Fortunately indeed, as events turned out, Boone was overruled, and the expedition was abandoned. The Bryan party and the others from North Carolina went back to the Yadkin. Boone himself with his family accompanied Russell to the Clinch settlement, where he erected a temporary cabin on the farm of one of the settlers, and then set out alone on the chase to earn provision for his wife and children through the winter.
Those who prophesied an Indian war were not mistaken. When the snowy hunting season had passed and the “Powwowing Days” were come, the Indian war drum rattled in the medicine house from the borders of Pennsylvania to those of Carolina. The causes of the strife for which the red men were making ready must be briefly noted to help us form a just opinion of the deeds that followed. Early writers have usually represented the frontiersmen as saints in buckskin and the Indians as fiends without the shadow of a claim on either the land or humanity. Many later writers have merely reversed the shield. The truth is that the Indians and the borderers reacted upon each other to the hurt of both. Paradoxically, they grew like enough to hate one another with a savage hatred—and both wanted the land.
Land! Land! was the slogan of all sorts and conditions of men. Tidewater officials held solemn powwows with the chiefs, gave wampum strings, and forthwith incorporated. ¹ Chiefs blessed their white brothers who had “forever brightened the chain of friendship,” departed home, and proceeded to brighten the blades of their tomahawks and to await, not long, the opportunity to use them on casual hunters who carried in their kits the compass, the “land-stealer.” Usually the surveying hunter was a borderer; and on him the tomahawk descended with an accelerated gusto. Private citizens also formed land companies and sent out surveyors, regardless of treaties. Bold frontiersmen went into No Man's Land and staked out their claims. In the very year when disaster turned the Boone party back, James Harrod had entered Kentucky from Pennsylvania and had marked the site of a settlement.
[¹] The activities of the great land companies are described in Alvord's exhaustive work, The Mississippi Valley in British Politics.
Ten years earlier (1763), the King had issued the famous and much misunderstood Proclamation restricting his “loving subjects” from the lands west of the mountains. The colonists interpreted this document as a tyrannous curtailment of their liberties for the benefit of the fur trade. We know now that the portion of this Proclamation relating to western settlement was a wise provision designed to protect the settlers on the frontier by allaying the suspicions of the Indians, who viewed with apprehension the triumphal occupation of that vast territory from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico by the colonizing English. By seeking to compel all land purchase to be made through the Crown, it was designed likewise to protect the Indians from “whisky purchase,” and to make impossible the transfer of their lands except with consent of the Indian Council, or full quota of headmen, whose joint action alone conveyed what the tribes considered to be legal title. Sales made according to this form, Sir William Johnson declared to the Lords of Trade, he had never known to be repudiated by the Indians. This paragraph of the Proclamation was in substance an embodiment of Johnson's suggestions to the Lords of Trade. Its purpose was square dealing and pacification; and shrewd men such as Washington recognized that it was not intended as a final check to expansion. “A temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians,” Washington called it, and then himself went out along the Great Kanawha and into Kentucky, surveying land.
It will be asked what had become of the Ohio Company of Virginia and that fort at the Forks of the Ohio, once a bone of contention between France and England. Fort Pitt, as it was now called, had fallen foul of another dispute, this time between Virginia and Pennsylvania. Virginia claimed that the far western corner of her boundary ascended just far enough north to take in Fort Pitt. Pennsylvania asserted that it did nothing of the sort. The Ohio Company had meanwhile been merged into the Walpole Company. George Croghan, at Fort Pitt, was the Company's agent and as such was accused by Pennsylvania of favoring from ulterior motives the claims of Virginia. Hotheads in both colonies asseverated that the Indians were secretly being stirred up in connection with the boundary disputes. If it does not very clearly appear how an Indian rising would have settled the ownership of Fort Pitt, it is evident enough where the interests of Virginia and Pennsylvania clashed. Virginia wanted land for settlement and speculation; Pennsylvania wanted the Indians left in possession for the benefit of the fur trade. So far from stirring up the Indians, as his enemies declared, Croghan was as usual giving away all his substance to keep them quiet. ¹ Indeed, during this summer of 1774, eleven hundred Indians were encamped about Fort Pitt visiting him.
[¹] The suspicion that Croghan and Lord Dunmore, the Governor of Virginia, were instigating the war appears to have arisen out of the conduct of Dr. John Connolly, Dunmore's agent and Croghan's nephew. Croghan had induced the Shawanoes to bring under escort to Fort Pitt certain English traders resident in the Indian towns. The escort was fired on by militiamen under command of Connolly, who also issued a proclamation declaring a state of war to exist. Connolly, however, probably acted on his own initiative. He was interested in land on his own behalf and was by no means the only man at that time who was ready to commit outrages on Indians in order to obtain it. As Croghan lamented, there was “too great a spirit in the frontier people for killing Indians.”
Two hundred thousand acres in the West—Kentucky and West Virginia—had been promised to the colonial officers and soldiers who fought in the Seven Years' War. But after making the Proclamation the British Government had delayed issuing the patents. Washington interested himself in trying to secure them; and Lord Dunmore, who also had caught the “land-fever,” ² prodded the British authorities but won only rebuke for his inconvenient activities. Insistent, however, Dunmore sent out parties of surveyors to fix the bounds of the soldiers' claims. James Harrod, Captain Thomas Bullitt, Hancock Taylor, and three McAfee brothers entered Kentucky, by the Ohio, under Dunmore's orders. John Floyd went in by the Kanawha as Washington's agent. A bird's-eye view of that period would disclose to us very few indeed of His Majesty's loving subjects who were paying any attention to his proclamation. Early in 1774, Harrod began the building of cabins and a fort, and planted corn on the site of Harrodsburg. Thus to him and not to Boone fell the honor of founding the first permanent white settlement in Kentucky.
[²] See Alvord, The Mississippi Valley in British Politics, vol. II, pp. 191-94.