be content to
hold it even at a small quit-rent from Henderson. But the latter's
colony was toppled over by a thrust from without before it had time to
be rent in sunder by violence from within.

Transylvania was between two millstones. The settlers revolted against
its authority, and appealed to Virginia; and meanwhile Virginia,
claiming the Kentucky country, and North Carolina as mistress of the
lands round the Cumberland, proclaimed the purchase of the Transylvanian
proprietors null and void as regards themselves, though valid as against
the Indians. The title conveyed by the latter thus enured to the benefit
of the colonies; it having been our policy, both before and since the
Revolution, not to permit any of our citizens to individually purchase
lands from the savages.

Lord Dunmore denounced Henderson and his acts; and it was in vain that
the Transylvanians appealed to the Continental Congress, asking leave to
send a delegate thereto, and asserting their devotion to the American
cause; for Jefferson and Patrick Henry were members of that body, and
though they agreed with Lord Dunmore in nothing else, were quite as
determined as he that Kentucky should remain part of Virginia. So
Transylvania's fitful life flickered out of existence; the Virginia
Legislature in 1778, solemnly annulling the title of the company, but
very properly recompensing the originators by the gift of two hundred
thousand acres.[27] North Carolina pursued a precisely similar course;
and Henderson, after the collapse of his colony, drifts out of history.

Boon remained to be for some years one of the Kentucky leaders. Soon
after the fort at Boonsborough was built, he went back to North Carolina
for his family, and in the fall returned, bringing out a band of new
settlers, including twenty-seven "guns"--that is, rifle-bearing
men,--and four women, with their families, the first who came to
Kentucky, though others shortly followed in their steps.[28] A few
roving hunters and daring pioneer settlers also came to his fort in the
fall; among them, the famous scout, Simon Kenton, and John Todd,[29] a
man of high and noble character and well-trained mind, who afterwards
fell by Boon's side when in command at the fatal battle of Blue Licks.
In this year also Clark[30] and Shelby[31] first came to Kentucky; and
many other men whose names became famous in frontier story, and whose
sufferings and long wanderings, whose strength, hardihood, and fierce
da