one day after the embattled farmers at Lexington and Concord
"fired the shots heard round the world," the echoing shots of
Boone and his sturdy backwoodsmen rang out to announce the
arrival of the proprietor of Transylvania and the birth of the
American West.

CHAPTER XV. Transylvania--A wilderness Commonwealth

You are about a work of the utmost importance to the well-being
of this country in general, in which the interest and security of
each and every individual are inseparably connected .... Our
peculiar circumstances in this remote country, surrounded on all
sides with difficulties, and equally subject to one common
danger, which threatens our common overthrow, must, I think, in
their effects, secure to us an union of interests, and,
consequently, that harmony in opinion, so essential to the
forming good, wise and wholesome laws.--Judge Richard Henderson:
Address to the Legislature of Transylvania, May 23, 1775.

The independent spirit displayed by the Transylvania Company, and
Henderson's procedure in open defiance of the royal governors of
both North Carolina and Virginia, naturally aroused grave alarm
throughout these colonies and South Carolina. "This in my
Opinion," says Preston in a letter to George Washington (January
31, 1775), "will soon become a serious Affair, & highly deserves
the Attention of the Government. For it is certain that a vast
Number of People are preparing to go out and settle on this
Purchase; and if once they get fixed there, it will be next to
impossible to remove them or reduce them to Obedience; as they
are so far from the Seat of Government. Indeed it may be the
Cherokees will support them." Governor Martin of North Carolina,
already deeply disturbed in anticipation of the coming
revolutionary cataclysm, thundered in what was generally regarded
as a forcible-feeble proclamation (February 19, 1775) against
"Richard Henderson and his Confederates" in their "daring, unjust
and unwarrantable proceedings." In a letter to Dartmouth he
denounces "Henderson the famous invader" and dubs the
Transylvania Company "an infamous Company of land Pyrates."

Officials who were themselves eager for land naturally opposed
Henderson's plans. Lord Dunmore, who in 1774, as we have seen,
was heavily interested in the Wabash Land Company engineered by
William Murray, took the ground that the Wabash purchase was
valid under the Camden-Yorke decision. This is so stated in the
records of the Illino