The extent to which the western people were prepared to go in the Confederation days was a matter of much dispute, and was aired fully in the course of time by controversies in Kentucky politics. But their hardihood and capacity for achievement have never been questioned. They were qualified by nature to insist upon their rights even if such insistence embarrassed the foreign negotiations of the home Government. Bred in the rural districts of Virginia and the Carolinas, accustomed to solitude and privations, depending upon their rifles for food and largely for dress, they felt no ties binding them to home and the old life when once they had crossed the mountains. They were self-dependent in nearly every particular except arms and ammunition. Carrying the organising instinct of their English forefathers, they set up local government as rapidly as their numbers warranted. To be held as colonists by the States to the eastward of the mountains was contrary to that spirit of inherited freedom which had already made those States out of colonies. Just at the dawn of the Revolution the colonisation of the far-famed "blue grass" region of Kentucky had begun, when Daniel Boone led the Transylvania Company from North Carolina to found Boonesboro. Although the independent government which this company erected was suppressed by the governors of Virginia and North Carolina, the movement could not be stayed. A few years later, these Kentuckians, increased in numbers by the enormous migration thither, were holding secession conventions which Virginia thought wise not to resist. North Carolina repressed with some effort the independent State of Franklin, or "Frankland," the land of the free Franks, as it was first called, which John Sevier and other hardy spirits set up in what is now eastern Tennessee. While these attempts to create independent States in the remote regions are now praised as evidences of the organising instinct of the American people, it must not be forgotten that at the time they were formed within the legitimate bounds of regular States and seriously threatened to impair their domains. The domain of a State is regarded as one of the most inviolable attributes of its sovereignty. The third Article of the Confederation bound the States to assist any of their number against attacks made upon its sovereignty. Not only were the States of Virginia and Kentucky threatened with the loss of territory through insurrection. The "Green Mountain boys," headed by Ethan Allen, had succeeded in setting up an independent State, with a popular innkeeper as governor, upon land claimed by New York. Against these infringements upon the integrity of the States, the Congress could do nothing more than draw up resolutions expressing "the highest disapprobation" of those who participated.