University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER VII

THE LAND COMPANIES

ALTHOUGH for several decades the Virginia
traders had been passing over the
Great Trading Path to the towns of the Cherokees
and the Catawbas, it was not until the
early years of the eighteenth century that Virginians
of imaginative vision directed their
eyes to the westward, intent upon crossing the
mountains and locating settlements as a firm
barrier against the imperialistic designs of
France. Acting upon his oft-expressed conviction
that once the English settlers had established
themselves at the source of the James

River "it would not be in the power of the
French to dislodge them," Governor Alexander
Spotswood in 1716, animated with the
spirit of the pioneer, led an expedition of fifty
men and a train of pack-horses to the mountains,
arduously ascended to the summit of
the Blue Ridge, and claimed the country by
right of discovery in behalf of his sovereign.
In the journal of John Fontaine this vivacious
account is given of the historic episode: "I
graved my name on a tree by the river side;
and the Governor buried a bottle with a paper
enclosed on which he writ that he took possession
of this place in the name and for King
George the First of England. We had a good
dinner, and after it we got the men together
and loaded all their arms and we drank the
King's health in Burgundy and fired a volley,
and all the rest of the Royal Family in claret
and a volley. We drank the Governor's
health and fired another volley."

By this jovial picnic, which the governor
afterward commemorated by presenting to
each of the gentlemen who accompanied him

a golden horseshoe, inscribed with the legend,
Sic juvat transcendere montes, Alexander
Spotswood anticipated by a third of a century
the more ambitious expedition on behalf of
France by Cèloron de Bienville (see Chapter
III), and gave a memorable object-lesson in
the true spirit of westward expansion. During
the ensuing years it began to dawn upon
the minds of men of the stamp of William
Byrd and Joshua Gee that there was imperative
need for the establishment of a chain of
settlements in the trans-Alleghany, a great human
wall to withstand the advancing wave of
French influence and occupation. By the
fifth decade of the century, as we have seen,
the Virginia settlers, with their squatter's
claims and tomahawk rights, had pushed on
to the mountains; and great pressure was
brought to bear upon the council to issue
grants for vast tracts of land in the uncharted
wilderness of the interior.

At this period the English ministry adopted
the aggressive policy already mentioned in
connection with the French and Indian war,

indicative of a determination to contest with
France the right to occupy the interior of the
continent. This policy had been inaugurated
by Virginia with the express purpose of stimulating
the adoption of a similar policy by North
Carolina and Pennsylvania. Two land companies,
organized almost simultaneously, actively
promoted the preliminaries necessary to
settlement, despatching parties under expert
leadership to discover the passes through the
mountains and to locate the best land in the
trans-Alleghany.

In June, 1749, a great corporation, the
Loyal Land Company of Virginia, received
a grant of eight hundred thousand acres above
the North Carolina line and west of the mountains.
Dr. Thomas Walker, an expert surveyor,
who in company with several other gentlemen
had made a tour of exploration through
eastern Tennessee and the Holston region in
1748, was chosen as the agent of this company.
Starting from his home in Albemarle County,
Virginia, March 6, 1750, accompanied by five
stalwart pioneers, Walker made a tour of exploration

to the westward, being absent four
months and one week. On this journey, which
carried the party as far west as the Rockcastle
River (May 11th) and as far north as the
present Paintsville, Kentucky, they named
many natural objects, such as mountains and
rivers, after members of the party. Their two
principal achievements were the erection of the
first house built by white men between the
Cumberland Mountains and the Ohio River—
a feat, however, which led to no important developments;
and the discovery of the wonderful
gap in the Alleghanies to which Walker
gave the name Cumberland, in honor of the
ruthless conqueror at Culloden, the "bloody
duke."

In 1748 the Ohio Company was organized
by Colonel Thomas Lee, president of the Virginia
council, and twelve other gentlemen, of
Virginia and Maryland. In their petition for
five hundred thousand acres, one of the declared
objects of the company was "to anticipate
the French by taking possession of that
country southward of the Lakes to which the

French had no right. . . ." By the royal
order of May 19, 1749, the company was
awarded two hundred thousand acres, free of
quit-rent for ten years; and the promise was
made of an additional award of the remainder
petitioned for, on condition of seating a hundred
families upon the original grant and the
building and maintaining of a fort. Christopher
Gist, summoned from his remote home
on the Yadkin in North Carolina, was instructed
"to search out and discover the Lands
upon the river Ohio & other adjoining branches
of the Mississippi down as low as the great
Falls thereof." In this journey, which began
at Colonel Thomas Cresap's, in Maryland, in
October, 1750, and ended at Gist's home on
May 18, 1751, Gist visited the Lower Shawnee
Town and the Lower Blue Licks, ascended
Pilot Knob almost two decades before Findlay
and Boone, from the same eminence, "saw
with pleasure the beautiful level of Kentucky,"
intersected Walker's route at two points, and
crossed Cumberland Mountain at Pound Gap
on the return journey. This was a far more
extended journey than Walker's, enabling
Gist to explore the fertile valleys of the Muskingum,
Scioto, and Miami rivers and to gain
a view of the beautiful meadows of Kentucky.[1]

It is eminently significant of the spirit of
the age, which was inaugurating an era of land-hunger
unparalleled in American history, that
the first authentic records of the trans-Alleghany
were made by surveyors who visited the
country as the agents of great land companies.
The outbreak of the French and Indian War
so soon afterward delayed for a decade and
more any important colonization of the West.
Indeed, the explorations and findings of
Walker and Gist were almost unknown, even
to the companies they represented. But the
conclusion of peace in 1763, which gave all the
region between the mountains and the Mississippi
to the British, heralded the true beginning
of the westward expansionist movement
in the Old Southwest, and inaugurated the
constructive leadership of North Carolina in
the occupation and colonization of the imperial
domain of Kentucky and the Ohio Valley.

In the middle years of the century many
families of Virginia gentry removed to the
back country of North Carolina in the fertile
region ranging from Williamsborough on the
east to Hillsborough on the west.[2] There
soon arose in this section of the colony a society
marked by intellectual distinction, social
graces, and the leisured dignity of the landlord
and the large planter. So conspicuous
for means, intellect, culture, and refinement
were the people of this group, having "abundance
of wealth and leisure for enjoyment,"
that Governor Josiah Martin, in passing
through this region some years later, significantly
observes: "They have great pre-eminence,
as well with respect to soil and cultivation,
as to the manners and condition of the
inhabitants, in which last respect the difference
is so great that one would be led to think
them people of another region."[3] This new
wealthy class which was now turning its gaze
toward the unoccupied lands along the frontier
was "dominated by the democratic ideals of
pioneers rather than by the aristocratic tendencies

of slave-holding planters."[4] From the
cross-fertilization of the ideas of two social
groups—this back-country gentry, of innate
qualities of leadership, democratic instincts,
economic independence, and expansive tendencies,
and the primitive pioneer society of the
frontier, frugal in taste, responsive to leadership,
bold, ready, and thorough in execution
—there evolved the militant American expansion
in the Old Southwest.

A conspicuous figure in this society of Virginia
emigrants was a young man named Richard
Henderson, whose father had removed
with his family from Hanover County, Virginia,
to Bute, afterward Granville County,
North Carolina, in 1742.[5] Educated at home
by a private tutor, he began his career as assistant
of his father, Samuel Henderson, the
High Sheriff of Granville County; and after
receiving a law-license, quickly acquired an
extensive practice. "Even in the superior
courts where oratory and eloquence are as
brilliant and powerful as in Westminster-hall,"
records an English acquaintance, "he

soon became distinguished and eminent, and
his superior genius shone forth with great
splendour, and universal applause." This
young attorney, wedded to the daughter of
an Irish lord, often visited Salisbury on his
legal circuit; and here he became well acquainted
with Squire Boone, one of the
"Worshipfull Justices," and often appeared
in suits before him. By his son, the nomadic
Daniel Boone, conspicuous already for his
solitary wanderings across the dark green
mountains to the sun-lit valleys and boundless
hunting-grounds beyond, Henderson was
from time to time regaled with bizarre and
fascinating tales of western exploration;
and Boone, in his dark hour of poverty and
distress, when he was heavily involved financially,
turned for aid to this friend and his
partner, who composed the law-firm of Williams
and Henderson.[6]

Boone's vivid descriptions of the paradise
of the West stimulated Henderson's imaginative
mind and attracted his attention to the
rich possibilities of unoccupied lands there.

While the Board of Trade in drafting the
royal proclamation of October 7, 1763, forbade
the granting of lands in the vast interior, which
was specifically reserved to the Indians, it was
clearly not their intention to set permanent
western limits to the colonies.[7] The prevailing
opinion among the shrewdest men of the
period was well expressed by George Washington,
who wrote his agent for preëmpting
western lands: "I can never look upon that
proclamation in any other light (but I say this
between ourselves) than as a temporary expedient
to quiet the minds of the Indians."
And again in 1767: "It [the proclamation
of 1763] must fall, of course, in a few years,
especially when those Indians consent to our
occupying the lands. Any person, therefore,
who neglects the present opportunity of hunting
out good lands, and in some measure marking
out and distinguishing them for his own, in
order to keep others from settling them, will
never regain it." Washington had added
greatly to his holdings of bounty lands in the
West by purchasing at trivial prices the claims
of many of the officers and soldiers. Three
years later we find him surveying extensive
tracts along the Ohio and the Great Kanawha,
and, with the vision of the expansionist, making
large plans for the establishment of a
colony to be seated upon his own lands. Henderson,
too, recognized the importance of the
great country west of the Appalachians. He
agreed with the opinion of Benjamin Franklin,
who in 1756 called it "one of the finest in
North America for the extreme richness and
fertility of the land, the healthy temperature
of the air and the mildness of the climate, the
plenty of hunting, fishing and fowling, the
facility of trade with the Indians and the vast
convenience of inland navigation or water carriage."[8]
Henderson therefore proceeded to
organize a land company for the purpose of
acquiring and colonizing a large domain in the
West. This partnership, which was entitled
Richard Henderson and Company, was composed
of a few associates, including Richard
Henderson, his uncle and law-partner, John
Williams, and, in all probability, their close
friends Thomas and Nathaniel Hart of
Orange County, North Carolina, immigrants
from Hanover County, Virginia.

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.[9] 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.[10] 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."[11]
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.[12]

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[13]—
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 made
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.[14] 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 line to
the mouth of the Great Kanawha.[15] 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 transAlleghany
could be legally obtained only by
extinguishing the title of the Cherokees.[16]

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.[17]

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.