nd has reported
her truly, "Bonnie Kate Sherrill" was a beauty. Through a porthole
Sevier saw her running towards the shut gates, dodging and darting, her
brown hair blowing from the wind of her race for life--and offering
far too rich a prize to the yelling fiends who dashed after her. Sevier
coolly shot the foremost of her pursuers, then sprang upon the wall,
caught up Bonnie Kate, and tossed her inside to safety. And legend says
further that when, after Sevier's brief widowerhood, she became his
wife, four years later, Bonnie Kate was wont to say that she would
be willing to run another such race any day to have another such
introduction!

There were no casualties within the fort and, after three hours, the foe
withdrew, leaving several of their warriors slain.

In the excursions against the Indians which followed this opening of
hostilities Sevier won his first fame as an "Indian fighter"--the fame
later crystallized in the phrase "thirty-five battles, thirty-five
victories." His method was to take a very small company of the hardiest
and swiftest horsemen--men who could keep their seat and endurance, and
horses that could keep their feet and their speed, on any steep of the
mountains no matter how tangled and rough the going might be--swoop down
upon war camp, or town, and go through it with rifle and hatchet and
fire, then dash homeward at the same pace before the enemy had begun to
consider whether to follow him or not. In all his "thirty-five battles"
it is said he lost not more than fifty men.

The Cherokees made peace in 1777, after about a year of almost
continuous warfare, the treaty being concluded on their side by the old
chiefs who had never countenanced the war. Dragging Canoe refused to
take part, but he was rendered innocuous for the time being by the
destruction of several of the Chickamaugan villages. James Robertson now
went to Chota as Indian agent for North Carolina. So fast was population
growing, owing to the opening of a wagon road into Burke County, North
Carolina, that Washington County was divided. John Sevier became Colonel
of Washington and Isaac Shelby Colonel of the newly erected Sullivan
County. Jonesborough, the oldest town in Tennessee, was laid out as the
county seat of Washington; and in the same year (1778) Sevier moved to
the bank of the Nolichucky River, so-called after the Indian name of
this dashing sparkling stream, meaning rapid or precipitous. Thus the
nickname given John