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His purposes were right, and small motives are not discernible in his record. He might reasonably urge that the Franklanders had only followed the example of North Carolina and the other American States in seceding from the parent body, and for similar causes, for the State's system of taxation had long borne heavily on the overhill men.
We are not told who took the lead when they left the known trail, but we may suppose it was Sevier and his Wataugans, for the making of new warpaths and wild riding were two of the things which distinguished Nolichucky Jack's leadership. Down the steep side of the mountain, finding their way as they plunged, went the overhill men.
They might with justice have asked what the industry and property of the Easterners were worth on that day when the overhill men drilled in the snows on the high peak of Yellow Mountain and looked down on Burke County overrun by Ferguson's Tories, and beyond, to Charlotte, where lay Cornwallis. The North Carolina Assembly did not confine itself to impolite remarks.
Nevertheless the war continued without a break, bands of warriors from the middle towns coming to the help of their disheartened Overhill brethren. Sevier determined to try one of his swift, sudden strokes against these new foes.
Augusta was the point where the old trading path forked north and west, and it was the key to the Back Country and the overhill domain. In Georgia and the Back Country of South Carolina there were many Tories ready to rally to the King's standard whenever a King's officer should carry it through their midst. A large number of these Tories were Scotch, chiefly from the Highlands.
Naturally such troops made war purely according to their own ideas, and cared nothing whatever for the commands of those governmental bodies who were theoretically their superiors. Sevier led his force down through the Overhill towns, doing their people no injury and holding a peace talk with them.
In the following year North Carolina erected her overhill territory into Washington County. The Governor appointed justices of the peace and militia officers who in the following year organized the new county and its courts. And so Watauga's independent government, begun in the spirit of true liberty, came as lawfully to its end.
The participators in the affray were of the distant Ayrate settlements of the tribe, southeast of the mountains, and not individualized. The Indians of Tennessee Town, which was then one of the most remote of the Cherokee villages of the Ottare division, and this perhaps was the reason it was selected as his home, were not concerned in the foray, nor were any others of the Overhill towns.
Since the ruse he had adopted had evidently not sufficed to evade the enforced stoppage at Fort Loudon, he had relinquished the intention to take them on past Choté to some other of the Overhill towns, and let them establish themselves as French traders. He feared that were they once inside the walls of Fort Loudon this design against the agreement with his allies would become transparent.
The overhill men in Greene County took due note of the Assembly's fiat and at the next election sent Sevier to the North Carolina Senate.
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