§ 299]

BOONE IN KENTUCKY

249

suffrage and absolute religious freedom were main features.1 A representative convention of thirteen, one from each station, chose a "court" of five members who formed the government. This body of commissioners held regular meetings and managed affairs with little regard for legal technicalities, but with sound sense. For six years Watauga was an independent political community. Then, in 1778, when the Revolution had reformed North Carolina, Watauga recognized the authority of that State and became Washington County.

was made in

299. The second group of Western settlements - almost as early as Watauga Kentucky. Among the many daring hunters and Indian fighters, who, preceding settlement, had ventured from time to time into the bloody Indian hunting grounds south of the Ohio, Daniel Boone was the famous. As early as 1760, Boone hunted west of the mountains; and in 1769 (the year Watauga was founded) he went on a "long hunt" there with six companions. After five weeks' progress through the forest stretching continuously

most

1 The student must remember how far short of such democracy fell the Revolutionary constitutions of the Eastern States four or five years later.

from the Atlantic, this little party broke through its western fringe and stood upon the verge of the vast prairies of America. They had come to the now famous "blue-grass" district of Kentucky.

Hitherto (except for petty Indian clearings) American colonists had had to win homes slowly with the ax from the stubborn forest. Now before the eyes of these explorers there spread away a lovely land, where stately groves and running waters intermingled with rich open prairies and grassy meadows, inviting the husbandman to easy possession and teeming with game for the hunter, herds of bison, elk, and deer, as well as bear and wolves and wild turkey, in abundance unguessed before by English-speaking men.

In the following months, hard on the trail of the hunters, followed various small expeditions of backwoods surveyors and would-be settlers, in spite of frequent death by the scalping knife and at the stake.2 In particular, Boone returned again and again, and, in 1773, he sold his Carolina home, to settle in the new land of promise. His expedition was repulsed, however, by a savage Indian attack, and the next year the opening of a great Indian War along the Virginian and Pennsylvanian border drove every settler out of Kentucky.

300. This was "Lord Dunmore's War." Without provocation, a dastard White trader had murdered the helpless family of Logan, a friendly Iroquois chieftain. In horrible retaliation a mighty Indian confederacy was soon busied with torch and tomahawk on the western frontiers. Pennsylvania suffered most, and the dilatory government there did little to protect its citizens. Virginia, however, acted promptly. To crush the confederacy she sent an army far beyond her line of settle

1 The prairies proper, even when reached, did not at first attract settlers. The lack of fuel and often of water more than made up for difficulty of clearing forest land. But Kentucky offered a happy mixture.

2 Very soon, indeed, the colonist learned that the Woods Indian of the West-armed now almost as well as the Whites was a far more formidable

foe than the weak tribes of the coast had been.

-

§ 301]

LORD DUNMORE'S WAR

251

ment, into the distant Northwest, where she claimed jurisdiction (§ 44), though parliament had just annexed the territory to Quebec. This Virginian force was composed chiefly of hardy frontier riflemen, with deerskin hunting shirts for uniform, but, by a curious contrast, it was led by an English earl, the royal governor, Lord Dunmore.

The rear division of the army, when about to cross the Ohio at the mouth of the Kanawha, was surprised, through the splendid generalship of the Indian leader Cornstalk, by the whole force of the natives; but, after a stubborn pitched battle, the frontiersmen won a decisive victory. This Battle of the Great Kanawha is as important as any conflict ever waged between Whites and Redmen. Says Theodore Roosevelt: "It so cowed the northern Indians that for two or three years they made no organized attempt to check the White advance. . . [It] gave opportunity for Boone to settle in Kentucky and, therefore, for Robertson to settle Middle Tennessee, and for Clark to conquer Illinois and the Northwest. It was the first link in the chain of causes that gave us for our western boundary in 1783 the Mississippi, and not the Alleghenies" (§ 288).

301. Permanent settlement in central Kentucky began the next spring (1775). For a few months it had the form of a proprietary colony. A certain Henderson, a citizen of North Carolina, bought from the southern Indians their rights to a great tract in central Kentucky and Tennessee. He named the proposed colony Transylvania, and secured Boone as his agent. In March and April, Boone and a strong company marked out the Wilderness Road1 and began to build "Boone's Fort."

Henderson soon arrived with a considerable colony.

1 This famous Wilderness Road was for many years merely a narrow bridle path, through the more passable parts of the forest and across the easiest fords, leading two hundred miles from the Holston River (near Watauga) into central Kentucky. In the worst places, the thick underbrush was cut out; but much of the time only the direction was blazed on trees. It long remained the chief road from the West to the Atlantic regions. Immigrants soon began, it is true, to float down the Ohio; but that route was more exposed to Indian attack, and return up the river in that day was impossible.

But the Revolution ruined all prospect of English sanction for his proprietary claims, and Virginia firmly asserted her title to the territory. Henderson soon passed from the scene; and, in 1777, Kentucky, with its present bounds, was organized as a county of Virginia.

Kentucky already contained several hundred fighting men, and now it became the base from which George Rogers Clark conquered the Northwest (§ 288). Before the close of the Revolution, Kentucky's population exceeded 25,000; and when peace made Indian hostility less likely, a still larger immigration began to crowd the Wilderness Road and the Ohio.

302. Meanwhile Watauga had become the mother of a still more western colony. Population had increased rapidly, and some of the earlier "forts" had grown into straggling villages. At the end of ten years, it was no longer a place for the real frontiersmen; and, in 1779, Robertson, with some of his more restless neighbors, migrated once more to a new wilderness home in west-central Tennessee, on the bend of the Cumberland.

DANIEL BOONE at 85 (in 1819), when

he had moved on into frontier Missouri. From a portrait by Chester Harding, now in the Filson Club, Louisville, Ky.

These "Cumberland settlements were the third group of English-speaking colonists in the Southwest. Population thronged into the fertile district, with the usual proportion of undesirable frontier characters; and the settlers found it needful at once to provide a government. May 1, 1780, a convention of representatives at Nashboro adopted a "constitution," - which, however, was styled by the makers merely "a temporary method of restraining the licentious."

§ 304]

ROBERTSON ON THE CUMBERLAND

253

A few days later, this "social compact" was signed by every adult male settler, 256 in number. It provided for a court of twelve "judges," chosen by manhood suffrage in the several stations. If dissatisfied with its representative, a station might at any time hold a new election (the modern “recall "). Like the early Watauga "commissioners," the "judges" exercised all powers of government. The constitution, however, expressly recognized the right of North Carolina to rule the district when she should be ready; and in 1783 that State organized the Cumberland settlements into Davidson County.

303. A year later (1784) North Carolina ceded her western lands to the Continental Congress. The Westerners complained loudly that the mother-State had cast them off, and that the dilatory Congress was not ready to accept them. The three counties of eastern Tennessee (about Watauga) now numbered 10,000 people. August 23, 1784, a representative convention of forty delegates declared this district an independent State with the name Frankland ("Land of the Free").

A later convention adopted a constitution, and a full state government was set up, with Sevier as governor. But North Carolina "repealed" her cession (Congress not having acted); and after some years of struggle that rose even into war, she succeeded in restoring her authority.

304. For some years, only feeble ties held the Western settlements to the Atlantic States. The men of the West made continuous efforts for Statehood; but these efforts were opposed not only by Virginia and North Carolina, but also by Congress. Then, at one time or another, in each of the three groups of settlements, these legitimate attempts merged obscurely in less justifiable plots for complete separation from the Eastern confederacy. For even this extreme phase of the movement,

1 The first legislature of Frankland had to fix a currency "in kind": a pound of sugar was to pass as one shilling; a fox or raccoon skin for two shillings; a gallon of peach brandy for three shillings, and so on. Easterners laughed contemptuously at this "money which cannot be counterfeited," forgetting how their fathers had used like currency (§ 208).