uring the year before the war.

While over two hundred colonists were picking out home sites wherever
their pleasure or prudence dictated, a gigantic land promotion
scheme--involving the very tracts where they were sowing their first
corn--was being set afoot in North Carolina by a body of men who figure
in the early history of Kentucky as the Transylvania Company. The leader
of this organization was Judge Richard Henderson. * Judge Henderson
dreamed a big dream. His castle in the air had imperial proportions.
He resolved, in short, to purchase from the Cherokee Indians the larger
part of Kentucky and to establish there a colony after the manner and
the economic form of the English Lords Proprietors, whose day in America
was so nearly done. Though in the light of history the plan loses none
of its dramatic features, it shows the practical defects that must
surely have prevented its realization. Like many another Caesar
hungering for empire and staking all to win it, the prospective lord
of Kentucky, as we shall see, had left the human equation out of his
calculations.

* Richard Henderson (1734-1785) was the son of the High Sheriff
of Granville County. At first an assistant to his father, he studied
law and soon achieved a reputation by the brilliance of his mind and the
magnetism of his personality. As presiding Judge at Hillsborough he had
come into conflict with the violent element among the Regulators, who
had driven him from the court and burned his house and barns. For some
time prior to his elevation to the bench, he had been engaged in land
speculations. One of Boone's biographers suggests that Boone may have
been secretly acting as Henderson's agent during his first lonely
explorations of Kentucky. However this may be, it does not appear
that Boone and his Yadkin neighbors were acting with Henderson when
in September, 1773, they made their first attempt to enter Kentucky as
settlers.

Richard Henderson had known Daniel Boone on the Yadkin; and it was
Boone's detailed reports of the marvelous richness and beauty of
Kentucky which had inspired him to formulate his gigantic scheme and had
enabled him also to win to his support several men of prominence in
the Back Country. To sound the Cherokees regarding the purchase and to
arrange, if possible, for a conference, Henderson dispatched Boone to
the Indian towns in the early days of 1775.

Since we have just learned that Dunmore's War compelled the Shaw