anoes
and their allies to relinquish their right to Kentucky, that, both
before and after that event, government surveyors were in the territory
surveying for the soldiers' claims, and that private individuals had
already laid out town sites and staked holdings, it may be asked what
right of ownership the Cherokees possessed in Kentucky, that Henderson
desired to purchase it of them. The Indian title to Kentucky seems to
have been hardly less vague to the red men than it was to the whites.
Several of the nations had laid claim to the territory. As late as 1753,
it will be remembered, the Shawanoes had occupied a town at Blue Licks,
for John Findlay had been taken there by some of them. But, before
Findlay guided Boone through the Gap in 1769, the Shawanoes had been
driven out by the Iroquois, who claimed suzerainty over them as well
as over the Cherokees. In 1768, the Iroquois had ceded Kentucky to the
British Crown by the treaty of Fort Stanwix; whereupon the Cherokees had
protested so vociferously that the Crown's Indian agent, to quiet them,
had signed a collateral agreement with them. Though claimed by many,
Kentucky was by common consent not inhabited by any of the tribes.
It was the great Middle Ground where the Indians hunted. It was the
Warriors' Path over which they rode from north and south to slaughter
and where many of their fiercest encounters took place. However shadowy
the title which Henderson purposed to buy, there was one all-sufficing
reason why he must come to terms with the Cherokees: their northernmost
towns in Tennessee lay only fifty or sixty miles below Cumberland Gap
and hence commanded the route over which he must lead colonists into his
empire beyond the hills.

The conference took place early in March, 1775, at the Sycamore Shoals
of the Watauga River. Twelve hundred Indians, led by their "town
chiefs"--among whom were the old warrior and the old statesman of their
nation, Oconostota and Attakullakulla--came to the treaty grounds and
were received by Henderson and his associates and several hundred white
men who were eager for a chance to settle on new lands. Though Boone was
now on his way into Kentucky for the Transylvania Company, other border
leaders of renown or with their fame still to win were present, and
among them James Robertson, of serious mien, and that blond gay knight
in buckskin, John Sevier.

It is a dramatic picture we evolve for ourselves from the meager
narratives of th