henderson arrived with a reinforcement of thirty men and a quantity of tools and ammunition. In the succeeding months arrivals were numerous from various quarters and by different routes. During the course of the year upwards of five hundred men from the frontiers of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Carolina went into Kentucky, but the majority of them were not settlers. Some were merely hunters but the greater number land speculators or “cabiners,” as they were termed, who ran up a shanty on a piece of land as evidence of occupation and returned to the colonies in the hope of selling the tract.

At the close of the summer Boone brought in his family from the Clinch Valley and his wife and daughters were, as he proudly declared, “the first white women to stand on the banks of the Kentucky.” Shortly afterwards, several other families came in, and there were before the end of September four or five settlements, the principal being Boonesborough and Harrodsburg, about fifty miles to the west of the former place. Two or three hundred acres of corn had been planted, fruit trees had been set, and horses, cattle and hogs had been introduced.

The settlers were for the most part of Scotch-Irish extraction, sturdy, patriotic men, attaching themselves to the soil with a tenacity that nothing could shake. In the struggle to maintain their homes in the new territory they greatly aided their countrymen in the Revolution, which was just about to break out. Indeed, they guarded the western flank of the colonies and even carried the war into the Crown dominions on the north. Among those who came into Kentucky in this first year of its settlement were a number whose names figure prominently in border story and in the history of our western march—George Rogers Clark, Simon Kenton, the Lewises, Benjamin Logan, James Harrod, John Todd, the brothers McAfee, Bowman, Hite, Randolph, McClellan.

During the latter months of 1775 the Indians gave little trouble and many settlers began to congratulate themselves upon the prospect of occupying the land without serious opposition, but in the closing days of the year several attacks were made on the whites at different points. These were the signal for the hurried departure of the timid, and of speculators, surveyors, and others who had no permanent interests in the country, making it apparent that in time of stress the tenure of the land would depend upon a few bold spirits.

In order to dispose of the Transylvania Company once for all, we shall anticipate the course of time somewhat. The settlers found many causes of dissatisfaction with the Company’s methods of managing affairs, and the declaration of independence by the colonies in July, 1776, made it evident that a proprietary government could not long exist. Under the circumstances, the settlers of Kentucky wished for definite inclusion in the new republic and with that view they sent a delegation to the Virginia Assembly praying that body to give them recognition as part of the State. In accordance with this petition, Kentucky was organized as a county of Virginia, with David Robinson as county lieutenant, John Bowman colonel, Anthony Bledsoe and George Rogers Clark majors, and Daniel Boone, James Harrod, Benjamin Logan and John Todd captains. Ultimately the Transylvania Company was compensated for the forfeiture of its possessions by a large grant of land.

But before all this happened, Kentucky had entered upon the stormy days that earned for it the grim title of “the dark and bloody ground.”