reaches and
could be legally leased or even purchased. The more level-headed
mountain people reasoned in this way: Why not send one of their number
on ahead to look over the region, negotiate for boundaries, and stake
them out for families who decided to take up their abode there? A
Scotch-Irishman named James Robertson took upon himself this task.

During this period of unrest in North Carolina, Boone had returned with
Rebecca and the children to Watauga where they found others to welcome
them. If indeed Daniel needed a welcome or wanted it. Again he cleared a
piece of ground and built a log house. But the smoke no sooner curled up
from the chimney than scores of Scotch-Irish from North Carolina, who
could no longer bear the injustice of government officials, began to
crowd into the valley around him. This irked Daniel, for he loved the
freedom of the wilds. "I've got to have elbow room," he complained to
Rebecca, "I know a place--"

The Scotch-Irish, however, stayed on in Watauga.

They had had enough of injustice and were glad to escape a country where
the more prosperous were making life hard for the less fortunate
immigrants who continued to come down the Virginia Valley, and the
mountain people who settled in the rugged western part of the state.
Like their Scotch-Irish brothers in Pennsylvania, they had determined to
find a remedy. They remembered how the Rangers in the Pennsylvania
border settlements had been forced to take matters in their own hands to
protect life and home, and they organized their protective band called
the Regulators. If armed force was needed, they meant to use it. They
found the Governor as indifferent to their appeals for fairness as the
Pennsylvania Assembly had been to the Rangers' protests. If North
Carolina's Governor had been a man of cool and fair judgment, the
tragedy of Alamance might have been averted. On the other hand, the
first decisive step toward American independence might have been lost,
or at least delayed.

In ironic response to the pleas of the Regulators, the Governor of North
Carolina summoned a force of one thousand militia men and led them into
the western settlements. At the end of the day, May 16, 1771, two
hundred and fifty of the two thousand Regulators who had gathered with
their rifles at Alamance when they heard of the coming of the militia,
lay dead. The living were forced to retreat.

If Robertson had planned his return it could not have come at a more