is event--a mass of painted Indians moving through the
sycamores by the bright water, to come presently into a tense, immobile
semicircle before the large group of armed frontiersmen seated or
standing about Richard Henderson, the man with the imperial dream, the
ready speaker whose flashing eyes and glowing oratory won the hearts
of all who came under their sway. What though the Cherokee title be a
flimsy one at best and the price offered for it a bagatelle! The spirit
of Forward March! is there in that great canvas framed by forest and
sky. The somber note that tones its lustrous color, as by a sweep of the
brush, is the figure of the Chickamaugan chief, Dragging Canoe, warrior
and seer and hater of white men, who urges his tribesmen against the
sale and, when they will not hearken, springs from their midst into the
clear space before Henderson and his band of pioneers and, pointing with
uplifted arm, warns them that a dark cloud hangs over the land the white
man covets which to the red man has long been a bloody ground. *

* This utterance of Dragging Canoe's is generally supposed to be
the origin of the descriptive phrase applied to Kentucky--"the Dark and
Bloody Ground." See Roosevelt, "The Winning of the West," vol. I, p.229.

The purchase, finally consummated, included the country lying between
the Kentucky and Cumberland Rivers almost all the present State of
Kentucky, with the adjacent land watered by the Cumberland River and its
tributaries, except certain lands previously leased by the Indians to
the Watauga Colony. The tract comprised about twenty million acres and
extended into Tennessee.

Daniel Boone's work was to cut out a road for the wagons of the
Transylvania Company's colonists to pass over. This was to be done by
slashing away the briers and underbrush hedging the narrow Warriors'
Path that made a direct northward line from Cumberland Gap to the
Ohio bank, opposite the mouth of the Scioto River. Just prior to the
conference Boone and "thirty guns" had set forth from the Holston to
prepare the road and to build a fort on whatever site he should select.

By April, Henderson and his first group of tenants were on the trail. In
Powell's Valley they came up with a party of Virginians Kentucky bound,
led by Benjamin Logan; and the two bands joined together for the march.
They had not gone far when they heard disquieting news. After leaving
Martin's Station, at the gates of his new domain, Hende