7. The Land Companies

Seizing the opportunity presented just after the conclusion of peace, the company engaged Daniel Boone as scout and surveyor. He was instructed, while hunting and trapping on his own account, to examine, with respect to their location and fertility, the lands which he visited, and to report his findings upon his return. The secret expedition must have been transacted with commendable circumspection; for although in after years it became common knowledge among his friends that he had acted as the company's agent, Boone himself consistently refrained from betraying the confidence of his employers. Upon a similar mission, Gist had carefully concealed from the suspicious Indians the fact that he carried a compass, which they wittily termed "land stealer"; and Washington likewise imposed secrecy upon his land agent Crawford, insisting that the operation be carried on under the guise of hunting game." The discreet Boone, taciturn and given to keeping his own counsel, in one instance at least deemed it advantageous to communicate the purpose of his mission to some hunters, well known to him, in order to secure the results of their information in regard to the best lands they had encountered in the course of their hunting expedition. Boone came among the hunters, known as the "Blevens connection," at one of their Tennessee station camps on their return from a long hunt in Kentucky, in order, as expressed in the quaint phraseology of the period, to be "informed of the geography and locography of these woods, saying that he was employed to explore them by Henderson & Company." The acquaintance which Boone on this occasion formed with a member of the party, Henry Scaggs, the skilled hunter and explorer, was soon to bear fruit; for shortly afterward Scaggs was employed as prospector by the same land company. In 1764 Scaggs had passed through Cumberland Gap and hunted for the season on the Cumberland; and accordingly the following year, as the agent of Richard Henderson and Company, he was despatched on an extended exploration to the lower Cumberland, fixing his station at the salt lick afterward known as Mansker's Lick.

Richard Henderson thus, it appears, "enlisted the Harts and others in an enterprise which his own genius planned," says Peck, the personal acquaintance and biographer of Boone, "and then encouraged several hunters to explore the country and learn where the best lands lay." Just why Henderson and his associates did not act sooner upon the reports brought back by the hunters--Boone and Scaggs and Callaway, who accompanied Boone in 1764 in the interest of the land company "is not known; but in all probability the fragmentary nature of these reports, however glowing and enthusiastic, was sufficient cause for the delay of five years before the land company, through the agency of Boone and Findlay, succeeded in having a thorough exploration inside of the Kentucky region. Delay was also caused by rival claims to the territory. In the Virginia Gazette of December 1, 1768, Henderson must have read with astonishment not unmixed with dismay that "the Six Nations and all their tributaries have granted a vast extent of country to his majesty, and the Proprietaries of Pennsylvania, and settled an advantageous boundary line between their hunting country and this, and the other colonies to the Southward as far as the Cherokee River, for which they received the most valuable present in goods and dollars that was ever given at any conference since the settlement of America." The news was now bruited about through the colony of North Carolina, that the Cherokees were hot in their resentment because the Northern Indians, the inveterate foes of the Cherokees and the perpetual disputants for the vast Middle Ground of Kentucky, had received at the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, November 5, 1768, an immense compensation from the crown for the territory which they, the Cherokees, claimed from time immemorial. Only three weeks before, John Stuart, Superintendent for Indian Affairs in the Southern Department, had negotiated with the Cherokees the Treaty of Hard Labor, South Carolina (October 14th), by which Governor Tryon's line of 1767, from Reedy River to Tryon Mountain, was continued direct to Colonel Chiswell's mine, the present Wytheville, Virginia, and thence in a straight Brie to the mouth of the Great Kanawha. Thus at the close of the year 1768 the crown through both royal governor and superintendent of Indian affairs acknowledged in fair and open treaty the right of the Cherokees, whose Tennessee villages guarded the gateway, to the valley lands east of the mountain barrier as well as to the dim mid-region of Kentucky. In the very act of negotiating the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, Sir William Johnson privately acknowledged that possession of the trans-Alleghany could be legally obtained only by extinguishing the title of the Cherokees.

These conflicting claims soon led to collisions between the Indians and the company's settlers. In the spring of 1769 occurred one of those incidents in the westward advance which, though slight in itself, was to have a definite bearing upon the course of events in later years. In pursuance of his policy, as agent of the Loyal Land Company, of promoting settlement upon the company's lands, Dr. Thomas Walker, who had visited Powell's Valley the preceding year and come into possession of a very large tract there, simultaneously made proposals to one party of men including the Kirtleys, Captain Rucker, and others, and to another party led by Joseph Martin, trader of Orange County, Virginia, afterward a striking figure in the Old Southwest. The fevered race by these bands of eighteenth-century "sooners" for possession of an early "Cherokee Strip" was won by the latter band, who at once took possession and began to clear; so that when the Kirtleys arrived, Martin coolly handed them "a letter from Dr. Walker that informed them that if we got to the valley first, we were to have 21,000 acres of land, and they were not to interfere with us." Martin and his companions were delighted with the beautiful valley at the base of the Cumberland, quickly "eat and destroyed 23 deer--15 bears--2 buffaloes and a great quantity of turkeys," and entertained gentlemen from Virginia and Maryland who desired to settle more than a hundred families there. The company reckoned, however, without their hosts, the Cherokees, who, fortified by the treaty of Hard Labor (1768) which left this country within the Indian reservation, were determined to drive Martin and his company out. While hunting on the Cumberland River, northwest of Cumberland Gap, Martin and his company were surrounded and disarmed by a party of Cherokees who said they had orders from Cameron, the royal agent, to rob all white men hunting on their lands. When Martin and his party arrived at their station in Powell's Valley, they found it broken up and their goods stolen by the Indians, which left them no recourse but to return to the settlements in Virginia. It was not until six years later that Martin, under the stable influence of the Transylvania Company, was enabled to return to this spot and erect there the station which was to play an integral part in the progress of westward expansion.

Before going on to relate Boone's explorations of Kentucky under the auspices of the land company, it will be convenient to turn back for a moment and give some account of other hunters and explorers who visited that territory between the time of its discovery by Walker and Gist and the advent of Boone.

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