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These two events the building of the fort and the Cherokee mission, which displayed Sevier's uncommon military genius and Robertson's ability and address as a negotiator elevated them still higher in the regard of their associates, and at once the cares and responsibilities of leadership in both civil and military affairs were thrust upon them.
To this effect, though written with a daintier pen, were certain lines but a few hours old, that twenty-fourth of April, in a diary which through many months had received many entries since the one that has already told us of its writer paired at Doctor Sevier's dinner-party with a guest now missing, and of her hearing, in the starlight with that guest, the newsboys' cry that his and her own city's own Beauregard had opened fire on Fort Sumter and begun this war which now behold!
I slept in the room with Captain Sevier's boys, and one window of it was of paper smeared with bear's grease, through which the sunlight came all bleared and yellow in the morning.
His services are ranked next to Sevier's in the history of his adopted state. The town of Paterson, in Putnam county, New York, was settled by Matthew Paterson, a Scottish stone-mason, in the middle of the eighteenth century, and was named after him. Lairdsville, in New York state, was named from Samuel Laird, son of a Scottish immigrant, in beginning of the eighteenth century.
He had racked his brain to find so much as one, all day long. "John," said Mary, "Dr. Sevier's been talking to you?" "Yes." "And he wants you to send me back home for a while?" "How do you know?" asked John, with a start. "I can read it in your face." She loosed one hand and laid it upon his brow. "What what do you think about it, Mary?"
Further, an atrocity committed in the recent campaign under Sevier's leadership Kirk's brutal murder of Corn Tassel, a noble old Indian, and other chieftains, while under the protection of a flag of truce had placed a bar sinister across the fair fame of this stalwart of the border. Utter desperation thus prompted Sevier's acceptance of Gardoqui's offer of the protection of Spain.
Obliged to choose between North Carolina and his own people, Sevier's hesitation was short. The State of Frankland, or Land of the Free, was formed; and Nolichucky Jack was elevated to the office of Governor with a yearly salary of two hundred mink skins. Perhaps John Tipton had hoped to head the new State, for he had been one of its prime movers and was a delegate to this convention.
Harrod and Logan, some time in 1777, reached the Watauga fort with three or four packhorses and filled their packs from Sevier's store; but, as they neared home, they were detected by red scouts and Logan was badly wounded before he and Harrod were able to drive their precious load safely through the gates at Harrodsburg.
Sevier's dashing and successful leadership wiped out in the minds of the backwoodsmen the memory of all his shortcomings and misdeeds; even the memory of that unpunished murder of friendly Indians which had so largely provoked the war. The representatives of the North Carolina Government and his own personal enemies were less forgetful. Sevier is Arrested.
Neither Sevier nor any one else ever with a hundred men defeated "five times his number" of northwestern Indians in the woods, and during Sevier's life in Virginia, the only defeat ever suffered by such a body of Indians was at Bushy Run, when Bouquet gained a hard-fought victory.