When the goods came to be distributed among the Indians it was found that, although they filled a large cabin and looked very tempting in bulk, there was but little for each warrior, and great dissatisfaction arose. One Cherokee, whose portion was a shirt, declared that in one day, upon this land, he could have killed deer enough to buy such a garment; to surrender his hunting-ground for this trifle naturally seemed to him a bad bargain. For the safety of the pioneers the chiefs could give no guarantee; they warned Boone, who appears to have acted as spokesman for the company, that "a black cloud hung over this land," warpaths crossed it from north to south, and settlers would surely get killed; for such results the Cherokees must not be held responsible.
This was not promising. Neither was the news, now received, that Governors Martin of North Carolina, and Dunmore of Virginia had both of them issued proclamations against the great purchase. The former had called Henderson and his partners an "infamous Company of Land Pyrates"; and they were notified that this movement was in violation of the king's proclamation of 1763, forbidding Western settlements.
The company, relying upon popular sympathy and their great distance from tidewater seats of government, proceeded without regard to these proclamations. Boone, at the head of a party of about thirty enlisted men, some of them the best backwoodsmen in the country,[11] was sent ahead to mark a path through the forest to Kentucky River, and there establish a capital for the new colony. They encountered many difficulties, especially when traveling through cane-brakes and brush; and once, while asleep, were attacked by Indians, who killed a negro servant and wounded two of the party. Boone won hearty commendation for his skill and courage throughout the expedition, which finally arrived at its destination on the sixth of April. This was Big Lick, on Kentucky River, just below the mouth of Otter Creek. Here it was decided to build a town to be called Boonesborough, to serve as the capital of Transylvania. The site was "a plain on the south side of the river, wherein was a lick with sulphur springs strongly impregnated."
To Felix Walker, one of the pioneers, we are indebted for the details of this notable colonizing expedition, set forth in a narrative which is still preserved. "On entering the plain," he writes, "we were permitted to view a very interesting and romantic sight. A number of buffaloes, of all sizes, supposed to be between two and three hundred, made off from the lick in every direction: some running, some walking, others loping slowly and carelessly, with young calves playing, skipping, and bounding through the plain. Such a sight some of us never saw before, nor perhaps ever may again." A fort was commenced, and a few cabins "strung along the river-bank;" but it was long before the stronghold was completed, for, now that the journey was at an end, Boone's men had become callous to danger.
Meanwhile Henderson was proceeding slowly from the settlements with thirty men and several wagons loaded with goods and tools. Delayed from many causes, they at last felt obliged to leave the encumbering wagons in Powell's Valley. Pushing forward, they were almost daily met by parties of men and boys returning home from Kentucky bearing vague reports of Indian forays. This resulted in Henderson losing many of his own followers from desertion. Arriving at Boonesborough on the twentieth of April, the relief party was "saluted by a running fire of about twenty-five guns." Some of Boone's men had, in the general uneasiness, also deserted, and others had scattered throughout the woods, hunting, exploring, or surveying on their own account.
The method of surveying then in vogue upon the Western frontier was of the crudest, although it must be acknowledged that any system more formal might, at that stage of our country's growth, have prevented rapid settlement. Each settler or land speculator was practically his own surveyor. With a compass and a chain, a few hours' work would suffice to mark the boundaries of a thousand-acre tract. There were as yet no adequate maps of the country, and claims overlapped each other in the most bewildering manner. A speculator who "ran out" a hundred thousand acres might, without knowing it, include in his domain a half-dozen claims previously surveyed by modest settlers who wanted but a hundred acres each. A man who paid the land-office fees might "patent" any land he pleased and have it recorded, the colony, and later the State, only guaranteeing such entries as covered land not already patented. This overlapping, conscious or unconscious, at last became so perplexing that thousands of vexatious lawsuits followed, some of which are still unsettled; and even to-day in Kentucky there are lands whose ownership is actually unknown, which pay no taxes and support only squatters who can not be turned out—possibly some of it, lying between patented tracts, by chance has never been entered at all. Nobody can now say. Thus it was that we find our friend Daniel Boone quickly transformed from a wilderness hunter into a frontier surveyor. Before Henderson's arrival he had laid off the town site into lots of two acres each. These were now drawn at a public lottery; while those who wished larger tracts within the neighborhood were able to obtain them by promising to plant a crop of corn and pay to the Transylvania Company a quit-rent of two English shillings for each hundred acres.
A SURVEY NOTE BY BOONE.
Reduced facsimile from his field-books in possession of Wisconsin State Historical Society.