Though claimed by many, Kentucky was by common consent not inhabited by any of the tribes.
It was the great Middle Ground where the Indians hunted.

It was the Warriors' Path over which they rode from north and south to slaughter and where many of their fiercest encounters took place.

However shadowy the title which Henderson purposed to buy, there was one all-sufficing reason why he must come to terms with the Cherokees: their northernmost towns in Tennessee lay only fifty or sixty miles below Cumberland Gap and hence commanded the route over which he must lead colonists into his empire beyond the hills.
The conference took place early in March, 1775, at the Sycamore Shoals of the Watauga River.

Twelve hundred Indians, led by their "town chiefs"-- among whom were the old warrior and the old statesman of their nation, Oconostota and Attakullakulla--came to the treaty grounds and were received by Henderson and his associates and several hundred white men who were eager for a chance to settle on new lands.

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.