and removed his whole family, including his wife and
children, his parents and his brothers and sisters, to this new haven of
freedom at Watauga.

The friendship formed between Robertson and Sevier in these first years
of their work together was never broken, yet two more opposite types
could hardly have been brought together. Robertson was a man of humble
origin, unlettered, not a dour Scot but a solemn one. Sevier was
cavalier as well as frontiersman. On his father's side he was of the
patrician family of Xavier in France. His progenitors, having become
Huguenots, had taken refuge in England, where the name Xavier was
finally changed to Sevier. John Sevier's mother was an Englishwoman.
Some years before his birth his parents had emigrated to the Shenandoah
Valley. Thus it happened that John Sevier, who mingled good English
blood with the blue blood of old France, was born an American and grew
up a frontier hunter and soldier. He stood about five feet nine from his
moccasins to his crown of light brown hair. He was well-proportioned and
as graceful of body as he was hard-muscled and swift. His chin was firm,
his nose of a Roman cast, his mouth well-shaped, its slightly full lips
slanting in a smile that would not be repressed. Under the high, finely
modeled brow, small keen dark blue eyes sparkled with health, with
intelligence, and with the man's joy in life.

John Sevier indeed cannot be listed as a type; he was individual. There
is no other character like him in border annals. He was cavalier and
prince in his leadership of men; he had their homage. Yet he knew how to
be comrade and brother to the lowliest. He won and held the confidence
and friendship of the serious-minded Robertson no less than the idolatry
of the wildest spirits on the frontier throughout the forty-three years
of the spectacular career which began for him on the day he brought
his tribe to Watauga. In his time he wore the governor's purple; and
a portrait painted of him shows how well this descendant of the noble
Xaviers could fit himself to the dignity and formal habiliments of
state; Yet in the fringed deerskin of frontier garb, he was fleeter on
the warpath than the Indians who fled before him; and he could outride
and outshoot--and, it is said, outswear--the best and the worst of the
men who followed him. Perhaps the lurking smile on John Sevier's face
was a flicker of mirth that there should be found any man, red or
white, with temerity en