gagement lasting several
hours, drove off the Indians. The army then proceeded at leisure
to lay waste the fifteen towns of the Middle Settlements; and,
after this work of systematic devastation was over, returned to
Fort Prince George. Peace was concluded in September as the
result of this campaign; and in consequence the frontier was
pushed seventy miles farther to the west.

Meantime, Colonel Waddell with his force of five hundred North
Carolinians had acted in concert with Colonel William Byrd,
commanding the Virginia detachment. The combined forces went into
camp at Captain Samuel Stalnaker's old place on the Middle Fork
of Holston. Because of his deliberately dilatory policy, Byrd was
superseded in the command by Colonel Adam Stephen. Marching their
forces to the Long Island of Holston, Stephen and Waddell erected
there Fort Robinson, in compliance with the instructions of
Governor Fauquier, of Virginia. The Cherokees, heartily tired of
the war, now sued for peace, which was concluded, independent of
the treaty at Charleston, on November 19, 1761.

The successful termination of this campaign had an effect of
signal importance in the development of the expansionist spirit.
The rich and beautiful lands which fell under the eye of the
North Carolina and Virginia pioneers under Waddell, Byrd, and
Stephen, lured them irresistibly on to wider casts for fortune
and bolder explorations into the unknown, beckoning West.

CHAPTER VII. The Land Companies

It was thought good policy to settle those lands as fast as
possible, and that the granting them to men of the first
consequence who were likeliest and best able to procure large
bodies of people to settle on them was the most probable means of
effecting the end proposed.--Acting-Governor Nelson of Virginia
to the Earl of Hillsborough: 1770.

Although for several decades the Virginia traders had been
passing over the Great Trading Path to the towns of the Cherokees
and the Catawbas, it was not until the early years of the
eighteenth century that Virginians of imaginative vision directed
their eyes to the westward, intent upon crossing the mountains
and locating settlements as a firm barrier against the
imperialistic designs of France. Acting upon his oft-expressed
conviction that once the English settlers had established
themselves at the source of the James River "it would not be in
the power of the French to dislodge them," Governor Alexander
Spotswood in 1