WATAUGA COUNTY, NC - HISTORY - A History of Watauga County, North Carolina Chapter 4, Part 3 ==================================================================== USGENWEB NOTICE: In keeping with our policy of providing free information on the Internet, data may be used by non-commercial entities, as long as this message remains on all copied material. These electronic pages may NOT be reproduced in any format for profit or for presentation by other persons or organizations. Persons or organizations desiring to use this material for purposes other than stated above must obtain the written consent of the file contributor. The submitter has given permission to the USGenWeb Archives to store the file permanently for free access. This file was contributed for use in the USGenWeb Archives by: Sharon Williamson ==================================================================== A History of Watauga County, North Carolina John Preston Arthur Chapter IV continued. Page 48 Forehanded "for Once."--It seems that it was Boone's business to recruit a party of roadmakers before he started from Sycamore Shoals, with the understanding that they were to meet a Long Island, in the upper Holston, just south of the Virginia line. "Thirty guns" or riflemen were secured, who, according to Felix Walker, afterwards congressman from this State, explicitly agreed to put themselves "under the management and control of Colonel Boone, who was to be their pilot through the wilderness." Then, March 10, 1775, began the making of the Wilderness Road, by way of Clinch and Powell's Rivers and Cumberland Gap and Rock Castle River to the mouth of Beaver Creek whee it empties into the Kentucky River.(1) This spot had been selected years before by Boone as an ideal place for the settlement, and there he began the choice of locations for him-self and his companions. When Henderson and his larger party ___________ Note: (1)As the Sycamore Shoals Treaty was not ratified till the 25th of March, Boone's departure on the 10th for he purpose of cutting the Wilderness Road, shows a degree of cock-sureness on the part of Henderson & Co., which gives additional force to the suggestion of the spy, Smyth, that a secret treaty had been already concluded; which, if true, merely makes the public treaty a farce and fraud, and lends a still more sinister aspect to this affair. Page 49 arrived three weeks later he made the "distinctly embarrassing discovery that Boone and his companions had preempted the choicest locations for themselves. Rather than have trouble, the tactful proprietor decided to leave them in undisturbed possession and appease the rest by locating the site of the capital of Transylvania, not in the sheltered level chosen by Boone, but some little distance from it, on a commanding elevation overlooking the Kentucky." (Bruce, p. 117.) Henderson's and Washington's "Continental Vision."-- Dr. Henderson does not hesitate to give Richard Henderson what he considers his true place in the westward movement: "Washington expressed the secret belief of the period when he hazarded the judgment that the royal proclamation of 1763 [forbidding individuals to buy or lease lands from the Indians] was a mere temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians, and was not intended as a permanent bar to the Western civilization. Some years earlier, Richard Henderson, with the continental vision of Washington, had come to the conclusion that the unchartered West offered unlimited possibilities in the shape of reward to pioneering spirits, with a genuine constructive policy, willing to venture their all in vindication of their faith. George Washington, acquiring vast tracts of Western land by secret purchase, indirectly stimulated the powerful army that was carrying the broad-axe westward; Richard Henderson, with a large-visioned constructive policy of public promotion, colonization and settlement for the virgin West, conferred untold benefits upon the nation at large by his resolution, aggressiveness and daring. Washington and Henderson were factors of crucial importance in the settlement of the West and the advance of the pioneer army into the wilderness of Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio." Elsewhere (Neale's Monthly, p. 211) Dr. Henderson says: "George Washington and Richard Henderson, as landlords, were vital factors in the development of the West." Dr. Henderson's Original Discoveries.-- Dr. Henderson promises to furnish not only documentary evidence to support all these statements, but photographic facsimiles in proof of the claim that Boone was indebted to Richard Henderson for legal Page 50 services(1) for a number of years prior to 1769, which had not been paid off prior to that date. Also, that the merchandise which was to be paid for the title of the Cherokees to the Transylvania lands was transported by Richard Henderson, not accompanied by Boone, "in six wagon loads of goods from Hillsboro, N. C. (really from Fayetteville--then Cross Creek), to Sycamore Shoals, by wagon over the North Carolina mountains" by a route "discovered through researches made for me among old maps, showing wagon roads of North Carolina, dating as far back as 1770. The stages of the route I hope to give in my published book when it appears. Henderson also carried the goods from Sycamore Shoals to Martin's Station in Powell's valley by wagon also, from there to the future site of Boonesboro the goods were transported by pack- horses."(2) Dr. Henderson very properly "scrupulously omitted citation in my 'Life and Times of Richard Henderson' to authorities other than known or accessible books, such as the North Carolina Colonial Records, etc.," as upon these new authorities rests his "claim to original research and discovery." Misconceptions About Colonel Henderson.--Assuming that Dr. Henderson shall be able to establish these facts, which is not questioned, there is no one who had suffered more at the hands of historians than his ancestor, Richard Henderson. For the general impression of him is that he nd his father had been part and parcel of the office-holding oligarchy or "ring" that dominated county government under Governor Tryon, Henderson's father having been sheriff and himself under-sheriff; also, that, as a judge, Richard Henderson was personally obnoxious to the Regulators because he at least had not prevented "the legal tyrannies and alleged injustices of county officials,: and was :so terrorized that during the night he mounted a fast horse and galloped out of town,"(3) ____________ Note: (1) This must have been a large fee that required Boone to go in debt to get supplies for his journey (Bruce, p. 62) and to spend two years of his life in the wilderness. (2) From Doctor Henderson's letter to J. P. A., June 11, 1913. The new material, discovered by Doctor Henderson, after laborious investigation extending over years, "was not accessible to or even known to R. G. Thwaites, biographer of Daniel Boone, or to H. Addington Bruce, author of "Daniel Boone and the Wilderness Road." (3) Bruce, p. 97. Page 51 when in the fall of 1770, while hearing cased at Hillsborough, his court room was invaded by a mob and minor officials were beaten. People generally believe that the grievances of the Regulators were genuine wrongs from which they, at great risk, were seeking to escape; that these Regulators were not anarchists,(1) but American patriots making the first stand for American liberty, bravely and openly and against great odds. They do not believe that Judge Henderson refused the demands of these oppressed people out of any high regard for the law, but because he wished to carry out the mandates of Tryon, by whom he had been appointed to the bench. Nevertheless, they were willing to believe that he was incapable of deliberately planning to violate the proclamation of 1763 against the purchase of lands from the Indians by individuals while he himself was presiding over a court of justice and drawing the pay of the colony or of the Crown of England for discharging the duties of a judge of the Superior Court of the colony of North Carolina. They supposed that Daniel Boone went to Kentucky in May, 1769, not because he had been paid to aid Henderson to violate the law he was sworn to uphold, but because John Finley had spent the winter before at Holman's Ford and had persuaded Boone that he could guide him to Kentucky by crossing the mountains to the westward. It was the general belief, also, that it was not in consequence of the Treaty of Fort Stanwix of 1768, but of the victory over the northwestern Indians at the Great Kanawha, September 10, 1774, which prompted Henderson and Hart to visit the Otari towns the following October for the purpose of getting from the Cherokees what was a worthless paper title to the Transylvania lands, and that Henderson especially, who was a lawyer, knew that "neither the British government nor the authorities of Virginia or North Carolina would recognize the authority" of the Cherokees to convey title thereto, and that instead of being a worthy scheme of national expansion, it was really a "bold, audacious dash for fortune." (Walter Clark in North Carolina Booklet, January, 1904, p. 7.) And, unfortunately, it is also the ______________ Note:(1) It seems strange to have a North Carolinian write in such terms of the Regulators, whom we have been taught to revere as heroes and patriots. Page 52 general belief that Henderson at least cared little for the ruin that he must have known would follow the failure of his title to the lands which he was trying to sell to the untaught pioneers.(1) For he speaks of them in his journal as "a set of scoundrels who scarcely believed in God or feared the devil." Certain it is that when all hope of profit disappeared, so did also Henderson and his associated, leaving Daniel Boone, with his helpless family, in the wilderness with a worthless title to two thousand acres of land, which had been his sole compensation for risking his life and cutting out the Wilderness Road for Henderson and his followers to travel over. And the claim upon which so much stress is laid, that Henderson shared "with Washington the vision of Western expansion," is made ridiculous when the Watauga Settlement of 1769 is remembered and it is recalled that Harrodsburg, only thirty miles southwest from Boonesboro, have been settled in 1774; also, that two weeks before Boone's arrival at Boonesborough (April 1, 1775) this same Harrodsburg, after having been abandoned in 1774, had been re-occupied by as hardy pioneers as any who came with Boone, and that about the same time two other settlements nearby were made at Boiling Springs and Logan's Station. Roosevelt says that with the failure of his title in both Virginia and North Carolina, "Henderson, after the collapse of his colony, drifts out of history." (Winning of the West, Vol. II, p. 64.) To some people of simple minds it might almost seem that it would have been better that Richard Henderson should be allowed to remain out of history, unless, indeed, it can be shown that he restored to poor, deluded Daniel Boone the 2,000 acres he had been duped into accepting as his share of the enterprise, for both Virginia and North Carolina together donated outright to Henderson and company 400,000 acres of land, out of which it does seem that Boone should have been made whole. Daniel Boone, penniless, remained in the wilderness and was the real leader of the great western expansion. ____________ Note:(1) A largely signed memorial was sent to the Virginia Convention in 1776 by these settlers, from which it appears that the price of the land had been advanced from twenty to fifty shillings a hundred acres, all of which was to be paid down: that 700,000 acres at the Falls of the Ohio (Louisville) had been reserved to the proprietors and their friends. It implored His Majesty, the King, to vindicate his title from the Six Nations; and asked to be taken under the protection of Virginia.