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 this event--a mass of painted Indians moving
through the sycamores by the bright water, to come presently into
a tense, immobile semicircle before the large group of armed
frontiersmen seated or standing about Richard Henderson, the man
with the imperial dream, the ready speaker whose flashing eyes
and glowing oratory won the hearts of all who came under their
sway. What though the Cherokee title be a flimsy one at best and
the price offered for it a bagatelle! The spirit of Forward
March! is there in that great canvas framed by forest and sky.
The somber note that tones its lustrous color, as by a sweep of
the brush, is the figure of the Chickamaugan chief, Dragging
Canoe, warrior and seer and hater of white men, who urges his
tribesmen against the sale and, when they will not hearken,
springs from their midst into the clear space before Henderson
and his band of pioneers and, pointing with uplifted arm, warns
them that a dark cloud hangs over the land the white man covets
which to the red man has long been a bloody ground.
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