第31章 Chapter VII. The Dark And Bloody Ground(2)

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. In Powell's Valley they came up with a party of Virginians Kentucky bound, led by Benjamin Logan; and the two bands joined together for the march. They had not gone far when they heard disquieting news. After leaving Martin's Station, at the gates of his new domain, Henderson received a letter from Boone telling of an attack by Indians, in which two of his men had been killed, but "we stood on the ground and guarded our baggage till the day and lost nothing."* These tidings, indicating that despite treaties and sales, the savages were again on the warpath, might well alarm Henderson's colonists. While they halted, some indecisive, others frankly for retreat, there appeared a company of men making all haste out of Kentucky because of Indian unrest.

Six of these Henderson persuaded to turn again and go in with him; but this addition hardly offset the loss of those members of his party who thought it too perilous to proceed. Henderson's own courage did not falter. He had staked his all on this stupendous venture and for him it was forward to wealth and glory or retreat into poverty and eclipse. Boone, in the heart of the danger, was making the same stand. "If we give way to them [the Indians] now," he wrote, "it will ever be the case."

* Bogart, "Daniel Boone and the Hunters of Kentucky." p. 121.

Signs of discord other than Indian opposition met Henderson as he resolutely pushed on. His conversations with some of the fugitives from Kentucky disclosed the first indications of the storm that was to blow away the empire he was going in to found.

He told them that the claims they had staked in Kentucky would not hold good with the Transylvania Company. Whereupon James McAfee, who was leading a group of returning men, stated his opinion that the Transylvania Company's claim would not hold good with Virginia. After the parley, three of McAfee's brothers turned back and went with Henderson's party, but whether with intent to join his colony or to make good their own claims is not apparent. Benjamin Logan continued amicably with Henderson on the march but did not recognize him as Lord Proprietor of Kentucky.

He left the Transylvania caravan shortly after entering the territory, branched off in the direction of Harrodsburg, and founded St. Asaph's Station, in the present Lincoln County, independently of Henderson though the site lay within Henderson's purchase.

Notwithstanding delays and apprehensions, Henderson and his colonists finally reached Boone's Fort, which Daniel and his "thirty guns"--lacking two since the Indian encounter--had erected at the mouth of Otter Creek.

An attractive buoyancy of temperament is revealed in Henderson's description in his journal of a giant elm with tall straight trunk and even foliage that shaded a space of one hundred feet.

Instantly he chose this "divine elm" as the council chamber of Transylvania. Under its leafage he read the constitution of the new colony. It would be too great a stretch of fancy to call it a democratic document, for it was not that, except in deft phrases.

Power was certainly declared to be vested in the people; but the substance of power remained in the hands of the Proprietors.