Ramsey's Annals of Tennessee to the End of the Eighteenth Century (1853)

93

FIRST SETTLEMENT IN TENNESSEE.

and achievement. What these elements were succeeding pages will but feebly develope and illustrate. Toil, enterprise, perseverance and courage, had planted that germ in a distant wilderness. The circumstances that surrounded it, required for its growth, culture and protection, wisdom, virtue, patriotism, valour and self-reliance. American was to become Western character, and here was the place and this the time of its first germination.

The news of the great grant from the Six Nations reached the frontier settlement soon after the treaty of

1769

November, 1768. Dr. Walker, the Commissioner from Virginia, had returned from Fort Stanwix, and brought with him an account of the cession. He is the same gentleman who, as

has been already narrated, had twice explored the new country, and now bore with him one form of authority for an indefinite extension of the white settlements westward. The Indian boundary, as adjusted at Hard Labour, in October of the same year, had given the assent of the Cherokees to a further expansion of the Holston settlements; and late in December, 1768, and early in January of 1769, was formed the nucleus of the first permanent establishment of the white race in Tennessee. It was merely an enlargement of the Virginia settlement near it, and at the time was believed to be upon the territory of that province,—the line dividing Virginia and North-Carolina not having been yet run west of Steep Rock. The settlers were principally from what is now Wake county, in North-Carolina. Some of them had been among the troops raised by that province, and sent, in 1760, for the relief of the garrison at Fort Loudon—others of them had wintered, in 1758, at the Long Island Fort, around which a temporary settlement had been made, which was soon after broken up and its members forced to retired east of Kenhawa.

Early in this year further explorations were made. One of them originated with Gilbert Christian and William Anderson. They had accompanied the regiment commanded by Colonel Bird, and were so pleased with the country through which they had marched, that they determined to explore it more fully. They were joined by the