Blood and Treasure by Bob Drury

Author:Bob Drury
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

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In March 1775, two months before Richard Henderson accepted his symbolic slice of Kentucky soil, Virginia’s governor, Lord Dunmore, dispatched an emissary to the Cherokee towns to inform them of his decision to declare the Transylvania Purchase illegal. His reasons were a mix of the political and the personal. On the one hand, the English Crown, through its representative in the royal governor’s office, had prohibited private companies from buying Indian territories, in no small part for fear that the frontier, once viewed as a safety valve to siphon excess laborers from eastern lands, would now begin to denude its colonies of their most productive citizens. The governor had few qualms about emptying his colony of men of little consequence and less taxable property. But now, Dunmore worried that the acreage claimed by squatters would impinge upon his own land speculations.

When news of Lord Dunmore’s intrigues reached Kentucky, the pioneers delivered a message of their own: any attempts by royal surveyors to “stretch the chain” near their western settlements would be met with powder and shot. In the meanwhile, the governor’s representatives in Cherokee country found the tribe already experiencing second thoughts about the “deception” that had cost them their hunting grounds.

An American trader living among the tribes reported that Little Carpenter and his fellow negotiators had been under the impression that it was not the Kentucky River that marked the purchase’s northern boundary, but a different watercourse altogether—the smaller Louisa, a tributary of the Big Sandy some 125 miles to the east. And in what can be interpreted as a tribal-wide grievance, an influential warrior who had received but a single linen hunting shirt and several gills of rum for his “share” of the “Great Grant” complained that he could kill more deer in a day in the forest and fields of Kanta-ke than the garment was worth. He soon departed with his family to join Dragging Canoe’s growing throng of disaffected tribesmen.

News from the north was no more encouraging. In the late spring of 1775, Boone’s old friend Capt. William Russell—now posted on the Ohio River at the fort erected in the wake of the Battle of Point Pleasant—sent a warning to Boonesborough: factions of the Shawnee and Mingo bands who had never recognized the legitimacy of the Treaty of Camp Charlotte were preparing to rise against the white “cabiners” along the Kentucky River. The Indians throughout the Ohio Country, Russell wrote to Boone, were aware of the violent rupture between the Redcoats and the American colonials near Boston. They hoped to use what they viewed as the white man’s civil war to reclaim their “stolen” land.

In the early stages of the conflict between colonies and mother country, Great Britain’s official Indian policy had been to restrain the northwest tribes from entering the fray. But now, Russell confided to Boone he feared that in the wake of the recent engagements at Concord and Lexington, rogue British agents from Detroit were already circulating among the Native Americans in an effort to turn them toward a warpath that led to Boonesborough’s front door.

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