Boonesborough, the capital of this little western colony.
Withers does not mention this first legislative assembly held
in the Mississippi Valley. It is an interesting and suggestive
episode in American commonwealth-building, and deserves careful
study. Roosevelt gives it admirable treatment, in his _Winning
of the West_. The journal of the convention is given at length
in the appendix to the second edition of Butler's _Kentucky_;
Hall's _Sketches of the West_, i., pp. 264, 265; Louisville
_Literary News-Letter_, June 6, 1840; and Hazard's _U. S.
Register_, iii., pp. 25-28. Henderson's MS. Journal is in the
possession of the Wisconsin Historical Society, and has never
yet been published.

Virginia and North Carolina did not favor an independent
government in Kentucky, and annulled the title of the Henderson
company--but Virginia (1795) granted the proprietors in
recompense 200,000 acres on Powell's and Clinch rivers.

We hear little more of Richard Henderson, in pioneer history.
In 1779, he was one of the North Carolina commissioners to
extend the western boundary between that State and Virginia.
During the winter of 1789-90 he was at the French Lick on
Cumberland, where he opened a land office. His last public
service was in 1781, when a member of the North Carolina house
of commons. He died at his country seat in Granville County, N.
C., January 30, 1785, in his fiftieth year. Two of his sons,
Archibald and Leonard, attained eminence at the bar of their
native State.--R. G. T.

[4] Among Dr. Draper's manuscripts I find this succinct
review of the aboriginal claims to Kentucky: "There is some
reason to suppose that the Catawbas may once have dwelt upon
the Kentucky River; that stream, on some of the ancient maps
published a hundred years ago, was called the 'Cuttawa or
Cawtaba River.' But that tribe of Indians, so far as we know,
never laid any claim to the territory.

"It would appear from the historical evidences extant, that the
Shawanoes were the earliest occupants of Kentucky of whom we
have any certain knowledge. Colden, the primitive historian of
the Iroquois Confederacy, informs us, that when the French
commenced the first settlement of Canada in 1603, the