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GENEALOGY COLLECTION
ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 00860 8892
GEORGE W. RANCK LEXINGTON, KENTUCKY Member of The Filson Club
FILSON CLUB PUBLICATIONS No. 16
BOONESBOROUGH, Ky.
ITS FOUNDING, PIONEER STRUGGLES, INDIAN EXPERIENCES, TRANSYLVANIA DAYS, AND REVOLUTIONARY ANNALS
With Full Historical Notes and Appendix
BY
GEORGE W. RANCK
Member of The Filson Club Author of
"The Bivouac of the Dead and Its Author," "The Travelling Church," "History of Lexington, Kentucky," "The Story of Bryan's Station," "Girty, the White Indian," etc.
Illustrated
LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY JOHN P. MORTON & COMPANY Printers to The Filson Club 1901
COPYRIGHTED BY THE FILSON CLUB 1901
816690
PREFACE.
B OONESBOROUGH, like a mist of the morning, has vanished, and the place which knew it once will know it no more forever. Not a cabin of the thirty that formed the parallelogram of the fort ; not a picket of the bullet-battered lines that encompassed the station, and not a pale of the stockades between the cabins is left. Not even a chimney, the last of a human habitation to perish, is left standing or shows the little mound of debris at its base as survivor of its fall. Its former site is an unromantic cornfield, where is seen the cultivated soil and the gathered crop, instead of preparations for aggressive war or stolid defense. So thoroughly has the station disappeared that it affords no perch for the owl and no hiding-place for the fox. Neither fire nor flood, nor earth- quake nor ruthless time has ever more completely swept a town from the face of the earth. Other towns in Kentucky, like Lystra and Franklinville and Ohiopiomingo, have vanished, but they never had any except a paper existence, while Boonesborough was a reality.
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The sites of some of the greatest cities of the world were occupied by accident and yet succeeded, while intel- ligent design selected others that utterly failed. It is easy enough to choose a site and lay off a town, but it requires inhabitants and manufactures and trade and per- severance to make it a success. When General George Rogers Clark, in 1776, led the opposition against the Transylvania Colony, and Virginia asserted her old law forbidding private citizens to purchase lands from the Indians, Transylvania was doomed, and with it Boones- borough. It was then only a question of time when the town and the fort would transfer their prestige to Har- rodsburg and become things of the past. Boone could roam through the untrodden forests in search of game, and could fight the Indian behind the trees of his native woods or on the open plain, but he lacked the municipal tact and persistence which builds up towns and turns them into cities, and most of his companions were like unto him.
But gone forever, as it is, Boonesborough yet holds a place in the memory and the heart of the living. Im- perishable recollections hover over its desolate site and bind it with chains of steel to our memories. It was here that civilization took its firm stand in the transmontane wilderness. Men had earlier roamed over the country as hunters and explorers and traders, but in Boonesborough
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they had their wives and children with them, and formed there the family circle, without which any attempts at civilization are mockeries. The blood that flowed through the veins of these fearless and hardy pioneers and warmed their hearts and nerved their strong arms yet courses through the veins of their descendants and makes the site of the old vanished station hallowed ground. As the zealous Mohammedan, when journeying to the Beit Allah of Mecca, sees in the mirage of the desert the minarets and domes and spires of the sacred Mosque, so the loyal descendant of the Boonesborough pioneers sees in the mists of tradition the fort and stockade and cabins of the vanished town as they were when occupied by his ances- tors. The classical scholar reveres not more the sites of departed Troy and Pæstum and Thebes than does the descendant of the first settlers the site of Boonesborough. Here the Boones, the Hendersons, the Calloways, the Harts, and Floyd and Kenton and Ballard and Stoner and Holder and Rawlings and Pogue stood like an impregnable wall and rolled back the fierce tide of savage warfare until civilization and Christianity were established in the pri- meval forest. It is the recollection of the hardships endured and the courage displayed by our ancestors there that makes Boonesborough dear to us and gives it a sure place in our memory and heart.
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Every Kentuckian has some conception of vanished Boonesborough, and imagines that he carries an image of it in his memory like unto it as it once existed. It is well, however, while we are cherishing conceptions of this town of the past, that we hold to a conception rightly formed. It has now been one hundred and twenty-six years since Boonesborough was founded, and during this long period no full or adequate history of it has been written. It has been reserved for a member of The Filson Club, an hundred years after the town had perished, to gather the conflicting traditions from their scattered sources, and, after separating the true from the false, to weave the facts into an exhaustive narrative. This Mr. George W. Ranck, the author of the work which follows this preface, has done, and here presents Boonesborough as it began and progressed and declined and finally disappeared from the face of the earth. He who reads Mr. Ranck's nar- rative will learn more about this vanished town than any one has known since its day in the land. And the reader will not only learn much that is new about Boones- borough, but he will learn something too important not to be known about pioneer life in Kentucky, about the attempt of Henderson and Company to establish a pro- prietary government by the name of Transylvania in Ken- tucky, and about the brave men and women who left
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comfortable homes on the Atlantic slope of the Alleghanies and settled in the wilderness of Kentucky, amid wild animals and wilder savages, with no protection but their own strong arms. Their own courage and skill and daring, practically unaided, won the great West from the British and the Indians and added it to the rich fruits of the Revolutionary War.
Boonesborough was really the creature of the Transyl- vania Colony, and Mr. Ranck very properly began the narrative with the treaty of Watauga in the spring of 1775, by which the southern half of Kentucky was pur- chased from the Indians. The building of a protecting fort on the acquired lands on the Kentucky River near the mouth of Otter Creek and the gathering of pioneer families there and the rise of a town around the fort followed in the natural order of sequence. And so did Indian war and sieges naturally follow, with all their heart-rending atrocities and sufferings. The confined life of the fort, however, in spite of the dangers outside of the pickets, soon began to drive the inhabitants to extramural cabins upon lands selected for farms. It was not many years after this process began before Boonesborough was deserted and log cabins with women and children in them on bits of cleared land peeped out here and there from the dark shadows of the surrounding forest. The steady
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decline and final extinction of the fort and town naturally followed the exodus of their inhabitants to the near and distant farms. The whole historic field has been covered, embracing every fact and tradition that need be known, and including biographic sketches of some of the leading characters in those stirring and perilous times. Old and rare manuscripts and scarce books and forgotten news- papers have been searched, and the whole story told in the book before us as it has never been told before.
Not the least important and instructive part of Mr. Ranck's work is its excellent halftone illustrations. These are not scattered indiscriminately through the book, as illustrations too often are, but appear at the pages where they are described and belong. Fine pictures represent the old fort, the place of meeting of the delegates, the sulphur well, the salt lick, the fresh water spring, the river, the ferry, and other views of the landscape, including the town of Boonesborough itself with its laid-off streets and numbered lots. There is a striking likeness of Boone, and a spirited picture of the treaty men making their way back to the fort after they discovered the treachery of the Indians. The author has thus covered every prac- ticable scene by a suggestive picture.
Still another merit of the work is the Appendix. Extracts from scarce books now inaccessible to the gen-
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eral reader, transcriptions of manuscripts which exist only in single originals at distant places, and articles from old newspapers and pamphlets make up the appendix. Among the selections is the deed by which the Cherokee Indians conveyed to Richard Henderson and his asso- ciates for the Transylvania Colony all the southern part of Kentucky, embracing about 20,000,000 acres ; the Jour- nal kept by Judge Henderson while on his proprietary land of Transylvania and while going to and returning therefrom ; the proclamations of the Governors of Vir- ginia and North Carolina denouncing the Transylvania enterprise; the Journal of the proceedings of the assembly of Transylvania delegates ; Felix Walker's diary of his trip to Boonesborough in 1775, and numerous other papers that are valuable to the student of history.
A book without an index is open to many objections in this rapid age. No one has time to turn over the leaves and find what he may want to read. The book under consideration is open to no such fault. Besides separate lists of the illustrations in the text and of articles in the appendix, giving the page of each, it has an ample gen- eral index, giving each subject and name, and the page on which it is found. It is an index, too, which gives the initial word with such certainty that we are not disappointed when we turn to the given page.
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It will be seen at a glance that the author has gone to the original sources for his material, that he has given us no rehash of other books and of other writers' opinions, and that British records play in this field their very important part. Another element of strength and value in this volume that no lover of genuine history will fail to appreciate is its full and free citation of authorities. A quibbler would have to contend with these authorities alone-not with the writer of the text.
It seems, therefore, that the book of which this is a preface is a work of merit in all its parts. The history of Boonesborough from its beginning in 1775 to its final extinction in less than half a century afterward is given by it in fullness and in detail. Indeed, the author has told all that had need of being told, and it will be long before any thing new or important can be added to the story as he has told it. The whole historic field has been gone over, and from it gleaned every thing that related to the vanished town or to its connections, or to the men and women who imparted to it their own immortality.
This is the sixteenth publication of The Filson Club. The fifteen volumes which preceded it were issued from year to year, and have gone forth into the world as pro- moters of history and biography. The club began its
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work in 1884, when it was formed, and it is the intention of its members to continue in the same line of publications until all the important matters in Kentucky are the sub- jects of monographs and all of the representative men and women have biographies. Those of us now living can form no just estimate of the value of such publications, but those who come after us in the distant future will know their worth and bless us for them.
R. T. DURRETT,
President of the Filson Club.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
The Author,
Frontispiece
Daniel Boone, 10
The Sulphur Well, 17
The Lick Spring,
19
Site of Fort Boonesborough, 25
Meeting of Transylvania House of Delegates,
30
Plan of Fort Boonesborough, 35
Site of Fort Boonesborough from opposite side of river, 40
The Hills of Clark County, 50
Relics of Daniel Boone,
66
Fort Boonesborough before Siege of 1778,
79
Climax of the Treaty, 89
Sycamore Hollow, 104 The Town of Boonesborough, I10
Residence of Judge Henderson, 115
Boonesborough Ferry,
125
The Old Sycamore, .
134
BOONESBOROUGH.
T HE spring of 1775 had come. The time had arrived not only for the assertion of American freedom but for its spread, and "Westward the star of empire takes its way." The hour had struck for the permanent settlement of Kentucky,' and in widely sepa- rated regions the hearts of unconscious instruments of fate had been fired for the work. But in no American Colony was the interest in that distant forest - land keener than in North Carolina,2 and in no place in North Caro- lina was it so conspicuous as in the scattered little frontier settlement of Watauga,3 in what is now East Tennessee.
"See Appendix A for " The Name Kentucky."
2 Which may be accounted for by the fact that Gist, Findlay, Boone, many of the Long Hunters, and other Kentucky explorers were residents of North Carolina.
3 The scattered settlement, usually mentioned in a general way as " Watauga," straggled, in 1775, with its stockades, cabins, and clearings, for quite a distance along the Watauga River, in the region now known as Carter County, Tennessee, and then included "The Fort," Sycamore Shoals, Colonel Charles Robertson's, "The Old Fields," since occupied by Elizabethton, and other interesting sites. As the name Watauga is con- nected with sundry things and places in Carter County, it may be well to say that this, the original pioneer Watauga we have described, must not be confused with the new town of Watauga, on the Southern Railroad, six or seven miles from the historic Watauga of which we write.
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Boonesborough
Ever since the preceding fall a train of circumstances had kept the minds of its inhabitants on that enticing country. First, their old friend and pilot, Daniel Boone,1 who had hunted there longer than any one, and who was stopping temporarily at "Snoddy's on the Clinch,"? had passed through their settlement more than once on his way down the Valley of the Holston to the principal seats of the Cherokees.3 Everybody knew of the comradeship between Boone and these Overhill Indians; that he had killed deer with them and had slept in their cabins, but they also knew that the Cherokees claimed the very game lands on which he had hunted so much and where he had recently tried to settle with his family, and somehow the impression was made that something was "going on " about Kentucky. Later there was quite a buzz in the clearings over the news that Boone and two strangers "from across the Ridge "4 had held powwows with the head men of the Cherokees, and, in December, curiosity became still more lively when a wagon train of "Indian goods" all the way from Fayetteville was stored in Watauga and carefully inspected by six silent, watchful
" See Appendix B for note on " Boone Before 1775."
2 See footnote on page 38, and Appendix C, for " Boone's First Attempt to Colonize Kentucky."
3 Chota, Tellico, and Tellassee.
4 The Blue Ridge Mountains, which shut off the infant settlement from the old communities of North Carolina.
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chiefs of the Overhill tribes. On Christmas Day the whole thing came out, as the shrewd frontiersmen had guessed, when " Richard Henderson, for himself and Com- pany," publicly advertised for "settlers for Kentucky lands about to be purchased,"1 and Indian runners car- ried the order of Ocanostota, the head chief of the Cherokees, for a spring meeting of his people at the Watauga settlement to consider, among other things, a grant, already substantially agreed upon, of those same far-spreading lands. Settlers said it was plain now why Boone had kept his big family conveniently near to the Warrior's Path ever since he had been driven back from Walden's Ridge; that he had never once given up his interrupted plan to plant a colony in Kentucky, but to decrease the risks he wanted to make his next start with the full consent of the Cherokees, and so had suggested and urged the formation of this new Company, and would accomplish his purpose as its agent.
Judge Henderson,? the ostensible head of the Company, was one of the leading lawyers of the Colony of North
1 Colonial Records of North Carolina.
2 Richard Henderson was a native of Hanover County, Virginia, where he was born April 20, 1735, but had been a citizen of North Carolina since 1756, when his father, Samuel Henderson, settled there. He was a self-made man. His education had been deferred and his opportunities came late, but he was gifted with pluck and ability, and when he did start he made rapid progress, and especially in his chosen profession, the law,
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Boonesborough
Carolina, and had until recently been one of the Asso- ciate Justices of its Supreme Court. Though rather showy, he was a man of genuine ability and culture, was self-reliant and a worker, and, though noticeable always for enterprise and ambition, had surprised the Colony by the magnitude and boldness of his present venture. All of the nine members of the Company were citizens of North Carolina and "from over the Ridge." Three of them were residents of the then very extensive County of Granville, viz: Henderson, John Williams, his cousin and a bright lawyer, and Leonard Henley Bullock, ex- sheriff of the county and a connection also. The others, who lived in or near the adjoining County of Orange, and who were mainly in commercial life, were James Hogg, a Scotchman and talented man of affairs; Nathaniel Hart,' one of the first of the Company to "sound" the Indians ; Thomas and David Hart, his brothers, and John Luttrell and William Johnstone.
The announcement of so novel an enterprise and at
and in 1768 was appointed one of the Associate Justices of North Carolina. This position he held until his court was closed in 1770 by the Regulators, who rose against the corrupt and arbitrary exactions of the royal government of the province. After this he is said to have sustained pecuniary losses, and in 1774 he seized upon Boone's suggestion as a means of repairing and augmenting his fortune. (Wheeler, Ramsey, and Draper.)
'Nathaniel Hart was born in Hanover County, Virginia, in 1734, but moved to North Carolina in his youth. Like Henderson, he had taken sides against the Regulators in 1771.
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such a disturbed and threatening juncture of public affairs created a sensation, and at least one officer of the Colony anxiously inquired "If Dick Henderson had lost his head?" But "Dick" not only still possessed that con- venience, but had used it. With the aid of Boone he had carefully investigated Kentucky, and had decided that now was the very time to strike. The Shawanese and other Northern Indians had but recently been defeated at Point Pleasant, and had obligated themselves by treaty to hunt no more on the Kentucky side of the Ohio. This and prior treaties seemed to leave no other Indian claim- ants to the Louisa2 country but the Cherokees, and, as to Great Britain, her claim seemed destined to utter extin- guishment in the conflict she was so rapidly forcing upon the Colonies. The importance of the movement was plain enough to Josiah Martin, the royal Governor of North Carolina, and on the 10th of February, 1775, he issued a
* Archibald Nelson, in Col. Rec. N. C.
2 Kentucky seems never to have been known by any but Indian names until a short time before 1775, when "Louisa " came into limited use among the whites. The generally accurate Bradford helped to perpetuate the error that the Kentucky River was given the English name "Louisa " by Doctor Walker twenty-six years before this treaty, but not only does Marshall declare that Walker did not reach the interior of the country, but later writers assert that it was a tributary of the Big Sandy - as given on Jefferson's map-that the explorer of 1750 so named. It was some time after Walker's tour before the name of this tributary was applied to the country itself, and then, fortunately, it quickly subsided before the original and ancient Indian name - Kentucky.
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proclamation1 denouncing it as "a lawless undertaking," "an infraction of the Royal prerogative," and threatened the Company, if it persisted in its course, "with the pain of His Majesty's displeasure and the most rigorous pen- alties of the law." The greatness of the political change that had already occurred is evidenced by the fact that this proclamation was completely ignored.
Boone, who had been commissioned by the Company to open a road to the Kentucky River, never ceased col- lecting woodmen in Powell's Valley for the work, and concentrated them at Long Island,? in the Holston. While arrangements for the expedition were being made, pro- visions for the entertainment of the Cherokees went on to the appointed conference ground, and so did the Indians and the white men, and early in March, 1775, the biggest crowd that had ever gathered in the Watauga Settlement of North Carolina was encamped about the stockaded cabins of Sycamore Shoals. 3 This spot, which took its name
' For text of proclamation see Appendix D.
2 This noted island, which was about twenty-six miles from the appointed rendezvous, is nearly three miles long, is in main Holston River near the junction of its north and south forks, and is included in the present Sullivan County, Tennessee.
3 Boone, in his Filson memoir, merely states that the treaty took place " at Watauga," without specifying the particular spot in the settle- ment that was used. Felix Walker, in his narrative, says it occurred "at Colonel Charles Robertson's," whose home tract in 1775 was about a mile west of Sycamore Shoals, but which, with Fort Watauga near by, often at that
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from the great sycamore trees which adorned it, which was then the seat of the now famous Watauga Associa- tion, and which is distinguished by its historic memories, ' was on the southern bank of the Watauga River about three miles below "The Old Fields," the site of the present Elizabethton, in what is now Carter County, Tennessee. It was a rendezvous, familiar to the Indians, in a valley that has long been known for its fertility and beauty, and here, on the spacious stretch of rich bottom lands that were bordered on one side by the winding river and on the other by the swelling foothills of Yellow Mountain, tents and wigwams were pitched and the solemn, cere- monious, and deliberate conference was held. The nego- tiators in behalf of the Company were Henderson and Boone, Nathaniel Hart and Luttrell. The most prom-
time designated the general Sycamore Shoals neighborhood. In his Annals of Tennessee, Ramsey, who was personally familiar with the historic spots included in the Watauga Settlement, and who gave these points especial attention, definitely locates the treaty ground at Sycamore Shoals, which seems to be the verdict of both tradition and later investigation, which further specify that it included the land opposite the late residence of Alfred M. C. Taylor and present home of E. D. Jobe. The writer is indebted to the courtesy of Messrs. N. E. Hyder and D. N. Reese, of Carter County, Ten- nessee, for facts about the topography of the Watauga region.
It was the seat of that famous little republic, the Watauga Associa- tion, which was the beginning of the political history of Tennessee; the place where the permanent settlement of Kentucky was assured, and the rendezvous five years after of the patriot riflemen who rode from thence to King's Mountain and victory.
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inent representatives of the Indians were Ocanostota, the aged, crippled, and distinguished head of the Chero- kees; the remarkable Attacullaculla, withered and even more aged, but still reputed the ablest of the Indian diplo- matists ; Savanooko, and Dragging Canoe. 1
Days were consumed in the consideration of the boun- daries and extent of the territory the Company desired, the price offered, and the wisdom of making such a sale, and interpreters were kept busy translating "talks" and documents and speeche's. Earnest protests against the treaty were made by orators of the Cherokees, and espe- cially by the eloquent and prophetic Dragging Canoe, but without effect, and on the 17th of March "The Great Grant"? was signed, and for the merchandise then stored on the ground and valued at £10,000 Henderson and his associates were declared the owners of territory south of the Kentucky River, comprising more than half of the present State of Kentucky.3 The twelve hundred Indians present assented to the treaty, and, though a few of them grumbled that they had received only one shirt apiece for
1 Virginia Archives.
2 So named to distinguish it from the " Path Deed," signed at the same conference, by which the Cherokees granted Henderson and Company another great tract which was on the Holston, Clinch, and Powell rivers. ( See United States Register for 1840. )
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