n 1768, was dotted with cabins on every spot
where the grazing was good, upon their return the following year.
Writing to Hillsborough on October 18, 1770, concerning the "many
hundred families" in the region from Green River to the branches
of the Holston, who refused to comply with the royal proclamation
of 1763, Acting-Governor Nelson of Virginia reports that "very
little if any Quit Rents have been received for His Majesty's use
from that Quarter for some time past"--the people claiming that
"His Majesty hath been pleased to withdraw his protection from
them since 1763."

In the spring of 1770, with the express intention of discovering
suitable locations for homes for himself and a number of others,
who wished to escape the accumulating evils of the times, James
Robertson of Orange County, North Carolina, made an arduous
journey to the pleasing valley of the Watauga. Robertson, who was
born in Brunswick County, Virginia, June 28, 1742, of excellent
Scotch-Irish ancestry, was a noteworthy figure of a certain
type--quiet, reflective, conservative, wise, a firm believer in the
basic principles of civil Liberty and the right of local
self-government. Robertson spent some time with a man named
Honeycut in the Watauga region, raised a crop of corn, and chose
for himself and his friends suitable locations for settlement.
Lost upon his return in seeking the mountain defiles traversed by
him on the outward journey, Robertson probably escaped death from
starvation only through the chance passing of two hunters who
succored him and set him upon the right path. On arriving in
Orange he found political and social conditions there much worse
than before, many of the colonists declining to take the
obligatory oath of allegiance to the British Crown after the
Battle of Alamance, preferring to carve out for themselves new
homes along the western waters. Some sixteen families of this
stamp, indignant at the injustices and oppressions of British
rule, and stirred by Robertson's description of the richness and
beauty of the western country, accompanied him to Watauga shortly
after the battle.

This vanguard of the army of westward advance, independent
Americans in spirit with a negligible sprinkling of Loyalists,
now swept in a great tide into the northeastern section of
Tennessee. The men of Sandy Creek, actuated by independent
principles but out of sympathy with the anarchic side of the
Regulation, left the colony almost to a ma