—John Donelson: Journal of a Voyage, intended by God's permission, in the good boat Adventure, from Fort Patrick Henry, on Holston River, to the French Salt Springs on Cumberland River.
To the settlements in Tennessee and Kentucky, which they had seized and occupied, the pioneers held on with a tenacious grip which never relaxed. From these strongholds, won through sullen and desperate strokes, they pushed deeper into the wilderness, once again to meet with undimmed courage the bitter onslaughts of their resentful foes. The crushing of the Cherokees in 1776 relieved the pressure upon the Tennessee settlers, enabling them to strengthen their hold and prepare effectively for future eventualities; the possession of the gateway to Kentucky kept free the passage for Western settlement; Watauga and its defenders continued to offer a formidable barrier to British invasion of the East from Kentucky and the Northwest during the Revolution; while these Tennessee frontiersmen were destined soon to set forth again to invade a new wilderness and at frightful cost to colonize the Cumberland.
The little chain of stockades along the far-flung frontier of Kentucky was tenaciously held by the bravest of the race, grimly resolved that this chain must not break. The Revolution precipitated against this chain wave after wave of formidable Indian foes from the Northwest under British leadership. At the very time when Griffith Rutherford set out for the relief of McDowell's Fort, a marauding Indian band captured by stealth near the Transylvania Fort, known as Boone's Fort (Boonesborough), Elizabeth and Frances Callaway, and Jemima Boone, the daughters of Richard Callaway and Daniel Boone, and rapidly marched them away toward the Shawanoe towns on the Ohio. A relief party, in two divisions, headed respectively by the young girls' fathers, and composed among others of the lovers of the three girls, Samuel Henderson, John Holder, and Flanders Callaway, pursued them with almost incredible swiftness. Guided by broken twigs and bits of cloth surreptitiously dropped by Elizabeth Callaway, they finally overtook the unsuspecting savages, killed two of them, and rescued the three maidens unharmed. This romantic episode—which gave Fenimore Cooper the theme for the most memorable scene in one of his Leatherstocking Tales—had an even more romantic sequel in the subsequent marriage of the three pairs of lovers.
This bold foray, so shrewdly executed and even more sagaciously foiled, was a true precursor of the dread happenings of the coming years. Soon the red men were lurking in the neighborhood of the stations; and relief was felt when the Transylvania Fort, the great stockade planned by Judge Henderson, was completed by the pioneers (July, 1776). Glad tidings arrived only a few days later when the Declaration of Independence, read aloud from the Virginia Gazette, was greeted with wild huzzas by the patriotic backwoodsmen. During the ensuing months occasional invasions were made by savage bands; but it was not until April 24, 1777, that Henderson's "big fort" received its first attack, being invested by a company of some seventy-five savages. The twenty-two riflemen in the fort drove off the painted warriors, but not before Michael Stoner, Daniel Boone, and several others were severely wounded. As he lay helpless upon the ground, his ankle shattered by a bullet, Boone was lifted by Simon Kenton and borne away upon his shoulders to the haven of the stockade amid a veritable shower of balls. The stoical and taciturn Boone clasped Kenton's hand and gave him the accolade of the wilderness in the brief but heartfelt utterance; "You are a fine fellow." On July 4th of this same year the fort was again subjected to siege, when two hundred gaudily painted savages surrounded it for two days. But owing to the vigilance and superb markmanship of the defenders, as well as to the lack of cannon by the besieging force, the Indians reluctantly abandoned the siege, after leaving a number dead upon the field. Soon afterward the arrival of two strong bodies of prime riflemen, who had been hastily summoned from the frontiers of North Carolina and Virginia, once again made firm the bulwark of white supremacy in the West.
Kentucky's terrible year, 1778, opened with a severe disaster to the white settlers—when Boone with thirty men, while engaged in making salt at the "Lower Salt Spring," was captured in February by more than a hundred Indians, sent by Governor Hamilton of Detroit to drive the white settlers from "Kentucke." Boone remained in captivity until early summer, when, learning that his Indian captors were planning an attack in force upon the Transylvania Fort, he succeeded in effecting his escape. After a break-neck journey of one hundred and sixty miles, during which he ate but one meal, Boone finally arrived at the big fort on June 20th. The settlers were thus given ample time for preparation, as the long siege did not begin until September 7th. The fort was invested by a powerful force flying the English flag—four hundred and forty-four savages gaudy in the vermilion and ochre of their war-paint, and eleven Frenchmen, the whole being commanded by the French-Canadian, Captain Dagniaux de Quindre, and the great Indian Chief, Black-fish, who had adopted Boone as a son. [187] In the effort to gain his end de Quindre resorted to a dishonorable stratagem, by which he hoped to outwit the settlers and capture the fort with but slight loss. "They formed a scheme to deceive us," says Boone, "declaring it was their orders, from Governor Hamilton, to take us captives, and not to destroy us; but if nine of us would come out and treat with them, they would immediately withdraw their forces from our walls, and return home peacably." Transparent as the stratagem was, Boone incautiously agreed to a conference with the enemy; Callaway alone took the precaution to guard against Indian duplicity. After a long talk, the Indians proposed to Boone, Callaway, and the seven or eight pioneers who accompanied them that they shake hands in token of peace and friendship. As picturesquely described by Daniel Trabue:
The Indians sayed two Indians must shake hands with one white man to make a Double or sure peace at this time the Indians had hold of the white men's hands and held them. Col. Calloway objected to this but the other Indians laid hold or tryed to lay hold of the other hand but Colonel Calloway was the first that jerked away from them but the Indians seized the men two Indians holt of one man or it was mostly the case and did their best to hold them but while the man and Indians was a scuffling the men from the Fort agreeable to Col. Calloway's order fired on them they had a dreadful skuffel but our men all got in the fort safe and the fire continued on both sides. [188]
During the siege Callaway, the leader of the pioneers, made a wooden cannon wrapped with wagon tires, which on being fired at a group of Indians "made them scamper perdidiously." The secret effort of the Indians to tunnel a way underground into the fort, being discovered by the defenders, was frustrated by a countermine. Unable to outwit, outfight, or outmaneuver the resourceful Callaway, de Quindre finally withdrew on September 16th, closing the longest and severest attack that any of the fortified stations of Kentucky had ever been called upon to withstand.
The successful defense of the Transylvania Fort, made by these indomitable backwoodsmen who were lost sight of by the Continental Congress and left to fight alone their battles in the forests, was of national significance in its results. Had the Transylvania Fort fallen, the northern Indians in overwhelming numbers, directed by Hamilton and led by British officers, might well have swept Kentucky free of defenders and fallen with devastating force upon the exposed settlements along the western frontiers of North Carolina, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. This defense of Boonesborough, therefore, is deserving of commemoration in the annals of the Revolution, along with Lexington and Bunker's Hill. Coupled with Clark's meteoric campaign in the Northwest and the subsequent struggles in the defense of Kentucky, it may be regarded as an event basically responsible for the retention of the trans-Alleghany region by the United States. The bitter struggles, desperate sieges, and bloody reprisals of these dark years came to a close with the expeditions of Clark and Logan in November, 1782, which appropriately concluded the Revolution in the West by putting a definite end to all prospect of formidable invasion of Kentucky.
In November, 1777, "Washington District," the delegates of which had been received in the preceding year by the Provincial Congress of North Carolina, was formed by the North Carolina General Assembly into Washington County; and to it were assigned the boundaries of the whole of the present state of Tennessee. While this immense territory was thus being definitely included within the bounds of North Carolina, Judge Henderson on behalf of the Transylvania Company was making a vigorous effort to secure the reëstablishment of its rights from the Virginia Assembly. By order of the Virginia legislature, an exhaustive investigation of the claims of the Transylvania Company was therefore made, hearings being held at various points in the back country. On July 18, 1777, Judge Henderson presented to the peace commissioners for North Carolina and Virginia at the Long Island treaty ground an elaborate memorial in behalf of the Transylvania Company, which the commissioners unanimously refused to consider, as not coming under their jurisdiction. [189] Finally, after a full and impartial discussion before the Virginia House of Delegates, that body declared the Transylvania purchase void. [190] But in consideration of "the very great expense [incurred by the company] in making the said purchase, and in settling the said lands, by which the commonwealth is likely to receive great advantage, by increasing its inhabitants, and establishing a barrier against the Indians," the House of Delegates granted Richard Henderson and Company two hundred thousand acres of land situated between the Ohio and Green rivers, where the town of Henderson, Kentucky, now stands. [191] With this bursting of the Transylvania bubble and the vanishing of the golden dreams of Henderson and his associates for establishing the fourteenth American colony in the heart of the trans-Alleghany, a first romantic chapter in the history of Westward expansion comes to a close.
But another and more feasible project immediately succeeded. Undiscouraged by Virginia's confiscation of Transylvania, and disregarding North Carolina's action in extending her boundaries over the trans-Alleghany region lying within her chartered limits, Henderson, in whom the genius of the colonizer and the ambition of the speculative capitalist were found in striking conjunction, was now inspired to repeat, along broader and more solidly practical lines, the revolutionary experiment of Transylvania. It was not his purpose, however, to found an independent colony; for he believed that millions of acres in the Transylvania purchase lay within the bounds of North Carolina, and he wished to open for colonization, settlement, and the sale of lands, the vast wilderness of the valley of the Cumberland supposed to lie within those confines. But so universal was the prevailing uncertainty in regard to boundaries that it was necessary to prolong the North Carolina-Virginia line in order to determine whether or not the Great French Lick, the ideal location for settlement, lay within the chartered limits of North Carolina. [192]