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.

It was fortunate for the Watauga settlers that the Indians and
the whites were on the most peaceful terms with each other at the
time the Watauga Valley was shown, by the running of the boundary
line, to lie within the Indian reservation. With true American
self reliance, the settlers met together for deliberation and
counsel, and deputed James Robertson and John Been, as stated by
Tennessee's first historian, "to treat with their landlords, and
agree upon articles of accommodation and friendship. The attempt
succeeded. For though the Indians refused to give up the land
gratuitously, they consented, for a stipulated amount of
merchandise, muskets, and other articles of convenience, to lease
all the country on the waters of the Watauga." In addition to the
land thus leased for ten years, several other tracts were
purchased from the Indians by Jacob Brown, who reoccupied his
former location on the Nolichucky.

In taking this daring step, the Watauga settlers moved into the
spotlight of national history. For the inevitable consequence of
leasing the territory was the organization of a form of
government for the infant settlement. Through his familiarity
with the North Carolina type of "association," in which the
settlers had organized for the purpose of "regulating" abuses,
and his acquaintance with the contents of the "Impartial
Relation," in which Husband fully expounded the principles and
practices of this association, Robertson was peculiarly fitted
f