Existing comment:
Abundance of Wild Beasts:
The abundance of game animals across Cumberland gap attracted hunters to the region. Leaving home for months and sometimes years, long hunters such as Daniel Boone harvested deer, beaver, bear, elk, and other animals for their profitable pelts.
As the supply of game animals decreased, competition for game meat and pelts between the American Indian tribes and the long hunters increased. Friction between the groups grew, especially as more colonists explored the territory with an eye to settling on it.
On such colonist was Colonel Richard Henderson, a land speculator and leader of the Transylvania Company that intended to settle in Kentucky., In the treaty made at Sycamore Shoals in 1775, he exchanged weapons, tools, and other goods with the Cherokee Indians for 20 million acres, including the right of way through the Cumberland Gap. Henderson hired Daniel Boone to blaze a trail through the mountains in Kentucky. It became known to thousands of pioneers as the Wilderness Trail.
Dragging Canoe, son of the Cherokee Chief Attakullaculla, protested the treaty his father had made with Colonel Henderson at Sycamore Shoals.
"Whole nations have melted away like balls of snow before the sun. The whites have passed the mountains and settled upon Cherokees land... When the whites are unable to point out any farther retreat for the miserable Cherokee, they will proclaim the extinction of the whole race."
-- Interpretation of Dragging Canoe speech, 1775 |