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Updated: May 6, 2025
The first settlements, known as the Watauga, or afterwards more generally as the Holston, settlements, grew up while keeping close touch with the Virginians, who lived round the Tennessee head-waters, and also in direct communication with North Carolina, to which State they belonged.
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."
At first the hardy pioneers found lodgment on the Watauga, Holston, Nolichucky, and other streams to the east of modern Knoxville. But in 1779 a colony was planted by James Robertson and John Donelson on the banks of the Cumberland, two hundred miles farther west, and in a brief time the remoter settlement, known as Nashville, became a Mecca for homeseeking Carolinians and Virginians.
As soon as they learned definitely that the Otari warriors, some seven hundred in number, were marching against them, they took refuge in their wooden forts or stations. Among the most important of these were the one at Watauga, in which Sevier and Robertson held command, and another known as Baton's Station, placed just above the forks of the Holston.
The year before the mountaineers faced Ferguson, the man who had done more than any one in founding the settlements from which the victors came, had once more gone into the wilderness to build a new and even more typical frontier commonwealth, the westernmost of any yet founded by the backwoodsmen. Robertson had been for ten years a leader among the Holston and Watauga people.
The nearest points at which these necessaries could be procured were the Watauga and Holston River settlements, which were themselves none too well stocked.
Help must be summoned from the Holston settlement on the Holston River in southwestern Virginia, two hundred miles by Boone's Trace. How many might be spared from the feeble garrison? Not more than two not more than one; and after a short debate, Captain Logan himself set out, in the night of June 6.
A part of the Cherokees, known by the name of Chickamaugas, inhabiting five villages on the Tennessee River, have long been in the practice of committing depredations on the neighboring settlements. It was hoped that the treaty of Holston, made with the Cherokee Nation in July, 1791, would have prevented a repetition of such depredations; but the event has not answered this hope.
A tolerably good road, sufficient for the passage of pack-horses in single file, had been opened from the settlements on the Holston to Boonesborough, by the party which Boone led out early in the following spring; and this now became the thoroughfare for other adventurers, a number of whom removed their families from North Carolina to Kentucky, and settled at Boonesborough, during the fall and winter of this year.
The meat was to be properly cured and salted in camp, and sent from time to time to the Falls, where Clark was to dispose of it in market, a third of the price going to Saunders. Thus the settlers could no longer always kill their own game; and there were churches, schools, mills, stores, race tracks, and markets in Kentucky. Organization of the Holston Settlements.
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