America here and now gave the one proof of life—growth. Not from one point in particular, but from every point, the ranks of this humble army were filled; not one sect or race gave those rough and shaggy regiments their men, but every sect and every racial stock.
That army had its leaders, though they wore only the uncouth regimentals of the rank and file. It is of certain of these Pilots of the Republic that these pages treat,—men who were moved by what were very generally called selfish motives in their days. Yet against what human motive may not the accusation of self-interest be cast? It has been hurled against almost every earnest man since Christ was crucified in ignominy nineteen centuries ago. Scan the list of men herein treated, and you will not find a single promoter of the Central West who was not accused of harboring an ulterior motive, if not of downright perfidy. Some of the best of these leaders of the expansion movement were most bitterly maligned; the heroic missionaries who forgot every consideration of health, comfort, worldly prosperity, home, and friends were sometimes decried as plotting ambassadors of scheming knaves.
The pure and upright Washington, looking westward with clearer eye and surer faith than any of his generation, was besmirched by the accusations of hypocritical self-aggrandizement. Yet he must stand first and foremost in the category of men who influenced and gave efficiency to that vital westward movement. This man, as will be shown, was more truly the "Father of the West" than he ever was "Father of his Country." A decade before the Revolution was precipitated in sturdy Massachusetts, he had become fascinated with the commercial possibilities of the trans-Alleghany empire. He explored the Ohio and Great Kanawha rivers, and conceived what the future would bring forth; he took up large tracts of lands. Before he died he owned many patents to land in what is now New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, Maryland, and Florida, as well as his home farms along the Potomac. He had a keen business sense, and demanded his full rights; he forcibly ousted from his lands men who knowingly usurped them; and all through the years he was accused of using his preponderating influence to further selfish plans; he was called a land-shark and a robber. It is interesting to know that his own private conclusion was that his investments had not paid; his words were that they had resulted more "in vexation than profit." And when he spoke those words he was master of between twenty and thirty thousand of the most fertile acres in the Ohio River basin.
Yet Washington had marvellously influenced the nation's destiny by these "unprofitable" investments. The very position he occupied and which he was accused of misusing had powerfully stimulated the army that was carrying the broadaxe westward. In countless ways this man had given circulation to ideas that were inspiring and hopeful, and just so far as he believed he had failed as a private speculator, he had in reality triumphed mightily as the leading exponent of a growing Republic which was called upon to prove that it could grow.
Richard Henderson stands out prominently as an honest leader of this army of conquerors. We can never read without a thrill the sentence in that letter of Daniel Boone's to Henderson in which the bold woodsman pleads the necessity of Henderson's hastening into Kentucky in 1775. All that Kentucky was and all that it did during the Revolution seems to have hung suspended on the advance of Richard Henderson's party through Cumberland Gap in that eventful April; and those words of the guide and trail-blazer, Boone, imploring that there be no delay, and emphasizing the stimulating effect that Henderson's advance would have on the various parties of explorers, have a ring of destiny in them. True, Virginia and North Carolina both repudiated Henderson's Indian purchase, and the promoter of historic Transylvania was decried and defamed; but his advance into the valley of the Kentucky gave an inspiration to the scattered parties of vagrant prospectors that resulted in making a permanent settlement in that key-stone State of the West, which was of untold advantage to the nation at large. And later Virginia and North Carolina made good the loss the founder of Transylvania had suffered because of their earlier repudiation.
In Washington and Henderson we have two important factors in the advance of the pioneer army into the old Southwest—the region between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi south of the Ohio River.
Daniel Boone