As they began the descent of the western slope of the mountain, an unexpected scene met the eyes of Robertson. When he left it in the previous autumn, the valley was an almost unbroken solitude; now the smoke was rising from a score of cabins, about which were many evidences of civilization. Nearly a hundred settlers were there, and the place was already a busy community.
There was not house-room for the large influx of strangers, but the spring weather was mild and genial, and they could encamp under the spreading trees until half-faced cabins were erected for their temporary shelter. These cabins were built of split saplings, one end resting on the ground, the other supported by a frame of forked poles about high enough for a man to enter standing upright. They were open at the front, but the sides and rear were covered with thick blankets, so as to afford shelter and privacy. Of no recognized order of civilized architecture, they would still serve to keep out the wind and the rain, and under them, on blankets, or now and then on the precious feather bed, spread on the ground, the tired immigrants might sleep as soundly as the renowned Sancho Panza of sleepy memory.
Their food was supplied from the corn planted and harvested by Robertson on his previous visit, and from the deer, buffalo, or wild turkey brought down by the unerring riflemen among them. On deer and wild turkey they had regaled before, but buffalo-meat was a delicacy with which they were not acquainted, and, its rich, juicy, tender steak once tasted, all other meat lost its flavor. None of them had ever even seen the animal, and we may imagine the wonder with which they first beheld the vast herds that almost darkened the valley. Lolling in the shade of the trees, or cropping leisurely the thick grass of the "openings," their coal-black beards sweeping the ground, and their long tails lashing their sleek dun sides, the noble beasts would gaze unconcernedly on the intruder, totally unconscious that this slender biped, with the slim smoke-breathing tube he bore in his hand, was ere long to wellnigh exterminate the lordly race and drive its scanty remnant far west of the Rocky Mountains. They were an easy prey to the early hunter, and thus the rude larders of the first settlers were filled to abundance.
Their wives and children provided with temporary shelter, the immigrants looked about for locations for more permanent dwellings, Virginia offered to every actual settler who should erect a log cabin and cultivate a small patch of ground four hundred acres so located as to include his improvements, together with the right to buy a thousand acres adjoining, at a price scarcely more than enough to cover the cost of surveying. The immigrants knew they were near the North Carolina boundary, but they supposed they were north of the line which starts "at a white stake on the Atlantic Ocean, at north 39° 20', and runs thence west to the South Seas," and thus were within the limits of Virginia and entitled to avail themselves of its cheap munificence,—cheap, because the whole territory had been bought by King George from the Six Nations for a few trinkets the total value of which did not exceed the cost of the wedding-outfit of a modern lady of fashion.
This line, "west to the South Seas," had not then been run farther west than the "Steep Rock," near the White-Top Mountain. When it was subsequently extended, the settlers found themselves within the limits of North Carolina and not entitled to the benefit of the Virginia law. But of this more hereafter. Now they were unconscious of encroaching on any rights of white man or red, and went on with their improvements, confident that they were acquiring an indefeasible title to their new possessions.
Nearly all the settlers whom Robertson found at Watauga were from Fairfax County, Virginia, and they had been attracted to the country by the report given of it by Dr. Thomas Walker, who with other gentlemen had made a hunting and exploring-tour through it as early as 1748. They were mostly from the farming population, somewhat uncouth in manner, and not much acquainted with books, but not illiterate, for in a document subscribed soon afterward by upward of a hundred of them only two names are signed with a cross. They had but little wealth; but they had what in a new community is far better,—frugal and industrious habits, enterprise, firm self-reliance, and the cool intrepidity which is fostered by frequent exposure to danger. No better material could have been selected to subdue the wilderness to the purposes of agriculture.
Among them, however, were some who had received the best education then afforded by the colonies. Prominent among these were the Seviers,—a father and four sons, who some time before had emigrated from Shenandoah County, Virginia, and settled about thirty miles farther north, near what is now Bristol, in Tennessee. There they were neighbors to the Shelbys, —another father and four sons,—who also have left an heroic record in the history of the Revolution.
Some of the younger Seviers, coming upon this valley on a hunting-expedition, had induced their father to remove to it; and here, "higher up the river, on its north side, and near the closing in of a ridge," he had built a roomy log mansion, a portion of which was still standing in 1844. The sons had erected dwellings lower down the river, and nearer the "Watauga Old Fields."
The Seviers were of French descent. The family name in France was Xavier, and they originally came from Xavier, a town at the foot of the Pyrenees, in Navarre, which was the birthplace of the famous ecclesiastic and missionary St. Francis Xavier. After the death of the saint the family became Huguenots, and on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 the direct ancestor of the Seviers of whom I am writing fled from France and settled in London, where he is said to have engaged in trade and prospered. The grandson of this man, Valentine Sevier, emigrated to Shenandoah County, Virginia, shortly prior to 1740; and this is the gentleman who, with his four sons, had now settled in the valley of the Watauga.
Each of these young men displayed qualities in after-life that would have rendered him worthy of notice in the annals of any community; but the oldest, John, born in 1744, is the one whose life and exploits will demand much the larger space in the following pages. Though so young, he had already acquired some distinction in his native State, for he had been appointed a captain in the "Virginia line" by the Earl of Dunmore, the last royalist governor of Virginia. In that capacity he had come in contact with Washington, who was a colonel in the same service; and it was doubtless owing to their early association that twenty years afterward, when Sevier was under the ban of outlawry by North Carolina, Washington appointed him to the military command of East Tennessee.