第32章 Chapter VII. The Dark And Bloody Ground(3)

Terms for land grants were generous enough in the beginning, although Henderson made the fatal mistake of demanding quitrents--one of the causes of dissatisfaction which had led to the Regulators' rising in North Carolina. In September he augmented this error by more than doubling the price of land, adding a fee of eight shillings for surveying, and reserving to the Proprietors one-half of all gold, silver, lead, and sulphur found on the land. No land near sulphur springs or showing evidences of metals was to be granted to settlers. Moreover, at the Company's store the prices charged for lead were said to be too high--lead being necessary for hunting, and hunting being the only means of procuring food--while the wages of labor, as fixed by the Company, were too low. These terms bore too heavily on poor men who were risking their lives in the colony.

Hence newcomers passed by Boonesborough, as the Transylvania settlement was presently called, and went elsewhere. They settled on Henderson's land but refused his terms. They joined in their sympathies with James Harrod, who, having established Harrodsburg in the previous year at the invitation of Virginia, was not in the humor to acknowledge Henderson's claim or to pay him tribute.

All were willing to combine with the Transylvania Company for defense, and to enforce law they would unite in bonds of brotherhood in Kentucky, even as they had been one with each other on the earlier frontier now left behind them. But they would call no man master; they had done with feudalism. That Henderson should not have foreseen this, especially after the upheaval in North Carolina, proves him, in spite of all his brilliant gifts, to have been a man out of touch with the spirit of the time.

The war of the Revolution broke forth and the Indians descended upon the Kentucky stations. Defense was the one problem in all minds, and defense required powder and lead in plenty. The Transylvania Company was not able to provide the means of defense against the hordes of savages whom Henry Hamilton, the British Governor at Detroit, was sending to make war on the frontiers.

Practical men like Harrod and George Rogers Clark--who, if not a practical man in his own interests, was a most practical soldier--saw that unification of interests within the territory with the backing of either Virginia or Congress was necessary.

Clark personally would have preferred to see the settlers combine as a freemen's state. It was plain that they would not combine and stake their lives as a unit to hold Kentucky for the benefit of the Transylvania Company, whose authority some of the most prominent men in the territory had refused to recognize. The Proprietary of Transylvania could continue to exist only to the danger of every life in Kentucky.

While the Proprietors sent a delegate to the Continental Congress to win official recognition for Transylvania, eighty-four men at Harrodsburg drew up a petition addressed to Virginia stating their doubts of the legality of Henderson's title and requesting Virginia to assert her authority according to the stipulations of her charter. That defense was the primary and essential motive of the Harrodsburg Remonstrance seems plain, for when George Rogers Clark set off on foot with one companion to lay the document before the Virginian authorities, he also went to plead for a load of powder. In his account of that hazardous journey, as a matter of fact, he makes scant reference to Transylvania, except to say that the greed of the Proprietors would soon bring the colony to its end, but shows that his mind was seldom off the powder. It is a detail of history that the Continental Congress refused to seat the delegate from Transylvania. Henderson himself went to Virginia to make the fight for his land before the Assembly.*

* In 1778 Virginia disallowed Henderson's title but granted him two hundred thousand acres between the Green and Kentucky rivers for his trouble and expense in opening up the country.

The magnetic center of Boonesborough's life was the lovable and unassuming Daniel Boone. Soon after the building of the fort Daniel had brought in his wife and family. He used often to state with a mild pride that his wife and daughters were the first white women to stand on the banks of the Kentucky River. That pride had not been unmixed with anxiety; his daughter Jemima and two daughters of his friend, Richard Galloway, while boating on the river had been captured by Shawanoes and carried off. Boone, accompanied by the girls' lovers and by John Floyd (eager to repay his debt of life-saving to Boone) had pursued them, tracing the way the captors had taken by broken twigs and scraps of dress goods which one of the girls had contrived to leave in their path, had come on the Indians unawares, killed them, and recovered the three girls unhurt.