At last the founder of Kentucky with his little band reached the destined goal of their arduous journeyings. Henderson's record on his birthday runs: "Thursday the 20th [April] Arrived at Fort Boone on the Mouth of Oter Creek Cantuckey River where we were Saluted by a running fire of about 25 Guns; all that was then at Fort.... The men appeared in high spirits & much rejoiced in our arrival." It is a coincidence of historic interest that just one day after the embattled farmers at Lexington and Concord "fired the shots heard round the world," the echoing shots of Boone and his sturdy backwoodsmen rang out to announce the arrival of the proprietor of Transylvania and the birth of the American West. CHAPTER XV. Transylvania--A Wilderness Commonwealth You are about a work of the utmost importance to the well-being of this country in general, in which the interest and security of each and every individual are inseparably connected.... Our peculiar circumstances in this remote country, surrounded on all sides with difficulties, and equally subject to one common danger, which threatens our common overthrow, must, I think, in their effects, secure to us an union of interests, and, consequently, that harmony in opinion, so essential to the forming good, wise and wholesome laws. --Judge Richard Henderson: Address to the Legislature of Transylvania, May 23, 1775. The independent spirit displayed by the Transylvania Company, and Henderson's procedure in open defiance of the royal governors of both North Carolina and Virginia, naturally aroused grave alarm throughout these colonies and South Carolina. "This in my Opinion," says Preston in a letter to George Washington (January 31, 1775), "will soon become a serious Affair, & highly deserves the Attention of the Government. For it is certain that a vast Number of People are preparing to go out and settle on this Purchase; and if once they get fixed there, it will be next to impossible to remove them or reduce them to Obedience; as they are so far from the Seat of Government. Indeed it may be the Cherokees will support them." [164] Governor Martin of North Carolina, already deeply disturbed in anticipation of the coming revolutionary cataclysm, thundered in what was generally regarded as a forcible-feeble proclamation (February 19, 1775) against "Richard Henderson and his Confederates" in their "daring, unjust and unwarrantable proceedings." [165] In a letter to Dartmouth he denounces "Henderson the famous invader" and dubs the Transylvania Company "an infamous Company of land Pyrates."