go, and
for every cabin they erected they battled as warriors to hold a fort. In
the first years they planted little corn and reaped less, for it may be
said that their rifles were never out of their hands. We have seen
how stations were built and abandoned until but two stood. Untiring
vigilance and ceaseless warfare were the price paid by the first
Kentuckians ere they turned the Indian's place of desolation and death
into a land productive and a living habitation.

Herein lies the difference, slight apparently, yet significant, between
the first Kentucky and the first Tennessee * colonies. Within the memory
of the Indians only one tribe had ever attempted to make their home in
Kentucky--a tribe of the fighting Shawanoes--and they had been terribly
chastised for their temerity. But Tennessee was the home of the
Cherokees, and at Chickasaw Bluffs (Memphis) began the southward trail
to the principal towns of the Chickasaws. By the red man's fiat, then,
human life might abide in Tennessee, though not in Kentucky, and it
followed that in seasons of peace the frontiersmen might settle in
Tennessee. So it was that as early as 1757, before the great Cherokee
war, a company of Virginians under Andrew Lewis had, on an invitation
from the Indians, erected Fort Loudon near Great Telliko, the Cherokees'
principal town, and that, after the treaty of peace in 1761, Waddell and
his rangers of North Carolina had erected a fort on the Holston.

* Tennessee. The name, Ten-as-se, appears on Adair's map as one
of the old Cherokee towns. Apparently neither the meaning nor the reason
why the colonists called both state and river by this name has been
handed down to us.

Though Fort Loudon had fallen tragically during the war, and though
Waddell's fort had been abandoned, neither was without influence in the
colonization of Tennessee, for some of the men who built these forts
drifted back a year or two later and setup the first cabins on the
Holston. These earliest settlements, thin and scattered, did
not survive; but in 1768 the same settlers or others of their
kind--discharged militiamen from Back Country regiments--once more made
homes on the Holston. They were joined by a few families from near the
present Raleigh, North Carolina, who had despaired of seeing justice
done to the tenants on the mismanaged estates of Lord Granville. About
the same time there was erected the first cabin on the Watauga River, as
is generally bel