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.

* * This utterance of Dragging Canoe's is generally supposed to be the origin of the descriptive phrase applied to Kentucky--"the Dark and Bloody Ground." See Roosevelt, "The Winning of the West," vol.I, p.229.
The purchase, finally consummated, included the country lying between the Kentucky and Cumberland Rivers almost all the present State of Kentucky, with the adjacent land watered by the Cumberland River and its tributaries, except certain lands previously leased by the Indians to the Watauga Colony.

The tract comprised about twenty million acres and extended into Tennessee.
Daniel Boone's work was to cut out a road for the wagons of the Transylvania Company's colonists to pass over.

This was to be done by slashing away the briers and underbrush hedging the narrow Warriors' Path that made a direct northward line from Cumberland Gap to the Ohio bank, opposite the mouth of the Scioto River.