er. There
the Cherokees ceded to the company for "ten thousand pounds, all the
vast tract of land lying between the Ohio and Cumberland rivers, and
west and south of the Kentucky." This region was called Transylvania.

So, just six years after his first hunting trip to Kentucky, Boone began
to colonize it and that in flat defiance of the British government. He
thumbed his nose too at a menacing proclamation of North Carolina's
royal governor.

Now that the land was acquired by the Transylvania Company they would
have to charter a course leading to and through it for prospective
settlers. For theirs was a "land and improvement company." Again Daniel
Boone was employed. This time his task was to open a path through the
wilderness.

With ax and tomahawk, with fighting and tribulations, he blazed the
trail from Holston River to the mouth of Otter Creek on the Kentucky
River. "Boone's Trace," they called it, connecting with the Warrior's
Path and its extensions into eastern Tennessee and western North
Carolina through Cumberland Gap and even beyond. It became the
Wilderness Trail or Wilderness Road. It was the first through course
from the mother state of Virginia to the West.

In spite of the purchase of land from the Indian, in spite of all the
treaties of peace, the cunning warrior persisted in attack upon the
white men, in massacre of women and children, in capture of hunter and
trapper.

Daniel Boone and his men had to safeguard their families and the future
of their company. They set about building a fort. As for Boone, he felt
himself "an instrument ordained to settle the wilderness." No hardship
was too great, no sorrow too deep to deter him in his mission of
"pioneering and subduing the wilderness for the habitation of civilized
men."

After two years of hardship and toil a fort was built on the banks of
the Kentucky River. It consisted of cabins of roughhewn logs surrounded
by a stockade. Over this crude fort, in one cabin of which Boone and
Rebecca lived with their family, a flag was raised on May 23, 1775. It
marked a new and independent nation called Transylvania.

Only a week after the flag-raising in Kentucky the people of
Mecklenburg, which had been established only eleven years, made another
step toward independence. On May 31, 1775, the Mecklenburg Resolutions
were adopted in North Carolina.

In the meantime the Revolution had begun and mountain men were first to
join Washington against the Briti