"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.