_After Examination Henderson is licensed to practise Law.--Defeat
of the Shawnees by the Virginians who claimed the Land south of
the Ohio.--The Attention of Settlers directed to the Land beyond
the Alleghanies.--Henderson resolves to form a Transylvania
Company and colonize Ken-ta-kee.--Buys from the Cherokees
twenty million Acres for ten thousand Pounds Sterling, March,
1775.--Bands of Earlier Kentucky Settlers, fleeing from the
Indians, meet Henderson's Colonists.--His Advance, led by Daniel
Boone, attacked by Indians.--Henderson appeals in vain to the
Fugitives to return with him.--Arrival of the Colonists at the
Site of Boonesborough.--Henderson's Anxiety regarding Virginia's
Attitude toward his Purchase.--The Governor of Virginia sends
a Force which overthrows the Colony.--Actual Settlers on the
Purchase permitted to remain in Title.--Grants of Land made to
the Company by Virginia and North Carolina in Return for their
Outlay.--The Moral Effect of this Proof that the West could be
successfully colonized._
RICHARD HENDERSON: THE FOUNDER OF TRANSYLVANIA
[Illustration]
IN early days in North Carolina, the young man who desired to practise
law was compelled to get a certificate from the Chief Justice of the
colony and to present this to the Governor; the latter examined the
candidate, and, becoming satisfied as to his attainments, granted him
a license. Almost a century and a half ago a youth presented himself
to the Governor of that colony with the proper credentials and asked
that he be examined for admission to the bar. His name, he affirmed,
was Richard Henderson. His father, Samuel Henderson, had moved from
Virginia in 1745, Richard's tenth year, and was now Sheriff of
Granville County. Richard had assisted his father "in the business of
the sherifftry," and, with a few books, had picked up his knowledge of
law.
All this the Governor of North Carolina learned with indifference, we
can imagine, as he looked the broad-shouldered lad up and down. It
may be that North Carolina had now a surplus of pettifoggers; at any
rate the Governor was not granting licenses with a free hand to-day.
The youth was not voluble, though his firm square jaw denoted both
sturdiness and determination; perhaps he was somewhat abashed, as he
well may have been, in the presence of the chief executive of the
colony.
"How long have you read law?" asked the Governor.
"A twelve-month," answered the lad.
"And what books have you read?" We can fancy there was the tinge of
a sneer in these words. Henderson named his books. If the sneer was
hidden until now, it instantly appeared as the young applicant was
bluntly told that it was nonsense for him to appear for an examination
after such a short period of study of such a limited number of books.
The firm jaws were clinched and the gray eyes snapped as the rebuke was
administered. Despite his homely exterior and unpolished address the
boy was already enough of a jurist to love justice and fair play; if
silent under many circumstances, he could speak when the time demanded
speech.
"Sir," he replied,--and it can be believed there was a ring to the
words,--"I am an applicant for examination: it is your duty to examine
me; if I am found worthy, I should be granted a license, and if not, I
should be refused one, not before."
We can be sure that the Governor bristled up at hearing his duty
outlined to him from the lips of a country boy; and it is no less
probable that as he began an examination it was wholly with the
intention of demoralizing utterly the spirit of the youth who had
spoken so boldly. The answers did not come so rapidly, probably, as the
questions were asked, nor were they formulated with equal nicety; but
the substance was there, of sufficient quantity and sturdy quality,
and in short order the Governor, who was a gentleman, found himself
admiring the cool, discerning lad who had the confidence of his
convictions. The license was granted and with it a bountiful degree of
honest praise.
Young Henderson immediately began the practice of law and was
increasingly successful; before the outbreak of the Revolution he was
judge on the bench of the Superior Court of North Carolina. As early as
1774 North Carolina was convulsed in the Revolutionary contest, and in
that year the Colonial government was abolished there.
The student will search in vain to find the earliest motive which led
Judge Henderson to turn his eyes to the westward at this juncture.
Yet since he had come of age he had witnessed important events: the
French and Indian War had been fought and won; Pontiac's rebellion
had been put down; the famous treaty of Fort Stanwix, which gave
Virginia all the territory between the Ohio and Tennessee rivers,
had been signed; and now in 1774, when North Carolina was in the
throes of revolution, Governor Dunmore of Virginia and General Andrew
Lewis defeated the savage Shawnees who had attempted to challenge
Virginia's right to the land south of the Ohio. The stories of the
first explorers of the hinterland beyond the Alleghanies--Walker,
Gist, Washington, and Boone--were now attracting more attention as
people began to believe that the Indians could, after all, be made to
keep their treaty pledges. As the Revolutionary fires raged in North
Carolina, many turned their eyes to the fresh green lands beyond the
mountains of which the "Long Hunters" and Boone had told. Were those
dreams true? Was there a pleasant land beyond dark Powell's Valley and
darker Cumberland Gap where the British would cease from troubling,
and honest men, as well as criminals and debtors, would be at rest?
The hope in one man's breast became a conviction, and the conviction a
firm purpose. Judge Henderson resolved to form a Transylvania Company,
secure a large tract of land, and lead a colony into the sweet meadows
of Ken-ta-kee.
It is not known when or how Judge Henderson learned that the Cherokees
would sell a portion of their Western hunting grounds. It may have been
only a borderland rumor; perhaps it came directly from the wigwams of
the Indians at the mouth of a "Long Hunter," possibly a Boone or a
Harrod. Somehow it did come, and Henderson resolved immediately to make
a stupendous purchase and follow it up with a remarkable emigration. It
will be proper to add at once that there is as little probability that
the Cherokees had a legal right to sell as that Henderson had to buy;
but neither party stood on technicalities. Virginia's sweeping claims,
made good by daring politics at the treaty of Fort Stanwix, covered
all the territory between the Ohio and the Tennessee. A Virginian law
forbade the private purchase of land from the Indians, though Virginia
herself had acquired it by flagrantly evading the plain meaning of the
King's proclamation of 1763 in making such a purchase from the Six
Nations. And the claim of the Six Nations to possession of the Old
Southwest was less substantial than that of the Cherokees who still
hunted there.
Passing, then, these technicalities as lightly as Virginia and
Henderson did (a common failing in the rough old days when this region
was but a moaning forest), let us look quickly to the West. Henderson's
plan was admirably laid. He at once took into his service the cool and
trusty Daniel Boone. The latter was posted off to that most distant of
borderland communities, the Watauga Settlement, to arrange a meeting
between the officers of the Transylvania Company and the chiefs of
the Cherokees. And here, at the famed Sycamore Shoals on this Watauga
tributary of the Tennessee, on the 17th of March, 1775, Richard
Henderson signed the treaty of Fort Watauga. His business associates
were Judge John Williams, Leonard Henley Bullock, James Hogg, Nathaniel
Thomas, David Hart, John Luttrell, and William Johnstone. But even the
well-informed Boone could not make all things move smoothly, and there
were delays ere the vast tract of twenty million acres lying south of
the Kentucky River was satisfactorily secured. The Cherokee chieftain,
Oconostota, opposed the treaty, and the stipulation named, ten thousand
pounds sterling in goods; he made, it is said, one of the "most
eloquent orations that ever fell from red man's lips," against Boone
and Henderson. At the close the quiet promoter, who "could be silent
in English and two Indian languages," met the Indian orator apart
and alone. No one ever knew what passed between them, but the treaty
of Fort Watauga was duly signed. All was ready now for the advance
movement, and Henderson immediately employed Daniel Boone to move
forward to mark the path to the Kentucky River, where the settlement
was to be made. Felix Walker was one of the band of woodsmen assembled
by Boone to assist in this task of marking out for white men the Indian
path through Cumberland Gap. "Colonel Boone ... was to be our pilot,"
Walker records, "through the wilderness, to the promised land."
Kentucky was a promised land; it was promised by the Cherokees, and
none knew better than the savage Shawnees that Cherokee promises
were worth no more than their own. In 1773 and 1774 numbers of the
half-civilized pioneers had been pressing into Kentucky, and in the
latter year cabins had been raised in many quarters. Whether or not
there was any sign of genuine permanency in these beginnings, Dunmore's
War, which broke out in 1774, put everything at hazard; the Kentucky
movement was seemingly destroyed for the time being. For this reason it
is that the Henderson purchase at Fort Watauga in March, 1775, was of
as precious moment and providential timeliness as perhaps any other
single private enterprise in our early history. As will be seen, the
Ohio Company played a most important role in the history of the West
in 1787, by making possible the famous Ordinance; but the filling of
Kentucky in 1775 was more important at that hour than any other social
movement at any other hour in Western history.
For Henderson "meant business": this was not a get-rich-quick scheme
that he was foisting upon others. He came to Watauga in the expectation
of proceeding onward to the farlying land he would buy--a man willing
to make great personal as well as financial risk in a venture more
chimerical in its day than the incorporation of an airship freight line
would be to-day. And by the twentieth of March, Henderson was ready
to push westward, along that winding line of wounded trees, up hill
and down valley, to the Gap and beyond into the wilderness which lay
between the Cumberland Mountains and the meadow lands of Kentucky.
Leaving Fort Watauga March 20, the party, chief of which were
Henderson, Hart, and Luttrell, reached Captain Joseph Martin's station
in Powell's Valley on the thirtieth. Of the experiences of these men,
recounted so interestingly in Henderson's little yellow diary, nothing
is so significant as the parties of pioneers which they soon began to
meet retreating from Kentucky. The first of these hurrying bands of
fugitives was encountered as early as April 7, and between that date
and April 19 at least seventy-six fugitives from the "dark and bloody
ground" met and passed Henderson's little colony of forty. Lewis's
victory of the Summer before had embittered the savages beyond all
words; and now, as the Spring of 1775 dawned in the lonely mountain
valleys, these first adventurers into Kentucky were hurrying eastward.
And this dread of Indian hostility was not a chimera; even as Boone's
party was hacking its route to the Kentucky River, it was ambushed in
camp by an Indian horde, which assailed it when night was darkest, just
before dawn; one man was killed and two were wounded, one of them
fatally.
Now it was that Boone sent Henderson those thrilling words which can
be understood only when we realize that the Indian marauders were
driving out of Kentucky the entire van which came there and began
settling in 1774. "My advice to you, Sir," wrote Boone from that bloody
battleground on the trail, "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 frustrate the intentions of the Indians, and keep the country
whilst we are in it. If we give way to them now, it will ever be the
case."
There is, unfortunately, no portrait of Richard Henderson in existence;
if one picture by some magic art could be secured, those who are
proudest of his memory could surely prefer no scene to this: a man a
little above average height, broad of shoulders but not fleshy, clad
in the rough garb of the typical pioneer, standing in Boone's trail
on a ragged spur of the gray-grained Cumberlands, pleading with a
pale-faced, disheartened Kentucky pioneer, to turn about, join his
company, and return to the Kentucky River. For this was the mission
of his life--to give heart to that precious movement into Kentucky at
this critical first hour of her history. A beginning had been made,
but it was on the point of being swept from its feet. The Transylvania
Company, led with courage and confidence by Boone and Henderson,
ignored the fears of fugitives and triumphed splendidly in the face of
every known and many unknown fears.
At noon of Saturday, April 8, Henderson and his followers were toiling
up the ascent into Cumberland Gap. On this day a returning party as
large as Henderson's was encountered. "Met about 40 persons returning
from the Cantuckey," wrote Henderson in his diary. "On Acct. of the
Late Murder by the Indians, could prevail one [on] one only to return.
Memo. Several Virginians who were with us returned." On the twelfth
another company of fugitives was met on Richmond Creek; William Calk,
one of Henderson's party, jotted this down in his journal: "There we
met another Company going back [to Virginia]; they tell such News Abram
and Drake is afraid to go aney further." This "Abram" was Abraham
Hanks, uncle of Nancy Hanks, the mother of Abraham Lincoln. But pushing
bravely on, Henderson and his daring associates reached the site of the
new Boonesborough (Fort Boone, Henderson called it) on the twentieth of
April.
From this it is well to date the founding of a genuine settlement
in Kentucky, one day after the rattle of that running fire of
muskets at Lexington and Concord which rang around the world. In an
indefinite sense, there were settlements in Kentucky before this; but
no promoter-friend of Kentucky ever coaxed back over the Cumberland
Mountains any of the founders of Boonesborough! True, Boonesborough
itself did not exist permanently; but not because the land was
deserted. Boonesborough was not on the direct line from Cumberland
Gap to the "Falls of the Ohio" (Louisville), and did not play the part
in later Kentucky history that Harrodsburg and Crab Orchard did. It
was, however, the first important fortified Kentucky station, and its
builders, chief of whom was Richard Henderson, received their heroic
inspiration from no persons or parties in existence in Kentucky when
they came thither. Henderson's determination to hold the ground gained
is seen in the following letter written in July, 1775, to Captain
Martin, in Powell's Valley, who had just given the Indians a bloody
check: "... Your spirited conduct gives me great pleasure. Keep your
men in heart if possible; now is your time, the Indians must not drive
us." A touch of the loneliness of Judge Henderson's situation is sensed
in another letter to Martin: "I long much to hear from you," he writes
from the banks of the far-away Kentucky, "pray write me at large, how
the matter goes with you in the valley, as well as what passes in
Virginia."
Little wonder he was anxious concerning Virginia's attitude toward his
purchase and the bold advance of his party of colonizers, from which
several Virginians had deserted. There could be no doubt of Virginia's
opinion of these North Carolinians who had taught that colony what
could be done in the West by brave, determined men. Henderson's
purchase was annulled, and Henderson and his compatriots were described
as vagabond interlopers, in a governor's anathema. Before this was
known, Henderson issued a regular call for a meeting of the colonists
to take the initial steps of forming a State government. But all that
Henderson planned is not to our purpose here. A rush of Virginians
through the doorway in Cumberland Gap, which Boone and Henderson had
opened, swept the inchoate state of Transylvania from record and almost
from memory. The Transylvania Company never survived the Virginia
governor's proclamation, North Carolina joining Virginia in repudiating
the private purchase. Actual settlers on Henderson's purchase, however,
were permitted to remain in title; and, in return for the money
expended by Henderson and his associates, Virginia granted his company
two hundred thousand acres of land in the vicinity of Henderson,
Kentucky; and North Carolina granted an equal amount in Carter's Valley
near the Cumberland Mountains. In each case the actual acreage was
about double that mentioned in the grant.
But this appropriation of nearly a million acres to the Henderson
Company cannot be viewed at this day as other than a payment for
great value received. From any standpoint Richard Henderson's brave
advance into Kentucky, in April, 1775, must be considered one of the
most heroic displays of that typical American spirit of comprehensive
aggrandizement of which so much is heard to-day. Its great value may
be guessed from the moral effect of the founding of Fort Boone at
the critical hour when the Revolutionary flames, so long burning in
secret, burst forth to enlighten the world. It meant much to the East
that Henderson and Boone should prove that a settlement on the lower
Ohio Basin could be made and maintained; it meant everything to the
infant West that Kentucky should so soon begin to fill with men, women,
and children. The debt of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois to Kentucky can
never be paid and probably never will be appropriately recognized.
The lands north of the Ohio were freed from savage dominion largely
by the raiding Kentuckians. It is certain that the most spectacular
campaign in Western history, Clark's conquest of Illinois, would never
have taken place in 1778 if Henderson and Boone had not placed the
possibility of successful Kentucky immigration beyond a reasonable
doubt in 1775.
Judge Henderson returned to North Carolina upon the failure of the
Transylvania Company, no doubt depressed and disappointed. The later
allotment of land to the Transylvania Company by Virginia and North
Carolina in part annulled the severe early defamatory charges of the
Virginia governor. He lived to a peaceful old age, and lies buried near
his old colonial mansion near Williamstown, North Carolina.
Boonesborough is well remembered as Boone's Fort; but it is unjust to
forget that Boone was acting in the employ of Richard Henderson, the
founder of Transylvania.