Pioneers of the Old Southwest [39]
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 Findlay guided 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 and Attakullakulla--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.*
* This 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.
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 and Attakullakulla--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.*
* This 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.