Land at twenty shillings per hundred acres was offered to each emigrant settling within the territory and raising a crop of corn before September 1, 1775, the emigrant being permitted to take up as much as five hundred acres for him self and two hundred and fifty acres for each tithable person under him.

In these "Proposals" there was no indication that the low terms at which the lands were offered would be maintained after September 1, 1775.

In a letter to Governor Dunmore (January, 1775), Colonel William Preston, county surveyor of Fincastle County, Virginia, says "The low price he [Henderson] proposes to sell at, together with some further encouragement he offers, will I am apprehensive induce a great many families to remove from this County (Fincastle) & Carolina and settle there." Joseph Martin, states his son, "was appointed entry-Taker and agent for the Powell Valley portion" of the Transylvania Purchase on January 20, 1775; and "he (Joseph Martin) and others went on in the early part of the year 1775 and made their stand at the very spot where he had made corn several years before.

In speaking of the startling design, unmasked by Henderson, of establishing an independent government, Colonel Preston writes to George Washington of the contemplated "large Purchase by one Col.
Henderson of North Carolina from the Cherokees....

I hear that Henderson talks with great Freedom & Indecency of the Governor of Virginia, sets the Government at Defiance & says if he once had five hundred good Fellows settled in that Country he would not Value Virginia." Early in 1775 runners were sent off to the Cherokee towns to summon the Indians to the treaty ground at the Sycamore Shoals of the Watauga; and Boone, after his return from a hunt in Kentucky in January, was summoned by Judge Henderson to aid in the negotiations preliminary to the actual treaty.