The land titles granted by the Transylvania Company having been declared void, it became necessary for Boone and the other settlers under that grant to purchase from the State government of Virginia new warrants. For this purpose Boone set out for Richmond in the spring. Nathaniel and Thomas Hart and others of his friends commissioned him to act as their agent in this matter. With his own small means and that which was entrusted to him for the purpose, he carried $20,000 in depreciated paper money--probably worth but half that amount in silver. It appears that of this entire sum he was robbed upon his way--where, or under what circumstances, we are unable to discover. His petition to the Kentucky legislature, in his old age, simply states the fact of the robbery, adding that he "was left destitute." A large part of the money was the property of his old friends, the Harts, but many others also suffered greatly. There was some disposition on the part of a few to attribute dishonorable action to Boone; but the Harts, although the chief losers, came promptly to the rescue and sharply censured his critics, declaring him to be a "just and upright" man, beyond suspicion--a verdict which soon became unanimous. Sympathy for the honest but unbusinesslike pioneer was so general, that late in June, soon after the robbery, Virginia granted him a preemption of a thousand acres of land in what is now Bourbon County.
A tradition exists that while in Virginia that summer Boone called upon his former host at Detroit, then a prisoner of war, and expressed sympathy for the sad plight into which the English governor had fallen; also some indignation at the harsh treatment accorded him, and of which Hamilton bitterly complained.
The founder of Boonesborough was soon back at his station, for he served as a juryman there on the first of July. During his absence immigration into Kentucky had been greater than ever; three hundred well-laden family boats had arrived in the spring from the Pennsylvania and New York frontiers, while many caravans had come from Virginia and the Carolinas over the Wilderness Road. Attacks by Indian scalping parties had been numerous along both routes, but particularly upon the Ohio. As a reprisal for Bowman's expedition of the previous year, and intending to interrupt settlement, Colonel Byrd, of the British Army, descended in June upon Ruddle's and Martin's Stations, at the forks of the Licking, with six hundred Indians and French-Canadians, and bringing six small cannon with which to batter the Kentucky palisades. Both garrisons were compelled to surrender, and the victors returned to Detroit with a train of three hundred prisoners--men, women, and children--upon whom the savages practised cruelties of a particularly atrocious character.