- ing the last of the triple range of mountains by the way of Cumberland Gap,
when they were suddenly attacked by Indians. Six white men, including Boone's eldest son James, were killed, and the cattle were dispersed, before the Indians were driven back. This tragedy so disheartened the emigrants that they declined to go further; and though Boone, in spite of his intense grief at the loss of his boy, would have persevered, he was obliged to yield to the numbers against him.
Back again then the survivors tramped, and took refuge at an outpost in the south-west of Virginia, where Boone remained, eating his heart out in compulsory inaction, until June, 1774, when, to his intense delight, he received an appointment as agent to a North Carolina company for purchasing lands in Kentucky. At the head of a party of surveyors, Boone joyfully started once more for the land which he looked upon as his own, and after a long journey, of which unfortunately, no details have been preserved, he stood again upon the shores of the Kentucky River, which he thoroughly surveyed with the help of his comrades, returning in safety in the ensuing year to his family in southern Virginia.
The reports given by Boone and others of the fertile lands in Kentucky resulted in the formation of a company, at the head of which was a man named Richard Henderson, for the purchase from the Cherokee Indians of a vast tract of land in Ohio and Kentucky, the natives having, by various hostile demonstrations, given proof of their intention not to permit the quiet appropriation of their soil. Daniel Boone, as having already had some intercourse, though not of the most encouraging kind, with the Cherokees, was chosen as the agent in the negotiation, and, after much speechifying, he obtained a hundred square miles of territory on the Kentucky and Ohio, an old warrior closing the final bargain with the words, "Brother, we give you fine land, but you will have trouble in settling it."
The shrewd sachem was right, for Virginia refused to recognize the purchase from the Indians as valid, and claimed all the lands between its western boundaries and the Mississippi for its own. Not until after a long and weary period of litigation was Boone able to realize the wish of his heart, and lay the foundations of the first settlement in Kentucky. His company had to be content, after all, with a very limited district to colonize; and after he had built his first fort, to which the name of Boonesborough was given in his honor, on the south side of the Kentucky River, he was greatly harassed by the treacherous attacks of the Cherokees, who,
