In March, 1771, we find the energetic explorers again on the Kentucky River, where they resolved to form a settlement, and whence they started in the ensuing month for the Yadkin of North Carolina to bring out their families. Two years elapsed before the necessary arrangements could be made, and meanwhile rumors reached the Eastern States of explorations made by other parties, who, without any preconcerted plans, were simultaneously wandering about on the banks of the Cumberland and Tennessee Rivers. In June, 1769, but one month after the first entry into Kentucky of Boone, some twenty men, from North Carolina and West Virginia, made their way over the Alleghanies, and through the Cumberland mountain pass to the river of the same name, into the south-west of Kentucky, the whole of which they thoroughly scoured, returning home in April, 1770, laden with the results of their hunting excursions.
In the same year, 1769, a second company of hunters built a boat and two trapping canoes, and in them paddled down the Cumberland River to the Ohio, and again down the Ohio to the Mississippi, embarking on which they made their way to Natchez, where they sold their furs to great advantage. This was of more importance to them than the fact that this trip of theirs connected the work of the English from the East with that of the French from the South, which alone entitles them to a place in our narrative.
In 1771, the Cumberland was again navigated, this time from the north, by Casper Mansso and some half a dozen companions, who penetrated into the so-called barrens of the south of Kentucky, where they met other hunters from the East. Thus, by the time of Boone’s return in 1773, Kentucky, though still unsettled by any white man, was no longer the unknown district it had been on his first visit, and he appeared to have many rivals in the field.
The little caravan of settlers, which included Boone’s own family and that of five others, started on its arduous journey across the Alleghanies in September, 1773, and in the now well-known Powell’s Valley its numbers were augmented by forty well-armed men, who had determined to throw in their lot with the emigrants. The transit of Powell’s Gap or Pass was succeeded by that of Wallen’s Ridge, and the augmented party were entering the last of the triple range of mountains by the way of Cumberland Gap, when they were suddenly attacked by Indians. Six white men, including Boone’s eldest son James, were killed, and the cattle were dispersed, before the Indians were driven back. This tragedy so disheartened the emigrants that they declined to go further; and though Boone, in spite of his intense grief at the loss of his boy, would have persevered, he was obliged to yield to the numbers against him.
Back again then the survivors tramped, and took refuge at an outpost in the south-west of Virginia, where Boone remained, eating his heart out in compulsory inaction, until June, 1774, when, to his intense delight, he received an appointment as agent to a North Carolina company for purchasing lands in Kentucky. At the head of a party of surveyors, Boone joyfully started once more for the land which he looked upon as his own, and after a long journey, of which unfortunately, no details have been preserved, he stood again upon the shores of the Kentucky River, which he thoroughly surveyed with the help of his comrades, returning in safety in the ensuing year to his family in southern Virginia.
The reports given by Boone and others of the fertile lands in Kentucky resulted in the formation of a company, at the head of which was a man named Richard Henderson, for the purchase from the Cherokee Indians of a vast tract of land in Ohio and Kentucky, the natives having, by various hostile demonstrations, given proof of their intention not to permit the quiet appropriation of their soil. Daniel Boone, as having already had some intercourse, though not of the most encouraging kind, with the Cherokees, was chosen as the agent in the negotiation, and, after much speechifying, he obtained a hundred square miles of territory on the Kentucky and Ohio, an old warrior closing the final bargain with the words, “Brother, we give you fine land, but you will have trouble in settling it.”
The shrewd sachem was right, for Virginia refused to recognize the purchase from the Indians as valid, and claimed all the lands between its western boundaries and the Mississippi for its own. Not until after a long and weary period of litigation was Boone able to realize the wish of his heart, and lay the foundations of the first settlement in Kentucky. His company had to be content, after all, with a very limited district to colonize; and after he had built his first fort, to which the name of Boonesborough was given in his honor, on the south side of the Kentucky River, he was greatly harassed by the treacherous attacks of the Cherokees, who, although they had received the value of two thousand pounds sterling in goods for their lands, lost no opportunity of annoying the white intruders.
In spite of all these difficulties, Boonesborough was ready in 1774 for the reception of Mrs. Boone and her children, and in the ensuing year the infant settlement was reënforced by the arrival of three other families. The summer of 1775 also witnessed the establishment of many other stations, including that of Louisville, on the Ohio, which soon became a kind of rendezvous for hunters, and a harbor of refuge for emigrants seeking a suitable site for the building of their new homes in the wilderness. Gradually the forests of oak, maple, walnut, etc., of Ohio, the now well-cultivated agricultural districts of Kentucky, and the less fertile cretaceous regions of Tennessee, became dotted with the homes of settlers, each of which in time sent forth new pioneers yet further to the westward.
The conclusion of the war between Great Britain and her mighty colonies in 1783, which gave to English America a political constitution of its own, was succeeded by a tide of emigration across the Alleghanies, and all the best districts for settlement in Tennessee and Kentucky were rapidly filled. In 1788, the Ohio Company, from New England, formed a settlement of considerable size on the north-west of the river from which it took its name, and after a long, desultory struggle with the Wyandots, Delawares, [♦]Potawatomies, Kickapoos, Piankashaws, Miamis, and other tribes occupying the surrounding districts, obtained a legal claim to their lands in 1795 by their purchase from the natives by the United States Government. The peaceable possession of these rich territories thus secured, they were soon portioned out into townships: city after city rose in the wilderness; and, to quote from a traveler who crossed the Alleghanies at the period of which we are writing, “Old America seemed to be breaking up and moving westward.” Every state sent forth its bands of emigrants, and no traveler on the now well-worn tracts across the formidable mountain ridge, dividing the old homes from the new, could advance far without coming upon family groups pausing for the return of some father or brother who had seen his dear ones part of the way.
[♦] ‘Pottawatomies’ replaced with ‘Potawatomies’