Toward the end of the year two parties set out, one by land, the
other by water, for the wonderful new country on the Cumberland
of which Boone and Scaggs and Mansker had brought back such
glowing descriptions. During the autumn Judge Henderson and other
commissioners from North Carolina, in conjunction with
commissioners from Virginia, had been running out the boundary
line between the two states. On the very day--Christmas,
1779--that Judge Henderson reached the site of the Transylvania
Fort, now called Boonesborough, the swarm of colonists from the
parent hive at Watauga, under Robertson's leadership, reached the
French Lick and on New Year's Day, 1780, crossed the river on the
ice to the present site of Nashville.

The journal of the other party, which, as has been aptly said,
reads like a chapter from one of Captain Mayne Reid's fascinating
novels of adventure, was written by Colonel John Donelson, the
father-in-law of Andrew Jackson. Setting out from Fort Patrick
Henry on Holston River, December 22, 1779, with a flotilla
consisting of about thirty flatboats, dugouts, and canoes, they
encountered few difficulties until they began to run the gauntlet
of the Chickamauga towns on the Tennessee. Here they were
furiously attacked by the Indians, terrible in their red and
black war-paint; and a well-filled boat lagging in the rear, with
smallpox on board, was driven to shore by the Indians. The
occupants were massacred; but the Indians at once contracted the
disease and died by the hundreds. This luckless sacrifice of
"poor Stuart, his family and friends," while a ghastly price to
pay, undoubtedly procured for the Cumberland settlements
comparative immunity from Indian forays until the new-comers had
firmly established themselves in their wilderness stronghold.
Eloquent of the granite endurance and courageous spirit of the
typical American pioneer in its thankfulness for sanctuary, for
reunion of families and friends, and for the humble shelter of a
log cabin, is the last entry in Donelson's diary (April 24,
1780):

"This day we arrived at our journey's end at the Big Salt Lick,
where we have the pleasure of finding Capt. Robertson and his
company. It is a source of satisfaction to us to be enabled to
restore to him and others their families and friends, who were
intrusted to our care, and who, some time since, perhaps,
despaired of ever meeting again. Though our prospects at present
are dreary, we have found a few