the two commodities most in demand, were
sold respectively for $2.66-2/3 and 16-2/3 cents per pound. The payment
was rarely made in coin; and how high the above prices were may be
gathered from the fact that ordinary labor was credited at 33-1/3 cents
per day while fifty cents a day was paid for ranging, hunting, and
working on the roads.[19]

Henderson immediately proceeded to organize the government of his
colony, and accordingly issued a call for an election of delegates to
the Legislature of Transylvania, each of the four stations mentioned
above sending members. The delegates, seventeen in all, met at
Boonsborough and organized the convention on the 23d of May. Their
meetings were held without the walls of the fort, on a level plain of
white clover, under a grand old elm. Beneath its mighty branches a
hundred people could without crowding find refuge from the noon-day sun;
it was a fit council-house for this pioneer legislature of game hunters
and Indian fighters.[20]

These weather-beaten backwoods warriors, who held their deliberations in
the open air, showed that they had in them good stuff out of which to
build a free government. They were men of genuine force of character,
and they behaved with a dignity and wisdom that would have well become
any legislative body. Henderson, on behalf of the proprietors of
Transylvania, addressed them, much as a crown governor would have done.
The portion of his address dealing with the destruction of game is worth
noting. Buffalo, elk, and deer had abounded immediately round
Boonsborough when the settlers first arrived, but the slaughter had been
so great that even after the first six weeks the hunters began to find
some difficulty in getting any thing without going off some fifteen or
twenty miles. However, stray buffaloes were still killed near the fort
once or twice a week.[21] Calk in his journal quoted above, in the midst
of entries about his domestic work--such as, on April 29th "we git our
house kivered with bark and move our things into it at Night and Begin
housekeeping," and on May 2d, "went and sot in to clearing for
corn,"--mentions occasionally killing deer and turkey; and once, while
looking for a strayed mare, he saw four "bofelos." He wounded one, but
failed to get it, with the luck that generally attended backwoods
hunters when they for the first time tried their small-bore rifles
against these huge, shaggy-maned wild cattle.

As Henderson pointed out, the