This vanguard of the army of westward advance, independent Americans in spirit with a negligible sprinkling of Loyalists, now swept in a great tide into the northeastern section of Tennessee. The men of Sandy Creek, actuated by independent principles but out of sympathy with the anarchic side of the Regulation, left the colony almost to a man. "After the defeat of the Regulators," says the historian of the Sandy Creek Association, "thousands of the oppressed, seeing no hope of redress for their grievances, moved into and settled east Tennessee. A large proportion of these were of the Baptist population. Sandy Creek Church which some time previous to 1771, numbered 606, was afterward reduced to fourteen members!" [123] This movement exerted powerful influence in stimulating westward expansion. Indeed, it was from men of Regulating principles—Boone, Robertson, and the Searcys—who vehemently condemned the anarchy and incendiarism of 1770, that Judge Henderson received powerful coöperation in the opening up of Kentucky and Tennessee. [124]
The several treaties concerning the western boundary of white settlement, concluded in close succession by North Carolina, Virginia, and the Crown with the Southern and Northern Indians, had an important bearing upon the settlement of Watauga. The Cherokee boundary line, as fixed by Governor Tryon (1767) and by John Stuart (1768), ran from Reedy River to Tryon Mountain, thence straight to Chiswell's Mine, and thence direct to the mouth of the Great Kanawha River. By the treaty at Fort Stanwix (November 5, 1768), in the negotiation of which Virginia was represented by Dr. Thomas Walker and Major Andrew Lewis, the Six Nations sold to the Crown their shadowy claim to a vast tract of western country, including in particular all the land between the Ohio and the Tennessee Rivers. The news of the cession resulted in a strong southwestward thrust of population, from the neighborhood of Abingdon, in the direction of the Holston Valley. [125] Recognizing that hundreds of these settlers were beyond the line negotiated by Stuart, but on lands not yet surveyed, Governor Botetourt instructed the Virginia commissioners to press for further negotiations, through Stuart, with the Cherokees. Accordingly, on October 18, 1770, a new treaty was made at Lochaber, South Carolina, by which a new line back of Virginia was established, beginning at the intersection of the North Carolina-Cherokee line (a point some seventy-odd miles east of Long Island), running thence in a west course to a point six miles east of Long Island, and thence in a direct course to the confluence of the Great Kanawha and Ohio Rivers. At the time of the treaty, it was agreed that the Holston River, from its intersection with the North Carolina-Virginia line, and down the course of the same, should be a temporary southern boundary of Virginia until the line should be ascertained by actual survey. [126] A strong influx of population into the immense new triangle thus released for settlement brought powerful pressure to bear upon northern Tennessee, the point of least resistance along the western barrier. Singularly enough, this advance was not opposed by the Cherokees, whose towns were strung across the extreme southeast corner of Tennessee.
When Colonel John Donelson ran the line in the latter part of 1771, The Little Carpenter, who with other Indian chiefs accompanied the surveying party, urged that the line agreed upon at Lochaber should break off at the head of the Louisa River, and should run thence to the mouth thereof, and thence up the Ohio to the mouth of the Great Kanawha. For this increase in the territory of Virginia they of course expected additional payment. As a representative of Virginia, Donelson agreed to the proposed alteration in the boundary line; and accordingly promised to send the Cherokees, in the following spring, a sum alleged by them to have been fixed at five hundred pounds, in compensation for the additional area. This informal agreement, it is believed, was never ratified by Virginia; nor was the promised compensation ever paid the Cherokees. [127]
Under the belief that the land belonged to Virginia, Jacob Brown with one or two families from North Carolina settled in 1771 upon a tract of land on the northern bank of the Nonachunheh (corruption, Nolichucky) River. During the same year, an experimental line run westward from Steep Rock and Beaver Creek by Anthony Bledsoe showed that upon the extension of the boundary line, these settlers would fall within the bounds of North Carolina. Although thus informally warned of the situation, the settlers made no move to vacate the lands. But in the following year, after the running of Donelson's line, Alexander Cameron, Stuart's deputy, required "all persons who had made settlements beyond the said line to relinquish them." Thus officially warned, Brown and his companions removed to Watauga. [128] Cameron's order did not apply, however, to the settlement north of the Holston River, south and east of Long Island; and the settlement in Carter's Valley, north of the Holston and west of the Long Island, although lying without the Virginia boundary, strangely enough remained unmolested. The order was directed at the Watauga settlers, who were seated south of the Holston River in the Watauga Valley.
The plight in which the Watauga settlers now found themselves was truly desperate; and the way in which they surmounted this apparently insuperable difficulty is one of the most striking and characteristic events in the pre-Revolutionary history of the Old Southwest. It exhibits the indomitable will and fertile resource of the American character at the margin of desperation. The momentous influence of the Watauga settlers, inadequately reckoned hitherto by historians, was soon to make itself powerfully felt in the first epochal movement of westward expansion.
[CHAPTER XIII.]
Opening the Gateway—Dunmore's War
Virginia, we conceive, can claim this Country [Kentucky] with the greatest justice and propriety, its within the Limits of their Charter. They Fought and bled for it. And had it not been for the memorable Battle, at the Great Kanaway those vast regions had yet continued inaccessable.
—The Harrodsburg Petition.
June 7-15, 1776.