Notwithstanding delays and apprehensions, Henderson and his colonists finally reached Boone's Fort, which Daniel and his “thirty guns”—lacking two since the Indian encounter—had erected at the mouth of Otter Creek.
An attractive buoyancy of temperament is revealed in Henderson's description in his journal of a giant elm with tall straight trunk and even foliage that shaded a space of one hundred feet. Instantly he chose this "divine elm" as the council chamber of Transylvania. Under its leafage he read the constitution of the new colony. It would be too great a stretch of fancy to call it a democratic document, for it was not that, except in deft phrases. Power was certainly declared to be vested in the people; but the substance of power remained in the hands of the Proprietors.
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. ¹
[¹] 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.
In the summer of 1776, Virginia took official note of “Captain Boone of Boonesborough,” for she sent him a small supply of powder. The men of the little colony, which had begun so pretentiously with its constitution and assembly, were now obliged to put all other plans aside and to concentrate on the question of food and defense. There was a dangerous scarcity of powder and lead. The nearest points at which these necessaries could be procured were the Watauga and Holston River settlements, which were themselves none too well stocked. Harrod and Logan, some time in 1777, reached the Watauga fort with three or four pack-horses and filled their packs from Sevier's store; but, as they neared home, they were detected by red scouts and Logan was badly wounded before he and Harrod were able to drive their precious load safely through the gates at Harrodsburg. In the autumn of 1777, Clark, with a boatload of ammunition, reached Maysville on the Ohio, having successfully run the gauntlet between banks in possession of the foe. He had wrested the powder and lead from the Virginia Council by threats to the effect that if Virginia was so willing to lose Kentucky—for of course “a country not worth defending is not worth claiming”—he and his fellows were quite ready to take Kentucky for themselves and to hold it with their swords against all comers, Virginia included. By even such cogent reasoning had he convinced the Council—which had tried to hedge by expressing doubts that Virginia would receive the Kentucky settlers as “citizens of the State”—that it would be cheaper to give him the powder.
Because so many settlers had fled and the others had come closer together for their common good, Harrodsburg and Boonesborough were now the only occupied posts in Kentucky. Other settlements, once thriving, were abandoned; and, under the terror, the Wild reclaimed them. In April, 1777, Boonesborough underwent its first siege. Boone, leading a sortie, was shot and he fell with a shattered ankle. An Indian rushed upon him and was swinging the tomahawk over him when Simon Kenton, giant frontiersman and hero of many daring deeds, rushed forward, shot the Indian, threw Boone across his back, and fought his way desperately to safety. It was some months ere Boone was his nimble self again. But though he could not “stand up to the guns,” he directed all operations from his cabin.