Transylvania Colony
To further complicate matters, this frontier land was also claimed by the Virginia Colony (particularly following Lord Dunmore's War) and a southern portion by Province of North Carolina.
The American pioneer and frontier explorer Daniel Boone was hired by Henderson to establish the Wilderness Road going through the Cumberland Gap and into southeastern Kentucky to facilitate settlement.
Continued provocations by colonial explorers, traders and trappers necessitated some concessions by the Indians to concede lands for settlement in exchange for peace.
In the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix, the Iroquois ceded their claims on lands south of the Ohio River to the British Empire.
The Shawnee lost this brief war and their chief Cornstalk ceded all their claims south of the Ohio River, including Kentucky.
In March 1775, Richard Henderson and Daniel Boone met with more than 1,200 Cherokee at Sycamore Shoals (present day Elizabethton in northeastern Tennessee).
A dissident Cherokee chief, Dragging Canoe, refused to sign, endorse, or obey the Treaty of Sycamore Shoals, declaring that "it is bloody ground, and will be dark and difficult to settle".
Dragging Canoe left the Sycamore Shoals treaty grounds and took those who were loyal to him and his way of thinking into southeastern Tennessee, near present-day Chattanooga.
Prior to the signing of the Sycamore Shoals Treaty, Henderson had hired Daniel Boone,[1] an experienced hunter, to travel to the Cherokee towns and to inform them of the upcoming negotiations.
[3] Afterward, Boone was hired to blaze what became known as the Wilderness Road, which went from southwestern Virginia north through the Cumberland Gap and into central Kentucky.
Henderson's plan involved the various settlements scattered across Transylvania sending delegates to Boonesborough, acting in the name of the people they represented and whose consent would justify the convention.
On behalf of his fellow investors in the land scheme he petitioned the Continental Congress, seeking to make Transylvania a legally recognized colony.
Despite those efforts, the Congress declined to act without the consent of Virginia and North Carolina, both of whom claimed jurisdiction over the region in question.
