a large portion of modern Kentucky and a significant portion of Tennessee north of present day Nashville. The Transylvania Company paid for the land with 10,000 pounds sterling of trade goods. After the treaty was signed, frontier explorer Daniel Boone came northward to blaze the Wilderness Road, connecting the Transylvania Purchase lands with the Holston and Watauga settlements. Both the lease and the sale were considered illegal by the Crown Government, as well as by the warring Cherokee faction known as the Chickamauga, led by the war-chief, Dragging Canoe. The Chickamauga violently contested the westward expansion by European settlers across Tennessee throughout the Cherokee–American wars (1776–1794). In April 1775, the Watauga Association was reorganized as the "Washington District," allied with the colonies that were declaring independence from Great Britain. The Washington District annexation petition was first rejected by Virginia in the spring of 1776, but a similar annexation petition presented by the district to the North Carolina legislature was approved in November 1776. Government under North Carolina In the days before statehood, Tennesseans struggled to gain a political voice and suffered for lack of the protection afforded by organized government. Six counties—Washington, Sullivan, and Greene in East Tennessee; and Davidson, Sumner, and Tennessee County in Middle Tennessee—had been formed as western counties of North Carolina between 1777 and 1788. In 1780, the newly formed Cumberland Association, under the Cumberland Compact, established Fort Nashborough on the Cumberland River, opening up a second frontier of settlement within present-day Tennessee. The Cumberland River settlements were separated from those in the east by a substantial enclave of Cherokee territory that was not formally acquired from them until 1805. After the American Revolutionary War, North Carolina did not want the trouble and expense of maintaining such distant settlements, embroiled as they were with hostile tribesmen during the Cherokee–American wars, and needing roads, forts, and open waterways. Nor could the far-flung settlers look to the national government; for under the weak, loosely constituted Articles of Confederation, it was a government in name only. In 1775, Richard Henderson negotiated a series of treaties with the Cherokee to sell the lands of the Watauga settlements at Sycamore Shoals on the banks of the Watauga River in present-day Elizabethton. An agreement to sell land for the Transylvania Colony, which included the territory in modern-day Tennessee north of the Cumberland River, was also signed. Later that year, Daniel Boone, under